http://myspace.com/danthechainsawman 3 Springs Waygookin - Dan the Chainsaw Man
About me:
I live in Korea where I am a professional edutainer. Prior to my arrival to Korea I worked as a youth counselor for 4 very long years. As an amusing side note I remember the promise myself I made the very moment my plane landed in Korea. I promised I would never work as a youth counselor ever again.
No more late nights filled with chaotic screams. No more screwed up group meetings filled with stories that make me sick in the stomach.
Seriously though.. loved the kids.. they were great.. the rest of the staff.. meh.. A few gems in the rough, but the rest where a waste of space.
Now I spend my time writing, reading, watching movies, and very slowly and carefully rehabilitating my blown out knees.
Just recently I participated in my first ever Yongsan Hash House Harriers walk/run. Given the condition of my knees I took my time and walked. Not up to running up any hills. Have to say the after party was mildly amusing. Listening to them sing their songs reminded me alot of playing rugby back in Uni.
Life is good. I could whine and complain alot about how I was thrown some curves. In reality that would be a bunch of total lies. No matter what I can't escape the obvious. I am alive. I am reasonably healthy. I have ten fingers and ten toes. I have my hobbies. One of these days I will start brewing my own beer. What more can a feller ask for?
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His first post on Fornits:
http://www.fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.ph ... ht=#115011 (can now find it at
http://wwf.fornits.com/viewtopic.php?p= ... 007cc4948e)
TS Waygookin
Disorganized Crime Boss
Joined: 06 Jul 2005
Posts: 3191
Location: 5 miles due south of hell.
PostPosted: Wed Jul 06, 2005 11:36 pm Post subject: Reply with quote
I was reading over this forum, and I was immediately impressed with the intensity of the posters in general. With a great deal of thought I have decided to post my own experience as a staff member at a Three Springs Facility. I was a counselor, Master Counselor C3, for nearly two years at this particular program. To be honest the more time I have spent away from the program, the more guilt I have felt for what I have seen, and further what I had done.
Let me start with the beginning. I had just completed 2 years at another wilderness facility. It was a good place, physical restraints were kept to a minimum. Verbal de-escalation techniques were strongly encouraged. The camp leadership had spent years encouraging the growth of a strong culture emphasizing alternatives to physical management. We routinely utilized the group process method of huddles to discuss issues, and sometimes did so for many hours of a day. Nonetheless, the camp's mission of character improvement for adjudicated youth worked well, and had results for kids who would have otherwise been thrown in a detention center. [Yet he now claims all programs are bad? All should be shut down?]
After my two years in the swamps, I moved on to Three Springs. From the very moment I made my counselor visit I should have known better than to accept employment at that facility. Everyone of my instincts screamed, "BAD PROGRAM!" In my 24 hour counselor visit I witnessed numerous events, and had a great many concerns. In a program that models itself on the group therapy model that uses a group to facilitate treatment of individual issues, they had huge groups. The groups looked shabby, and dispirited. The campsites appeared to be an apalling mess. The counselors had a far to casual relationship with their residents. Let me delve into the details of each item individually, starting with the size of the groups.
The group therapy model as I experienced it works best when the size of the group is between 6 and 10 residents. Two of the groups on the Three Springs campus had groups of 15 youths. What happens in my experience is that the size of the group makes for lessened experience. For example, the bigger the group, the less attention can be paided to an individual youth's issues. The smaller the group, means a lack of social dynamics to stimulate the youth's group therapy. The explanation I was given by the Supervisor on duty entailed lack of staff. Apparently the facility had just went through a large reduction of staff, and was so bad they had office personell covering some of the groups. This alone should have been a big sign to myself that something was truly wrong with this particular site. Well if you can't guess I didn't catch on, but in fact witnessed a great deal more.
The groups were sloppy, and dispirited. They were poorly dressed in dirty, and torn clothing. They looked depressed, and honestly like a pack of beaten dogs. At first I was certain they had were just tired from working all day. As I spent time with the group I was assigned to for the day a few of them informed me this was the way they looked all the time. I was immediately concerned. How can you expect a group of boys to feel good about themselves if they are dressed like a pack of bums? You simply can not! Kids in programs do not need designer clothing, but they do need clean, well maintained clothes. They need to change their clothes daily. I was told by a counselor that they allowed the kids to decide when to change their clothes.
With a bit of investigation I found it was not uncommon that a few of the residents had gone more than a few days without changing their clothing. In fact, some of them simply did not have the clothing to change into, despite numerous letters written to their family workers to get more clothing from home.
The one thing I know is that if you want to improve the self esteem of anyone its probably a bad idea to let them go a few days wearing dirty nasty clothing. If you want a kid to trust you as a staff member you should probably not just turn a blind eye to his lack of clothing. In the last program I worked with we were frequently told to make darn good and sure that clothing items were not an issue. We had an entire section of the camp warehouse full of pants, shirts, and coats for kids who did not have enough clothing. Three Springs unlike the last program is a for profit enterprise. If a kid did not have clothes, he had to get them from home, and sometimes that took months.
Not only did these kids look like a pack of vagrants they certainly appeared to feel like them as well. They looked shabby, they were extremely negative about the program, and voiced constant statements about the depth of their own feelings of worthlessness. This really worried me. A good counselor would have found activities to help these kids feel better. A good counselor would have found building projects to not only build something useful, but to build a sense of ownership, and pride in a group of kids who hated everything around themselves. Ok I do realize that kids, and adults are not going to be fans of programs, but I do know from personal experience the kids will begin to feel ownership over their own situation [Hmmmmm …. Wonder what he means by from “personal” experience?]. If that sense of ownership is inherently negative, what good is the program doing them? NOT a damn thing.
Their campsites were for the most part an appalling pig pens. I nearly refused to sleep in the cabin due to the stench. Apparently cleaning of campsites was to time consuming, and something they only did when they needed. Oh god help me I was so disgusted. Its bad enough that they looked like bums, now the counselors did not seem to care that they lived in trash pits? What positive statement was being sent to these children? Nothing that I could tell. The only thing they appeared to be learning was, "Look like a bum feel like a bum, then go to your campsite, and live like a bum." The real sad part was most of the kids seemed like pretty descent sorts. Most of them had substance abuse, and self esteem problems. For the most part they were a fun loving bunch of guys. The kind of kids who really could have benifited from a work hard, play hard mentality. They were lazy, but what the heck thats something you can unlearn. I frankly had a hard time understand why half of them were even in a program.
Not only did I have a hard time understanding why they were in a program, I somehow convinced myself I could make a difference with my experience. Stupid. I should have said no and ran away screaming. None the less I reported to work, and underwent my 100 or so hours of orientation training. None of which was of any use to me. I had already received 4 times that amount of training at my previous program. A program that prided itself in simplicity of the group process, rather than what I would learn would be the hell of individual consquences. I spent most of my orientation trying to remain in the full awake posture. Somehow I graduated orientation, and was promptly asked to work with the young kids.
Off I toddled to the young kid's group. I really liked those kids they were a bunch of hell raisers of the first order. Never a dull moment for that matter. However, lets discuss not only the failings of the program, but MY FAILINGS as a counselor. These were a group of young children ages 10 to 14. The previous counselor's had not done a good job managing their treatment in a very useful manner. I went into their trunk room, and found rat crap in their foot lockers, and under them as well. They had several bed wetters who frequently wet their beds, and nothing was really done about it.
The behaviors of the group was of course of the chain. In retrospect I should not find anything about what I went through very amusing, but its hard not to laugh. I had to quell riots on a regular basis. I was attacked by 10 year olds. This was pretty interesting considering I am 6 foot tall, weighing nearly 280 pounds, and an avid weight lifter. The kids frequently went beserk over the smallest issue.
None of this was a surprise to me, as I already knew that any new counselor faces resistance from the group. Nothing new, but what did shock me was the total sense of indifference from the administration. Worse was my on attitude. I came from a facility that worked hard to keep physical restraints from being a daily part of our lives. We all accepted that at some point it very well may happen. However, we all did our part to make sure they didn't happen needlessly.
At Three Springs I was involved in almost 200 full on physical restraints. No one seemed to be alarmed with this number, and seemed to accept it as part of business with my group. In the end I instituted several programs to reduce restraints, but received little support from the administration. Lets delve into my responsibilities as a counselor a bit more.
I let myself be seduced into a sick culture. I let my experience of one good program fall to the wayside, and became a part of the sick Three Springs Machine.
I regularly used intimidation to force compliance.
I regularly used physical holds when they were not needed.
I rarely used proper proceedures when conducting these physical holds.
In short I became an active participant of the Three Springs identity. I really should have quit the company at that point, and moved on in life. However, I though I could make a difference.
In the end my group of hell raisers settled down. We began to function, and have alot of fun. Almost everyone of the residents had some form of ADHD, and thrived when I put them all to work. I normally tried to make sure that they had useful work projects. Some people liked to give their groups these pointless make work things that as far as I could tell did no one any good. While, my group began to thrive with me, they still acted like maniacs with my cocounselors. No surprise, they simply did not have the established sense of respect, or fear of my cocounselors. I came back on many occasions to find my group in the midst of a major crisis involving pudding. My favorite crisis being a kid urinated on himself and laid in the middle of the trail for over two hours in his own pee.
Things like this became so common, no one seemed to be surprised anymore. Myself went from being idealistic, to a part of a jaded corporate cancer.
All this came to end. I was of all things fired. My adaption to the program was so complete that I did not notice the periodic change of it around myself. I was fired for giving out an inappropriate consequence. in short I had a kid do something silly to keep himself busy, and out of trouble till suppertime. As a result he aquired a minor abrasion, and I was terminated. I have to say under normal conditions I would have fired myself. However, from what I gathered afterwards, the periodic change, was just that periodic, and things went back to business as usual. Despite all of this my termination was the best thing that happened in my time there.
In my two years at Three Springs I went from a person who cared, to a person who cared in all the wrong ways.
I went from a healthy weightlifter, to a person who was simply an overweight stressed out person who probably hated myself. I nearly suffered a heart attack from the stress. I was on a prescription of Xanax. I pondered suicide on a regular basis.
