NEW GLOUCESTER – Kayla Trammell is trying to be a good sport. She’s known as an athlete, but volleyball just isn’t her favorite thing on this summer afternoon.

As she plays with her housemates in a field behind Opportunity Farm, Kayla starts to grumble.

It’s hot. It’s sticky. And a bad thing happens when she tries to serve.

“I broke a nail!” she yells from the edge of the court.

Between the trials of morning summer camp and frustrations at home, it’s been a long day for the 14-year-old, who lives at the home for troubled children. There were dozens of chances for her to blow her top. A year ago, she probably would have.

“I used to punch things. Basically, anything that was around me,” she says.

But today, she stays in control – even through a confrontation with another girl.

“I breathed,” she explains later to Diana Goucher, an in-home counselor.

“You breathed and took some space or you breathed and popped her?” Goucher asks.

“Took some space,” Kayla says with a grin.

For Kayla, success is measured in self-control. For Opportunity Farm, the success of its new girls’ program is measured in kids like Kayla.

For more than 90 years, Opportunity Farm was for boys only. Some applied to the private group home because they couldn’t get along with their families. Others were in danger of landing in juvenile hall. All were in some way troubled, abused or neglected.

Set up to care for 21 boys between 8 and 18 years old, the farm offered a free home away from home where they could deal with their problems with help from counselors, role models and other boys.

But in the 1990s, farm officials realized that boys weren’t the only ones who needed help. Thousands of girls also ended up in trouble in Maine each year. Between 1990 and 2000, the arrest rate for girls shot up by 39 percent.

“In Maine there was nothing for the early intervention piece. The Board of Trustees felt it was time to do that,” said the farm’s president, Ron Scott.

In 2002, after more than a year of fund-raising, Opportunity Farm for Boys became Opportunity Farm for Boys and Girls. It opened its first girls’ home a half-mile down the road from the boys’ campus, keeping the boys and girls separate but close enough for supervised get-togethers and field trips.

The boys live in older homes and refurbished farmhouses. The girls got a new, $500,000 house. The boys have a swimming pool and a ball field. The girls got a front yard, a huge grassy field and a small garden. They live a half-mile apart in different styles of housing, but their programs are almost identical. Like the boys, the girls live in family-style group homes with “family teachers,” adults who act as live-in surrogate parents and counselors.

Diana Goucher is one of the four family teachers at Welch House, the girls’ home. She helps the eight girls between the ages of 14 and 17 cope with their problems and learn to live as a family in their big white house on a country road.

“The biggest thing is to tell them, You’re worth something. You deserve better than what you’ve been given,'” Goucher said.

Slow start

Welch House, named after a longtime female trustee, was filled this past summer for the first time since it opened 18 months ago. It had only two girls in December 2002. Gina Hutchinson was one of them.

She was 15 and living with her family in Poland when she applied for the new girls’ campus. Her older brother had been to Opportunity Farm a few times, she said. The program’s mix of counseling, strict rules and point-system rewards hadn’t worked for him.

But after taking a hard look at her life and the arguments she was having with her family, Gina thought it might be right for her.

“It wasn’t like I was a bad kid or my life was completely horrible,” said Gina, now 17. “I wanted to improve myself.”

Moving away from home wasn’t difficult, she said. Changing schools mid-year was.

At her old high school, Gina was a classic social butterfly. At Gray-New Gloucester High School, where Opportunity Farm kids attend classes, she was worried that she wouldn’t be accepted at all.

Gina told her new classmates that she had recently moved into a big house down the road. She didn’t mention the farm.

“But it’s a small community. Everybody knows,” she said.

To her relief, Gina found friends at school. With help from the farm, she started working on her issues and her relationship with her parents. She set goals for herself: good grades, college, a career as a teacher.

For the farm itself, things were less rosy.

Within four months of opening, Gina’s housemate went home for a weeklong visit. Like all Opportunity Farm residents, she was at the group home voluntarily. While visiting her family, she decided not to return.

After years of planning and fund-raising for a co-ed facility, Opportunity Farm found that girls were arriving slowly.

“It has taken a lot of work to help people understand we now have a girls’ home,” said Renee Williams, a caseworker at the farm.

A better life

Over the next six months, word got out and more girls began to arrive.

Some didn’t get along with their parents. Others wanted to change their behavior or get help with emotional issues. At least one had attempted suicide.

All felt that Opportunity Farm was their best chance for a better life. Even if they didn’t make the move with enthusiasm.

“I didn’t think it was cool at all. I didn’t think it was fair. But I agreed to try,” said Kayla, who slammed doors and punched walls when she lost her temper.

“She was not violent. But almost violent,” said Kayla’s mother, Kelley Ace.

After Kayla, then 13, had a particularly heated argument with her stepfather and demanded to leave home, her mother suggested Opportunity Farm

With her family living just 10 minutes away, Kayla spent her first months at the farm going to her mother for help. She cried and called home when things didn’t go her way.

Now Kayla handles those situations on her own. She is better at controlling her temper and she has learned to think before she acts.

“It’s gotten a lot better – more than a lot better,” Ace said. “She’s now a normal 14-year-old.”

A handwritten note on the dining room calendar at Welch House recently marked Kayla’s one-year anniversary with an exclamation point.

Kayla decided to stay, but not everyone does. Since the farm opened Welch House almost two years ago, three girls have come and gone.

“They just couldn’t handle the program,” Goucher said. “At home they’re doing what they want to do and they want to go back to that.”

It can take one to two years for an Opportunity Farm kid to really make progress. The first six months are often the hardest, as both boys and girls battle homesickness and struggle with farm rules. They are asked to change behavior they’ve relied on their entire lives, and many kids say the challenge is too much.

“It’s hard to see that,” said Goucher, who lives and works with the kids. “It’s like, C’mon, just get a little more oomph. You can do it.'”

When a child succeeds at the farm, her whole life can change, Goucher said.

When a child leaves, it’s heartbreaking.

“You wait a week, a couple of weeks after, for that phone call: I want to come back,'” Goucher said.

But none of the three girls who left has asked to return. Goucher doesn’t like to think about the life they went back to, or where the girls who stayed would be without the farm.

“I don’t really want to know,” she said.

Goucher, who has worked for years at various group homes, is adamant that the farm can help all kids.

Room for more

It’s been successful for Nina Borowick, who is well on her way to turning her life around.

Given up as an infant, Nina spent her early childhood in foster homes. At 8, she was adopted by a woman and her partner. But after a lifetime in the foster care system, Nina had developed problems.

“I did everything you could possibly do,” said Nina, now 17.

She lied and swore. She was “oppositional,” she said.

Like many kids, she chafed against the farm’s structure for the first six months. Now she excitedly rattles off the changes she’s seen in herself: She asks for help. She’s more independent. She listens to others. She respects herself.

“It’s hard because you’re working on the hardest thing you could work on: yourself,” she said.

Now Nina goes home for day visits every weekend. She’s working on repairing the relationship with her adoptive parents.

She plans to graduate from high school and hopes to attend a prestigious dog training academy in Texas. She dreams of getting a house of her own, complete with dogs and horses.

But for now, the farm feels like home.

Opportunity Farm officials hope more girls will feel that way. The farm will open a second, six-girl home beside Welch House next summer. It plans to build a third home within two years.

If successful, the girls’ campus could ultimately house 21 to 24 girls, doubling the size of Opportunity Farm to at least 42 young people.

It’s a move that many say is due.

Including the girls themselves.

“It’s hard. but it’s worth it,” said Nina. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”