Community members say Gov. Maura Healey’s pause on closing a state-owned children’s rehab hospital in Canton doesn’t appear to be happening, arguing that patients are being discharged at an alarming rate.

Families and staffers are raising the alarm after Healey announced in late February that she’d halt her plans to close Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital for Children.

Pappas, established over a century ago, serves patients who range in age from 7 to 22 years old and have physical and cognitive disabilities as well as chronic and medically complex conditions requiring hospital-level care.

Those close to aging out have been discharged over the years, but parents of a 14-year-old boy who has resided at the 160-acre campus for six years have said they’re being told their son will soon have to exit Pappas.

Traci Conners and her husband Joe shared during a community forum in Canton Wednesday their experience involving their grandson Kyran, whom they adopted after he suffered a traumatic brain injury as an infant that left him severely disabled.

Following Healey’s announcement, the Conners said they’ve been contacted “numerous times” to speak with a “discharge committee about plans to discharge Kyran, who at 14 is not even eligible for discharge, age-wise or medically.”

The wife and husband highlighted how “senior management” allegedly told them that they were “being too critical” of four alternative facilities they’ve looked at over the months, and they “should not be comparing them to Pappas.”

“To say to a family, ‘Don’t compare these places to Pappas,’ they’re absolutely out of their minds. That is crazy to me,” state Sen. Paul Feeney, D-Attleboro, and a lead advocate in saving Pappas, told the Conners.

“We were just floored when he said that,” Traci Conners replied.

Pappas provides 24/7 nursing care, therapeutic services including speech and language, occupational, physical, and recreational, and programming to advance independent living skills, among other services.

Patients learn music, technology, physical education, and art along with a general curriculum in classrooms and in other settings on the 160-plus acre campus — an environment advocates say can’t be found elsewhere in the Bay State.

State public health officials in the winter said more than half of the 36 patients at the 60-bed facility were over 18 at the time, awaiting discharge to more appropriate settings. Under Healey’s initial plan, some patients would have been transferred to Western Massachusetts Hospital in Westfield, more than 100 miles away from Canton. The Conners said that’s where “senior management” told them their son would end up.

The proposal that caused an uproar also included the closure of Pocasset Mental Health Center, a 16-bed psychiatric hospital in Bourne, which has also been halted. Officials projected that consolidation would have saved $31 million.

A working group reviewing Pappas and considering its future met for the first time on Wednesday, according to Sen. Feeney.

“I wish I could tell you what the outcome of that was going to be,” he said.

In a legislative budget hearing earlier this month, Public Health Commissioner Robbie Goldstein highlighted how the flow of discharges and admittances is the same as in the past two years. In 2023, Pappas shrunk its patient count as services shifted into just one of its buildings due to the decrepit state of the others.

“Holding a patient in a hospital when they have completed their hospital course or when they have completed their level of care … would actually be against the goals of Pappas,” Goldstein said during an April 7 hearing.

State Rep. Bill Galvin, of Canton, said he will file a budget amendment by the end of the month to form a special legislative commission to review Pappas’ finance programs and services, containing language that prevents a closure in the future.

Jen Ford, a teacher of 14 years at Pappas, slammed members of the Healey administration for not doing their jobs, as she said they’re failing to realize Pappas’ significance. The state is “quietly discharging student after student,” she said.

“These students are being rushed out of here,” she said, “and they are not admitting at the rate that they’re trying to discharge. They’re trying to run out the clock.”

Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital for Children in Canton. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)