"That, to me, is just not acceptable," Evans said last week. "One thing I can't and will never tolerate is the mistreatment of children."

Evans said DHS had failed to recognize Chad's problems soon enough. In response to recent reports about Chad's performance, he said, he reassigned the man who oversaw contracts for DHS, Steven C. Oakman.

Oakman did not respond to requests for comment in telephone calls and a letter left at his house.

In his statement, Chad spokesman Ragone disputed the data showing a high number of holds at Chad. He said the figures reflected a wide variety of "hands-on" contact by staff with residents, not just the most serious interventions.

Kim J. Masters, a child psychiatrist who wrote the guidelines on restraints for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said he was struck by Chad's data showing as many as 100 holds in a month.

"That's a lot," he said.

When he took charge some years ago at one center - larger than Chad - Masters considered its tally of 100 restraints a year to be "out of control."

Its staff now do about two per month.

A high number of restraints, Masters said, reflects "a coercive environment that says, 'You have to do this or else.' " Such techniques rarely work and may backfire, he said.

"Kids act out when they don't feel safe," Masters said. "And they don't feel safe when they're being restrained all the time."

A litany of problems

In 2004, for example, Tennessee officials wrote: "Serious incident reports revealed that the agency uses what appears to be an excessive number of physical restraints."

That year, Chad admitted that a worker had to be pulled off a resident after the staffer threw 16-year-old John T. Boy against a wall. The worker said he had "overacted" and apologized, records show.

Chad acknowledged that the aide had had "problems like this two or three times in the past" and said he would be fired "once they found someone to take his place."

In an interview in Tennessee, Boy's mother said she had been astounded that Chad kept the worker on.

"They did not care about kids at this facility," Sharon Pruett said. "It needs to be shut down."

The employee was finally dismissed, records show. Boy was shot to death last year, in a killing unrelated to his Chad experience.

In 2005, when Tennessee staged a surprise inspection of Chad, a girl told the inspectors that a Chad supervisor "will try to hurt students during restraints and 'wants us to scream.' "

Another youngster said she had seen "Big Mike slam kids down real hard on the floor. I don't want that happening to me, so I try hard to do everything they ask me to do."