Department heads aren’t the only District employees leaving the government lately. In a memo yesterday, new Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services Director Clinton Lacey announced a shake-up in the agency’s top staff.

“Moving forward, I want to reassure staff that personnel decisions will not be based on emotion or favoritism,” Lacey writes in his memo.

Intriguing! Lacey’s memo doesn’t go into details, but previous DYRS Director Neil Stanley‘s administration had been hounded by news reports about alleged secrecy and distrust of anyone outside of his inner circle.

At one point, Stanley was accused of rewriting a job description to put acquaintance Steven Baynes, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran who had no juvenile justice experience, in charge of the New Beginnings youth corrections facility. Baynes, who was working as DYRS’ chief of staff as of February, is one of the five top DYRS brass now out of the agency.

Also out, according to Lacey: Erick Mitchell (Office of Internal Integrity), Maria Martins-Evora (Community Programs), Dionne Hayes (Office of the General Counsel), and Eric Collins (Correctional Institution Administrator).

“[Lacey] decided to make some higher-level changes,” says DYRS spokesman Adam Aljabori.

Read the rest of Lacey’s shake-up memo below:

[documentcloud url=”https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2110288-dyrs-transition-memo.html”]