FOR A MERE $30,000+ DOLLARS A YEAR
YOU TOO CAN SEND YOUR CHILD TO
BEAUTIFUL WESTERN SAMOA
AND KEEP HIM THERE...COMPLETE WITH HANDCUFFS,
PEPPER SPRAY, MACE AND ELECTRICAL DISABLERS.
Does It look like Paradise? You Bet!
Is it?
Depends on who you talk to.
We are beginning a series today on "specialty schools for defiant teens" . These schools are what have been described to us as part of an explosive industry of largely residential schools who take "private placements" of children determined by their families to be troublesome.
These organizations tend to call themselves "Schools" when it comes to accreditation or licensing but market themselves as providing "treatment." In spite of this latter claim, the facilities frequently lack staff psychologists, psychiatrists or social workers though they may have a loose affiliation with an on-call physician. They use sophisticated and powerful marketing techniques, targeting their services to families who are in emotional disarray. Families who are in crisis.
They say: We will come and get your child.
Immediately. (or within 24 hours)
The results for their children vary as do their assessments of the programs. Many of the families who purchase their services decry standard methods of treatment and tell heartrending stories about the failure of traditional counseling or psychiatry to meet the needs of their children:
"My son had the best of everything. We sent him to counseling. We got reports. Some clinical Psychologists told us he was fine. Nothing wrong. Another gave us a terrible report. No one told us what to do."
Those sentiments on the part of parents are understandable. They have utilized every apparent available resource to no positive end for their child. However, there is an apparent incongruence between the marketing image of these facilities and the services they actually provide. This is illustrated by the quasi-therapeutic language used when identifying appropriate "students":
"Discipline: Facility seeking behavioral change through extraordinarily rigorous behavioral demands, some counseling or therapeutic content also available. (However, at an additional charge)
Retention of Involuntary Clients: A high staff ratio trained and prepared to prevent runaway and authorized to pursue and apprehend involuntary residents, but at some risk for the most determined. This is customarily called 'staff secure'
Valid Reason For Admission: adoption issues, family conflict, passively non-compliant, aggressively defiant -- will openly and intentionally defy authority and may be verbally abusive, other behavioral issues
Compatible With Admission, But Relevant Services Not Offered: needs travel guidance/assistance -- escort service"
A review of staff credentials to determine the professional experience of those to whom one has entrusted their child yields little comfort. For the most part, these "schools" operate without any licensed mental health professionals on their staffs and indeed, suggest that such individuals are overvalued. The program posits that the failure of conventional mental health professionals are what warrants their "new" approach.
However, the behaviors enumerated in the literature above can have a variety of causes: Organic brain syndrome, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia and even hearing and visual disease. Teachers and lay people do not normally diagnose such aliments and for good reason. Any attempt to do so by anyone other then those trained in behavioral disorders is certain folly as well as illegal in many jurisdictions.
In the course of researching this story, we have interviewed over three dozen families. We will write about three of them here and quote several others. Although our evaluation of some of those choices may vary from what the programs or the families consider to be their reality, we hope that we will have treated them and their experiences with respect and honesty. We are grateful for the time they have spent telling us their stories. The three families we will follow have sons who attended one particular school, Paradise Cove, in Western Samoa. We chose Paradise Cove because it is one of the most sophisticated in terms of marketing technique, representative of the increasingly global nature of this business. Additionally, the pool of students is large enough to have a range of results to review.
PC is not in and of itself unique. It is one of a growing number of "schools" that are aggressively marketed to relatively affluent parents of children between the ages of 11 and 18 who are acting out, recalcitrant or underachieving. What is unique about Paradise Cove, is that it serves a greater range of families in terms of income and because it comes under the umbrella of a large US based organization known generically as "Teen Help". Teen Help is a marketing arm for "Tranquility Bay", a similar but co-ed facility in Jamaica, as well as campuses in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Montana and Utah.
From this point on we will refer to "Teen Help" as the generic name for the Teen Help family of businesses which are an interlocking series of limited corporations, limited partnerships, and family trusts, which all appear to be associated with three southern Utah businessmen: Robert Lichfield, Brent Facer and J. Ralph Atkin.
One of the many things that distinguishes the Teen Help programs, is the system of financial incentives and commissions it offers to parents of enrolled "students." Vaguely reminiscent of the practices in the medical profession that led to the Safe Harbor Laws, parents are compensated financially for recruiting the families of other "defiant teens." A call to a special 800 number yields marketing advice as well as current prices for marketing support materials such as brochures and videotapes.
This topic is a tough one. Parents want the best for their children. Resources for teenagers have diminished in the last twenty years due to a reduction in education spending, the rise of HMO's and an increased number of young people in the neediest cohort. The children of the baby boomers are reaching their teen years and their numbers will grow in the next decade.
What is a desperate parent to do?
Several hundred, perhaps thousands, of desperate parents have chosen Teen Help. In the following installments, we're going to take a closer look at what Teen Help promises to these people in their time of need and what they actually deliver once parents turn the care of their children over to them. Sit back and prepare yourself for an illustration of what can happen when for profit industries enter the world of the vulnerable.
This was taken from Intrepid Reporter...
Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary,
categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.
--Abbie Hoffman
