Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Facility Question and Answers
Rocklyn Academy - Origins, Program
Ursus:
Some other threads on fornits which focus on Rocklyn Academy; despite some similarities in title, these are all different threads:
* Rocklyn Academy(Canada) · viewtopic.php?f=14&t=22400
* Rocklyn Academy(Canada) · viewtopic.php?f=9&t=22446
* Dr. Williams of Rocklyn Academy · viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27802
* Rocklyn academy- "Dr" Darryl Williams · viewtopic.php?f=9&t=28283
* Is this Darryl Williams from Rocklyn Academy? · viewtopic.php?f=9&t=29017
Ursus:
Here's an old article. This was originally posted on Rocklyn's website. Now... all such media coverage has been scrubbed out of existence!
No date and no source were provided with article. And for some reason, the name of the Ontario agency which allegedly did the initial inspection of Rocklyn Academy ... was deleted. I wonder why? Does anyone know whether there were any problems with that inspection, presuming it took place?
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School had its beginnings in "Inside Out" program
By Pat O'Connor
How would you like to start a private school? Just get some good teachers, perhaps some retired ones or those who are disenchanted with the public system; find a suitable building, maybe an old mansion; charge a really big tuition fee; open your doors, and there you are. An easy money-maker with prestige as a bonus!
This is about as unlikely a scenario as a McDonald's on Mars. The founding of Rocklyn Academy, a private school a few miles west of Thornbury, is a story with many twists and surprises. It is a story that would never have happened with people who did not have the stamina of Bob Shaw and Dale Stohn, the school's founders. First of all, Shaw and Stohn had no intention of opening a school. They were both qualified teachers who had jobs in Toronto.
They are both people who have more energy than is perhaps normal. For example, before Shaw used his teaching degree in the class room, he had simultaneously owned and operated three different businesses. While he was successfully running these businesses, he and Stohn initiated a retreat program for teenagers. The aim of "Living Inside Out" as it was called, was to provide an intensive experience where these young people confronted their fears, emotions, strengths and weaknesses in a five day healing journey that had, as Shaw puts it, "incredible results. When kids met their parents after the week, there was a very positive new bond forged.
"The retreat was "spiritual without being religious," added Shaw, "It was like a wilderness therapy program without the wilderness and the duration, but with the same sort of discovery of self."
Shaw and Stohn felt that the "Living Inside Out" program was so successful and so valuable to teenagers that they decided to approach the Ministry of Education to make it available to students at large. The moral core of the program, its spirituality, its approach to anger management, and its fundamental emphasis on self-discovery had many in the education world excited. The Parliamentary Secretary of The Minister of Education was equally impressed.
The proposal by Shaw and Stohn filled a very real need for values education. In the mid-eighties, the public school system's attempts to be all things to all people meant that any pronouncement that smacked of a particular religion was unfair to other sects. How could Hindus feel comfortable with Christian values voiced in opening morning exercises? The upshot was the dearth of any values promulgated by the system. Thus, the non denominational offering of Shaw and Stohn (that was all about self-awareness and empowerment from within was recognized as a timely program to fill that void. Ironically, the Ministry of Education could not afford to implement the concept. Similarly, other financial sources were unable to fund the program. No one could afford to buy happiness for students.
By this time, Shaw and Stohn were worn out by their efforts to promote "Living Inside Out" while other aspects of their lives had been going ahead full bore at the same time. Respite was sought in leaving the city altogether. After looking long and hard, they found a farm in Rocklyn. It had a barn, it had land, and it had a house. There was no hint of the urban about it.
Shaw commuted to Toronto to teach and Stohn provided "Living Inside Out" sessions for women in the new farm home, continuing a program that she had initiated in Toronto. And now is when the seed of the future school was planted. A friend of the couple had a teenaged granddaughter who was "in trouble". The friend asked if Stohn would let her attend a "Living Inside Out" session. When the girl finished the week, she had altered her attitude so much that the grandfather asked where the girl might go to school to reinforce and sustain the shift that had happened in so short a time. Stohn phoned a number of schools with no satisfactory results.
It wasn't long before the obvious solution presented itself: Shaw and Stohn needed to start the appropriate school themselves.
Four weeks later, in September of 1999, with five students, an Ontario High School Curriculum, and an inspection by the ••••, Rocklyn Academy was born. There were many ups and downs before the school arrived at its present configuration. But today it stands as a tribute to the determination and conviction of Shaw and Stohn. There are three buildings that constitute the school: a residence where the girls eat, sleep, and share a common room for home-time at night, classes in the day; there is a separate building that also has several classrooms used for classes and meetings; and finally there is an administration building with offices, therapy interview room, and storage.
Shaw's final words when talking about the school were, "The school has a life of its own. The school runs us, we don't run the school."
This isn't some sort of Stephen King view of a building come to life; really, it is the comment of a man whose dream is coming to fruition in a school which is evolving in just the way it needs to and should.
# # #
Ursus:
From the Our Kids site (Canadian). Rocklyn no longer maintains a profile on their site; maybe it was too pricey given their current low enrollment numbers...
I think this article was first published in 2003 or 2004, as it mentions that the school was (then) founded four years ago.
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Our Kids Go To School
Back to their future
Specialized schools help struggling kids triumph
It seemed like it happened overnight. Becky Kamm morphed from model child to teenager from hell. She became defiant and unco-operative; she stayed out all night drinking and partying; she skipped school and thumbed her nose at parental rules.
"It was like a war zone," says her mother, Jo-Dee Kamm, who manages a court office in Dryden, Ontario. "She defied anything we set down - what time to be home, helping at home - yet she wanted all the privileges. She was spiraling out of control. We were terrified she was going to get hurt."
It started with her summer job. Several lakeside tourist resorts near Dryden rely on seasonal employment. Becky worked as a waitress and cabin cleaner, and quickly fell in with the wrong crowd.
"It was like she was giving up," Kamm says. "Her marks were dropping. She wasn't focused. And she was hanging out with a crowd whose only interest was drugs and alcohol. At one point, she came home and I realized, this is not my daughter. I don't know this person. It's like somebody threw the switch on this kid - and she blamed us."
The turning point came one day, when Becky, struggling with her poor marks, found herself hesitating as her friends tried to persuade her to skip class once again. She gave in - again. That night in her room she began to worry about the future.
"I was afraid I was going to end up a nobody and that was my worst fear - to be a failure," Becky says.
Her mother found her, curled up and crying.
"I said to her, 'Help me understand what you need. I don't know how to help you any more.' "
Becky told her mother that she had to get away, that she could not make it if she stayed. She mentioned a school that a friend of hers had attended.
Within three weeks, she was on a plane to Rocklyn Academy near Owen Sound, Ontario on Georgian Bay. Set on 75 forested acres with five kilometres of walking trails, it's a small private boarding school for troubled - and troublesome - high school girls who are doing poorly in the traditional school setting because they are hard to manage or truant or in crisis.
"My mom said, 'Once you are on that plane, there is no turning back,' " Becky recalls. "I knew that if I got on that plane I had to be prepared to do what I had to do. After that I didn't know what would happen. I thought my grades were too bad to get into university."
Idyllic as the country setting was, Becky at first lashed out, railing against her parents for "sending" her there. But her mother reminded her, "No, remember this is what you wanted and we are supporting you."
In the ensuing months, a dramatic change took place.
Becky's attitude changed. She threw herself into kick-boxing, soccer, weight training and yoga. Her marks went up. "Now if I get an 80, I'm disappointed," she says.
She worked her way up through the school ranks to "head girl." And her dreams of becoming a vet, dreams long given up, are back on track. Now an A student, she has been accepted at four universities and has chosen the University of Guelph, where she has a $1,000 scholarship.
"It feels like my daughter is back," says Kamm.
Bob Shaw, a teacher who founded Rocklyn Academy four years ago with his psychotherapist wife Dale Stohn, puts it simply. "We help them rediscover their excellence. All we do is help them find that which is within them."
It's an approach that grew out of week-long emotional healing retreats Shaw and Stohn used to conduct for teens to deal with issues like anger management. It's very structured with lots of rules and 24-hour, seven-day-a-week supervision, but staff are nurturing, Shaw says, and "it's not a boot camp."
The girls make their own decisions, but they also deal with the consequences. If they are caught smoking, for instance, they lose privileges for a week. Although the consequences meet a lot of resistance, the girls eventually move through five levels of "responsibilities and privileges" beginning with "incoming student" culminating, for some, with head girl. Along the way they acquire privileges such as more phone calls, allowable items of jewelry and weekend leaves, earned or revoked according to behaviour.
It may seem arbitrary, Shaw says, but it's symbolic. The privileges are not important - it's what they represent. "They need to feel that they are in charge of their lives," Shaw says, "and making those choices is the birth of self-esteem."
The school doesn't take students with psychiatric disorders ; it's not a treatment centre.
There are 26 staff for 27 girls, many of whom have attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the low self-esteem that often ensues. Most of the girls are intelligent but do not believe they are.
And the girl must want to come to Rocklyn Academy. "We're not a lockup," Shaw adds with a chuckle. "We work with them in ways that include a phenomenal amount of tolerance."
Dramatic results, as in Becky's case, are why more and more parents are making often huge personal and financial sacrifices to send their kids to special needs private schools.
"I have parents who have mortgaged the house and grandparents who have cashed in their RSPs," says Scott Morrison, headmaster of the Sheila Morrison School in a rural setting near Barrie, Ontario.
Fees here range from $14,000 for a day student to $26,500 for a boarder. Rocklyn Academy's fees are $35,000, and all students are boarders.
"We have kids who come to us at 16 who can't read," says Morrison. If they do not get help, he adds, "you end up with a 19-year-old who has no skills but they don't know they have no skills because they are getting Bs. No one ever fails them. They are being misled. You have kids in Grade 7 who still have not mastered work at the Grade 3 level and this builds on itself."
Morrison blames the whole language system, which he calls the most disastrous thing in the world for children with learning disabilities. Introduced in the late 1960s, it bypasses spelling and language structure in favour of memorizing or "guess work," he says.
"Kids with learning disabilities who were once considered lazy or slow learners must be taught to decode words phonetically," he says.
"We have kids who have come up five grades in one year. If you saw the progress, you would not think it's the same kids."
Our Kids features a comprehensive list of schools that specialize in helping struggling teens.
Our Kids Publications™ © 2009
Oz girl:
i dont know if this is of any help to you on the "living inside out" thing but the concept is linked to the serenity prayer;
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things that I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference.
which was origially writen by an american theologan called Reinhold Niebur who was big on the idea that spirituality, in his case Christianity should be practiced more than preached. The concept as you can imagine had been bastardized by everyone from AA to Christian megachurches like Hillsong to various new age orgainzations and has been often secularized by taking the word god out.
Ursus:
--- Quote from: "Oz girl" ---i dont know if this is of any help to you on the "living inside out" thing but the concept is linked to the serenity prayer;
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things that I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference.
which was origially writen by an american theologan called Reinhold Niebur who was big on the idea that spirituality, in his case Christianity should be practiced more than preached. The concept as you can imagine had been bastardized by everyone from AA to Christian megachurches like Hillsong to various new age orgainzations and has been often secularized by taking the word god out.
--- End quote ---
Could you perchance elaborate on where and/or how you see the specific connection of "Living Inside Out" to The Serenity Prayer? I'm not trying to discount your premise, but perhaps I'm just not looking in the right place. I think one could say something pretty similar re. linkage to Khalil Gibran's writings.
There were a number of so-called spiritual self-help movements during the middle of the last century, many appearing to offer some watered down version of Christian doctrine, some mixing in 12-steps, some anti-psyche establishment, etc. etc. I think literary pieces like the Serenity Prayer or Khalil Gibran's prose may well have appealed to these movements and were (often) included as part of their fare, but were not necessarily conceptually integral.
Then again, you may know something about this that I don't yet know... :D
The Serenity Prayer
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.
--Reinhold Niebuhr[/list][/list]
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