Date: 2003-05-26
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/ny-cost0525,0,1206682.story?coll=3Dnyc-topnews= -s hort-navigation Alexandra Slavis (Newsday/Letta Tayler)=20
By Letta Tayler LATIN AMERICA CORRESPONDENT
Orotina, Costa Rica -- Shortly after stealing her father's credit card for a $2,500 shopping spree, high-school dropout Alexandra Slavis woke up before dawn in February to find strangers, a man and a woman, looming over her bed in Midwood, Brooklyn.
"They said ... 'You can go to jail or you can go to Costa Rica for a week's vacation,' " recalled Slavis, 17.
Slavis eagerly opted for the latter -- but her escorts dropped her at Dundee Ranch Academy, a behavioral modification program for troubled U.S. teens whose regime was tougher than that of many New York jails. Dundee was billed as a "paradise for change."
Like all newcomers to Dundee, which enrolled 200 youths ages 11 to 17 at a campus in the jungly hills of western Costa Rica, Slavis wasn't allowed to speak to her peers for more than 15 minutes a day, she said. She was barred from so much as glancing at a male student. She slept in a crowded dorm where the bunks were stacked three-high and most toilets were clogged. The cereal had weevils -- "cornflakes con carne," staff members joked.
Students who broke rules or complained said their punishments included essays of 12,000 words or more that they had to write before they could leave study hall, even if it took two weeks. Some said they had to walk 500 times around the swimming pool in the hot sun or spend days standing or kneeling perfectly still, changing positions only every half-hour.
When Slavis rebelled, she said, staff members twice used a common Dundee tactic: they held her head to the floor, pulled her arms behind her back and yanked one hand toward her ear for two consecutive half-hour stretches.
"I started going crazy, screaming, 'I want to talk to my mom!' " Alexandra said of her first days at Dundee. The staff told her that before she could pick up the phone, she had to reach something they called Level 3 -- a process that would take at least three months.
Costa Rican authorities raided the school Thursday and announced they were investigating its owner, Narvin Lichfield, for alleged physical and psychological mistreatment of students. Yesterday, Lichfield announced he was closing the academy.
The implosion of Dundee Ranch opens a window on the flourishing tough-love industry, which increasingly is creating programs for troubled U.S. teens in foreign countries where the dollar goes further and oversight often is far weaker. Dundee Ranch was part of a Utah-based network -- the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, or WWASP. Two other foreign WWASP schools shut down and a third dropped out of the association in recent years. WWASP still operates 10 schools in Mexico, Jamaica and the United States, including Ivy Ridge Academy, near Ogdensburg in upstate New York.
As Dundee students were flown home or to other WWASP schools, Lichfield yesterday denied wrongdoing. "I'm a sinner or a saint, depending on which side of the story you're on," he said.
WWASP president Ken Kay defended his programs as "character-building in a structured environment."
"We've helped approximately 15,000 families in crisis and have thousands of happy clients," Kay said. Although seven suits have been filed against WWASP affiliates, he noted none has been upheld.
The State Department has warned parents to carefully monitor overseas behavior modification programs.
For about $30,000 a year, "Kids are basically put in a private prison and held incommunicado. It's neither educational nor therapeutic," said Thomas Burton, the California attorney who filed lawsuits against WWASP affiliates.
Using slick advertising and Internet sites, WWASP "preys on desperate parents" who often send their children without ever visiting the schools, Burton said. "If this were done to animals we'd have the activists out in full force saying, 'You don't treat animals this way.'"
Dundee's purpose "is not to help teens in crisis or their families. It is to make millions of dollars for the owner," wrote Amberly Knight, the academy's director for six months until August, in a January letter to Costa Rican authorities.
Knight wrote that the school for a time gave students unfiltered drinking water that she suspected was the cause of widespread intestinal problems. She said it lacked staff trained to deal with at-risk youths and improperly restrained students -- in one case dislocating a teen's shoulder. It kept them far longer than necessary to rake in extra tuition payments, Knight wrote, and hushed up the rape of a female staff member by a colleague.
Despite allegations of abuse, dozens of students said last week that Dundee had changed them for the better.
"I'd be in a life of crime if I hadn't come here," said Slavis, who says she was using drugs and rampaging against her parents before she came. She said she wanted to continue the program.
Slavis' parents, like many with children at Dundee, agreed. "My child was having a lot of problems," said Slavis' father, Scott, a surgeon. "Maybe she needed some tough love. I'm not happy about this kind of behavior modification but I'm not sure there's any other solution."
Students who complain are exaggerating the conditions in an effort to "manipulate" their parents, said several Dundee teens and staff members. "Everything is great here. It's paradise," said Peter Livak, a Dundee liaison between students and parents. He conceded that part of his job is to censor students' e-mail messages home.
Dundee's campus -- papaya-colored buildings clustered gracefully around tropical gardens -- suggests teens are in a country club. So do the student uniforms: starched white shirts with khaki slacks for boys or skirts for girls.
But in snippets of conversations that ended prematurely when supervisors pulled students away or simply stood nearby, youths described the school as a hell in which even laughter could take away the good-behavior points needed to win privileges and, ultimately, graduate.
Teens who have left Dundee spoke more freely.
"They made us watch torture movies," said Geoffrey Bock, 17, of Mandeville, La., who spent a year here with a twin brother until their mother removed them in October.
"A lot of it was POWs, like Chinese torture, and Holocaust stuff. I guess they were trying to show us how good we had it," Bock said. "Some of it was disgusting. But if you looked away from the screen for more than five seconds they took away points."
Kay said he didn't know if students watched torture movies but said schools might use "educational tapes that show some atrocities.
Bock lived in the "Bat Cave" -- a dorm so named because its walls hadn't been completed, allowing bats to fly in. He said he once had to spend 12 hours a day, for four days, kneeling on rocky ground with his hands behind his back, with breaks of only a few minutes at a time. His crime: putting on sneakers when he couldn't find one of his loafers.
Emily Ely, 13, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who left Dundee Friday, lost 28 pounds in three months because she wouldn't eat the weevil-filled cereal or the cold, lumpy rice.The showers usually were broken or so filthy that she bathed in a sink, she said.
When students asked for psychological counseling, the staff told them they didn't need it and forced them into ill-supervised group therapy sessions, Ely and other teens said. Schooling consisted of students teaching themselves with textbooks that often had missing pages, several teens said.
The program works, Ely said, but "only because you miss your parents, so you want to change so you can see them."
"The program teaches these kids to be more angry and aggressive in the end," said Roderick S. Hall, a San Diego psychologist who has worked with WWASP alumni. "I think the kids end up shutting down. It's psychological torture."
Key, the WWASP president, said the only torture being inflicted is by Costa Rican prosecutors, who marched into the school Tuesday and told the students they were free to go, and then left, setting off pandemonium. Dozens of students fled and staffers dragged them back.
Students went on a rampage that night and the school was forced to place dozens of them overnight in a walled compound on the campus, Lichfield said.
But several Dundee students said they'd been placed in the compound because they'd refused to sign papers saying they wanted to remain at the academy. Lichfield's attorney, Rafael Garc=EDa, denied the allegations and said prosecutors had "terrorized" students into signing papers saying they wanted to leave.
As U.S. consular officials sort out children's documents and help them contact parents, Dundee staffers have loaded students onto buses to the airport for flights home. Some parents, like Ely's mother, Laurie Ely, didn't learn their children were headed back until getting collect calls from them at the San Jose airport.
"We blindly... believed what they told us," said Laurie Ely, who refinanced her home to send her daughter. But many other parents said the probes into Dundee hadn't shaken their faith. "I was very satisfied," said Slavis' mother, Mindy Slavis, a nurse who decided upon the WWASP programs after researching them on the Internet. "She loved it and I can prove it with her letters."
Mindy Slavis said her daughter willingly agreed to go straight from Dundee to the Tranquility Bay program in Jamaica, the WWASP school with the harshest reputation. "We want her to continue on this good path," she said.= =20 Copyright =A9 2003, Newsday, Inc.=20