Lake House Academy

[Ursus]

Long time program ideologue Catherine "Cat" Jennings (Talisman Summer Programs, Camp Elliot, Stone Mountain School, and New Leaf Academy of North Carolina) to head a new program based in North Carolina:

-------------- • -------------- • --------------

Breaking News
Posted: Jun 14, 2010

Greenwich Education & Prep
Greenwich, CT

Lake House Academy For Young Girls In NC To Open

Contact:
Peter Newman
Director,
203-661-1609
http://greenwichedprep.com/lha

Greenwich Education & Prep provides primary, supplementary and specialized learning services as well as educational consulting and individualized college prep courses to K through 12 students and their families. They help students find their passion for learning and teach them to enjoy the journey. They differ from other tutoring, test prep and private schooling organizations by the breadth of programs offered and the superior credentials of their educators.

At Greenwich Education & Prep, students are individually assessed and a curriculum is developed according to their unique learning style and academic needs. Greenwich Education & Prep helps students achieve their full potential and measures their success on the progress students achieve. More information about Greenwich Education & Prep is available on the Internet at http://www.greenwichedprep.com.


Copyright ©2010, Woodbury Reports, Inc.

[Pile of Dead Kids]

You sure this is in the right forum Ursus? Is GE&P owned by Aspen or CRC?

[Ursus]

You sure this is in the right forum Ursus? Is GE&P owned by Aspen or CRC?

I don't know who owns Greenwich Education and Prep. However, they have a couple of key folk who were formerly with Aspen, hence there appears to be some type of relationship, be it financial and/or philosophical.

Here's some information on Catherine "Cat" Jennings, recently appointed Executive Director of the soon to open Lake House Academy. In addition to being former head of Stone Mountain School and New Leaf Academy of North Carolina, both Aspen programs, she also founded Talisman Summer Programs and Camp Elliot prior to her association with Aspen Education Group.

[Interestingly enough, and perhaps a bit of a non sequitur, Aspen is also opening another new program this August called Talisman School, also in North Carolina.]

First, here is Catherine Jennings' formal farewell letter to the New Leaf community from a couple of weeks ago:

-------------- • -------------- • --------------

Breaking News
Posted: May 27, 2010

New Leaf Academy of North Carolina
Hendersonville, NC

Cat Jennings Looking At Options

Contact:
Rebecca Jefferies
Program Manager
828-697-5029
http://www.newleafnorthcarolina.com

May 28, 2010

Dear Friends and Families of New Leaf Academy of North Carolina,

I am writing to inform you of my plans as we move forward. As you are arranging plans for your daughter and your family's needs, I too am looking at options for myself and my family, therefore my last day at New Leaf will be Friday, June 11th.

Dr. Karen Fitzhugh, VP Operations for Aspen has been present on site for the past two weeks. Karen will move into the chief leadership position at New Leaf upon my departure. Karen is an experienced Executive Director and I have every confidence she will work with you to ensure your daughter has the best transition. In addition, the New Leaf management team will remain in place throughout June.

By June 11th, all families will have carefully crafted plans to move their daughters to their next placement and I am confident the staff that you have known and trusted with your child will be able to implement the plans and support you in transitioning her out of NLANC. I look forward to seeing you all as you come in for Graduation on June 10th and the Family Seminar and visit on the 11th.

Serving your daughter and your family has been one of the greatest experiences of my career and I will keep those memories forever. I will miss each and every one of you. I would love to hear of your successes. The NLANC staff will know how to contact me if they need things as we finish up and I have included ways to contact me after June 11th should you need it.

Thank you for your understanding and support. All of you have contributed to the success of NLANC in trusting us to care for your daughter, supporting her in her work and simply being apart of the NLANC family.

Sincerely,

Cat Jennings
828-707-3473
catjennings@charter.net


Copyright © 1995-2010 by Woodbury Reports Inc.

[Eliscu2]

Sounds like a sweet place!
I wonder if I could get a free "Zap Pack" with every kid I enroll.
Maybe I'll start my own program.
Vail Education.....I always liked it better than Aspen.

[Ursus]

Here's Cat Jennings' brief bio from New Leaf Academy's website; the Lake House Academy website still needs to be updated:

-------------- • -------------- • --------------

Catherine B. Jennings, Executive Director



Executive Director Catherine "Cat" Jennings has more than twenty five years working with children at-risk. A pioneer in the field of treatment programs for emotionally, socially, and behaviorally challenged adolescents, Cat has founded three programs devoted to helping students struggling with ADHD, learning differences, social skills development, and autism.

Her programs include the Talisman Summer Programs, a co-educational summer camp for children ages 9-18; Camp Elliot, a licensed mental health program/ therapeutic school for emotionally disturbed boys; and Stone Mountain School, an emotional growth boarding school for boys grades 6-12. In 2000, the Aspen Education Group acquired Stone Mountain School as part of its family of services. In 2004, Cat was selected to lead New Leaf Academy of North Carolina, a personal development boarding school for girls.


"SOMETIMES A GIRL CAN FEEL LIKE A LEAF IN A WINDSTORM.
WE UNDERSTAND HER NEED FOR REDISCOVERY."

New Leaf Academy, 2009.

[Ursus]

This may be a bit of a non sequitur for this thread, but here's someone else currently employed by Greenwich Ed who also has Aspen Ed figuring prominently in their background...

Those of you who may have wondered where Frank Bartolomeo ended up (formerly with Academy at Swift River), may wonder no more. He's here, as director of another of Greenwich Ed's schools — The Spire School. From GE&P's website:

-------------- • -------------- • --------------

Frank Bartolomeo, Ph.D.
Executive Director, The Spire School at Greenwich Education and Prep



Dr. Frank Bartolomeo comes to The Spire School at Greenwich Education and Prep with over 20 years of experience in the child and adolescent mental health field. He has worked in such diverse settings as residential treatment centers, schools, outpatient clinics, and hospitals in the Boston area.

In 2005, Frank became Director of Counseling at a therapeutic boarding school and spearheaded its transformation from an emotional growth paradigm to a contemporary model that incorporated the best available research on residential care; he later became the Executive Director.

His areas of specialization include: child and adolescent therapy, group and organizational psychology, and group psychotherapy. Frank served as Co-Chair of the Children's Group Therapy Association in Boston, and in 2003 was awarded "Group Worker of the Year" by the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups (AASWG). He also served as an assistant clinical professor at Boston University School of Social Work from 1998-2003. Frank has published articles related to the theory, research, and practice of behavioral health care for youth.

Frank enjoys yoga, motorcycling, playing soccer and watching his children's sporting events.


# #

[Ursus]

I guess I musta missed the "official announcement" of Bartolomeo's new appointment when it was first posted. So... belatedly... here it is:

(Curious that it does not deign to mention the Academy at Swift River at all, eh?    )

-------------- • -------------- • --------------

Breaking News
Posted: May 20, 2010 14:50

The Spire School Stamford
New Canaan, CT

Dr Frank Bartolomeo to Head The Spire School

Contact:
Frank Bartolomeo, Ph.D
Executive Director
203-661-1609
http://www.greenwichedprep.com

May 19, 2010

The Spire School at Greenwich Education and Prep is pleased to announce Dr. Frank Bartolomeo, PhD has been named Executive Director. Dr. Bartolomeo has over 20 years experience working with adolescents in the mental health field and has worked in residential treatment centers, schools, outpatient clinics and hospitals in the Boston area. His areas of specialization include: child and adolescent therapy, group and organizational psychology, and group psychotherapy.

The Spire School is a private day school in Stamford, CT that combines a rigorous college prep program with an overall emphasis on wellness of mind and body. The students who attend The Spire School are intellectually capable yet need direction and support, due to unsuccessful academic experiences and their self defeating beliefs about their capabilities.

Through an individualized academic program, students develop the skills needed to extend this self-examination to their physical, social, and emotional well-being. With an emphasis on exercise, nutrition, and proper self-care, we help our students regulate their emotions and develop interpersonal skills such as effective communication, good listening, empathy, and conflict resolution.

The approach at Spire is to create a team of community-based allies, particularly parents, who work in concert to support and encourage the students. Staff works in collaboration with those people who play significant roles in the students' lives, including family members, outside professionals, or clergy. This is central to the Spire approach because these relationships weave strong social support networks that sustain and enrich the students.

To learn more call The Spire School or visit the website at: http://www.greenwichedprep.com


Copyright ©2010, Woodbury Reports, Inc.

[SUCK IT]

These people put themselves out there to help kids. They put their money where their mouth is and work hard to help troubled teens. The people who post here like to post their pictures and throw stones at them, post false information to discredit them and attempt to bully them into shutting down. I have more respect for someone willing to actually try than those who do nothing but tear other people down. The extremists posting here are the most selfish people in the world. They didn't like treatment so they don't want anyone to go to treatment and will lie about being abused to discredit every facility they can. If the extremists here wanted to help kids there are many ways they could, instead they relish in the freedom to humiliate those who actually try. They have created their own mythology and slang words, the fornits culture is of hatred and misinformation. The agenda is to discredit all available options for parents seeking help for their troubled teen, other than the government options. These posters are actually pro government communists who believe only government should be involved in the troubled teen industry, that's why you'll only see them attack privately run programs here. They are completely blinded to the truth and their actions are motivated by delusion.

[Anne Bonney]

post false information to discredit them

What false information?



 

They didn't like treatment so they don't want anyone to go to treatment and will lie about being abused to discredit every facility they can.

I didn't like being abused in so-called "treatment".  I didn't like being forced into an abusive "rehab" for a problem I did not have.


 

If the extremists here wanted to help kids there are many ways they could, instead they relish in the freedom to humiliate those who actually try.

We suggest getting professional help, instead of abdicating parental responsibilities to strangers with little to no qualifications to deal with emotionally fragile children, especially because so many of these programs utilize the confrontational, 'attack therapy' on children.

 

They have created their own mythology and slang words,

 :rofl:  :rofl:   Oh that's rich, considering the amount of loaded language and rehab-speak that flows freely inside.

the fornits culture is of hatred and misinformation.

There is no Fornits culture.  You guys appear to be threatened by the fact that there are more than just a few people who are beginning to realize the dangers of these places.  That's why all the venom is coming from people like you, Danny and a few others.  Your belief system has been threatened and you're lashing out.  I actually feel sorry for you guys in a lot of ways.  It's scary to realize that everything you've built your life upon is bullshit and quicksand.

The agenda is to discredit all available options for parents seeking help for their troubled teen, other than the government options.

 :rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:

Most of us would tell you to steer as far away from "government" intervention as possible.  Shows how little you know about how "the Fornits culture" thinks.   :rofl:

These posters are actually pro government communists who believe only government should be involved in the troubled teen industry, that's why you'll only see them attack privately run programs here. They are completely blinded to the truth and their actions are motivated by delusion.

 :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:  :roflmao:


Wow.  You've really jumped the shark now, haven't you?

[SUCK IT]

Hi Manne, hope you had a good holiday. You say you offer professional alternatives to private treatment options, what exactly are those? Are you claiming that the 'abuse' that happens in private treatment, do not occur in 'professional' treatment? I fail to see the distinction. Your 'professional', or a better word might be clinical treatment, is very expensive and not an option for most teens, even those with insurance only get a limited amount. So what then? I don't see how you can draw a line between the private industry which also has professionals in their programs, with clinical treatment. You would be more comfortable in a rubber room, than outside in a wilderness program? Different issues need different solutions, the treatment industry is constantly morphing and changing to adapt to the needs of teens and their parents. Why are you so afraid of the free market, don't you believe parents know better than a 'professional' or government bureaucrat?  This is the exact communist argument I was saying, you want a govt. expert middleman to decide whether parents can send their kid to treatment, that won't help anything. Other than give the stone throwers more power, more taxes, more control. I see why this appeals to the fornits extremist, to me it's disgusting.

[Ursus]

These posters are actually pro government communists who believe only government should be involved in the troubled teen industry, that's why you'll only see them attack privately run programs here.

Lols. Check out the Public Sector Gulags forum. IMO, this is where it all began.

The government loves to give loans and grants to private sector initiative for methodologies they are quite interested in making use of, but which are perhaps too "experimental" for the public to swallow as being government sanctioned. At least in the early stages.

Come to think of it, Straight, Inc., The Seed, and even Synanon benefited from this kind of governmental largesse.  

[Troll Control]

...clinical treatment, is very expensive and not an option for most teens, even those with insurance only get a limited amount.

Most "clinical treatment" takes the form of individual counseling.  This usually runs about $80 per session and is almost entirely covered by most insurance plans. $80 per session times 8 sessions per month equals $640, with insurance typically picking up at least 80% of the bill (often it is 100% with a small co-pay of $20 or so) or $512, leaving the patient to pay $128 per month for safe, effective, clinically-proven treatment with measurable results that lasts, on average, less than six months, or $768 for the entire course of treatment.

Most programs on the other hand, cost around $5000 per month and typically $0 is covered by insurance, leaving the "attendee" (their parents, actually) to pay $5000 per month out of their pocket for an average stay of 12 months (or more, but why quibble?), or $60,000, for "treatment" that has no clinical validity whatsoever and about which not one single clinical trial has ever been undertaken in the 40 or so years these "programs" have been in operation.  

"Programs" are not considered a valid treatment modality and this is precisely why insurance companies will not pay for them.

Your argument is fallacious, rife with inaccuracy and blatant untruths and, on its face, completely ridiculous.

[Pile of Dead Kids]

Or to be more precise, Ursus, they *did*. In the past tense.

Back in the 60s even the CIA was swept up by some stupid weird shit. The whole embarrassing MKULTRA thing, all the stuff with LSD, remote viewing, oldschool brainwashing, everything. Wanna know why they stopped?

'Cause it didn't fucking work!

Three-letter agencies don't give a fuck one way or another about ethics or whether something is right or not. They just want results, and even in a bureaucracy somebody is going to realize that it's not working sooner or later. And the kind of results coming out of the Seed and similar shit were just not what they were looking for. Not reliable enough, and the harder you pushed the worse the target got. So they scrapped it, as well as a lot of the other useless crap of the era, and tried to forget they had ever gotten involved in it. There was a brief resurgence when Dick Cheney started the waterboarding shit, but since that was just for revenge and didn't work either it was quickly scrapped. Believe me, nobody in government wants to see the clusterfuck of the mid-2000s again. Too much of a headache and they got next to nothing for it.

The sad part is that the monster they had set loose into the wild started evolving on its own, occasionally cross-breeding with the brutish "reformatories" of the time and proto-LGATs. So we got The Seed, Straight, then WWASPS and its variants on one hand, CEDU and its derivatives on the other, and some other minor forms besides. The Seed is gone, Straight is almost completely toast, WWASPS is a shadow of what it was, CEDU is dead, and its derivatives are eating shit.

It's like releasing a fast-mutating virus into a faster-changing host. If we had the 2010 Aspen programs in 1960 they would have fluorished and they wouldn't be getting hammered; the hammering mechanisms (regulation, Fornits, the Internet generally) simply didn't exist. On the other hand, in an environment where any teenager has multiple methods of getting on and instantly summoning hordes of rapacious T-cells, even these evolved forms start dying. The advance of society is simply too much for them to handle, the whole name-change staff-change shuffle isn't working too well anymore, and their basic formulae are failing hard everywhere the regulatory system works. See Trails Carolina. "Wait... we have to do what now?"

The real funny joke is that they're actually using Darwinian evolution against themselves, for obvious reasons. The kids don't even need to be dead; fucked up for life and never having children works too.

[Whooter]

Abuse occurs everywhere clinical treatment or non clinical.. educated or not.

......after state regulators concluded he'd had sex with another patient, billed her insurance company for those sessions and took her prescription pain medications.
To avoid further prosecution by the state, in mid May Lerom voluntarily relinquished his license and promised to "cease practicing psychology." But Lerom still has his office open.

Link

A top state psychologist who oversaw therapy for hundreds of incarcerated sex offenders was fired for allegedly having a sexual affair with a patient, two lawyers involved in the case said.
Link



...

[Troll Control]

Sure, there are abusers everywhere.  The difference?  Programs have not ever been clinically validated.  In other words, it has never, in 40 years, been established that they actually "treat" anything and the average cost/program length is $60k/12 months, versus $768/6 months for actual treatment that is proven by clinical trials to be safe and effective.

It also doesn't go unnoticed that rates of abuse by program staff are several orders of magnitude greater than the general population (see MBA for a contemporary example where regulators confirmed a "100%" abuse rate via sexualized role play, food/sleep deprivation, rape etc.).  Abusers gravitate to these secretive institutions where thay can abuse at will and if they get caught, it likely won't even get reported (see "Trails Carolina" for a contemporary example where kids got their shoes and pants confiscated nightly, a kid was punched in the face by staff, dosed on meds without doctor's orders, restrained for extended periods daily, etc.) so the program can avoid the bad publicity.