I don?t know what their reasons for leaving were. I had asked each of them but I didn?t think that that they were terribly candid, which in retrospect, I appreciate for the most part. I began to sense that members of the staff were fearful about a year before I graduated. I started talking about this sense in raps and people encouraged me to take care of my feelings. I ran indictments against staff who really seemed to be covering things up; likely how they were feeling. My indictments fell on deaf ears. I had some relatively good conversations with one of my friends who were on the staff and she found a pretty good balance between telling me that I was sensing a growing notion among the staff but that it wasn?t appropriate for me to be involved in what was going on. I had talked with my parents about leaving then; it had been so hard to see a place that I loved and had a sense of ownership in be changed programmatically without any process or explanation. Even worse, I experienced staff as either denying what was happening or sweeping it under the carpet and minimizing the growing changes. My parents were supportive of whatever I decided to do, stay or leave. One of my staff supports didn't try and reason with me emotionally as I might have expected. He instead pointed out the obvious, that I was almost done and only had my Summit to finish. Why not do it? I decided to stay and continued to express my discomfort with the changes.
Lisa and Brett Carry, Rae and Sharon Kreider, Doug and Mona Kim-Brown, Mary and Gary Weber-Quinn, and Randy (who had been married to Caroline Wolf) all left within two months of one another. Brett, Rae, and Randy had been ?Team Heads? and Doug had been headmaster of the school. The various ?Families? had been dissolved and Teams had been created in their place when I was in Challenge. Medication came to the school shortly thereafter and it confused the hell out of us because it had been so clear before that ?medication=bad? and now people were taking it (sometimes against their will). Think for a moment how surreal it would have been for a staff to run an indictment at someone who was refusing to take medication! It was crazy-making and many of us would cautiously flip the indictments on the staff ? they would usually relent pretty quickly, their hearts didn?t seem to be in what they were saying. Our world was no longer simple and black and white and those who had seemed to know what to do and when now seemed all too human. It was awful.
The Psychiatrist (Doug Ratelle sp.?) started after my I and Me. He seemed to be one of the few staff who knew about medication but also understood our discomfort with what was happening. He was comfortable with being indicted and was able to hold the very strong feelings that were fired at him by many of us who were displacing our anger at the school and our confusion over the changing program onto him. He was a good guy in my memory.
There was also a Psychologist (David Masseli) who came on staff who was offering individual therapy to people for whom raps seemed to have little utility. He also provided educational and personality testing to some, including me. I had sought out his services in preparation for college. I had always had some sense that I had trouble learning certain things and wanted some confirmation of it and to have some direction for what I might do about it. He was GREAT! I went through nearly a week of testing and then went over the results with him. He was able to help me make sense of parts of myself that had always seemed mysterious. My mom though was not into it (she didn't see the use) and when it came time for the second half of the work ? figuring out what I could do to compensate for a pretty clear learning disability, she stopped paying. It had been a ton of money and in her mind she had spent enough on me for the time being and this testing was a budget item she crossed off.
This is by no means a complete story. Even if I took more time I don?t really know what exactly was going on, what staff had been told, and why so many seemed to flee. It also was more than a decade ago and I can?t trust my memory to recall what I might once have known, but well, here are the highlights.
Best, M[ This Message was edited by: mad on 2004-09-20 05:11 ]
