IT'S ABOUT TIME!!!
NY Times Article
Melee Keeps Spotlight on Hard Life at Academy
Published: June 8, 2005
Melee Keeps Spotlight on Hard Life at Academy
Stewart Cairns for The New York Times
Jason Finlinson, director of the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a disciplinary boarding school near the Canadian border that is under legal scrutiny.
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: June 8, 2005
OGDENSBURG, N.Y. - The melee at the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a boarding school here for troubled teenagers, began at about 10:15 p.m. on May 16 when someone pulled a fire alarm in the boys' dormitory.
Within moments, students were smashing windows, overturning furniture and fighting, with some trying to help the academy's security guards squelch the disturbance. Eleven students fled the campus, near the Canadian border, and bolted into the night.
Ogdensburg police officers, state troopers, St. Lawrence County sheriff's deputies and the United States Border Patrol were called in and the uprising was quickly put down. Those who escaped were rounded up, and the police arrested and jailed 12 students on rioting, assault and other charges; the academy expelled 48.
Administrators say the uprising was not a result of systemic problems in the academy but of the mixture of combustible characters in a severe disciplinary environment meant to rehabilitate teenagers who have run afoul of the law and their parents.
Jason Finlinson, 33, Ivy Ridge's director, said in an interview at the academy last month that with the expulsions, the school had shed its most troublesome residents.
Still, the violence brought more unwanted attention to an institution that, since opening three years ago, has drawn the scrutiny of state investigative agencies and attracted a loud chorus of critics, including former students who have accused the school of mistreatment.
The office of Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, is investigating whether Ivy Ridge violated state law by issuing diplomas, since it is not accredited by the state. The state police are investigating two cases involving allegations of child abuse and one case stemming from the riot.
Mr. Finlinson and other administrators say all allegations of abuse are false and the invention of disgruntled former students and competitors in the potentially lucrative industry of so-called specialty boarding schools.
Mr. Finlinson said the school was offering a valuable service for parents who feel they have run out of ways to help their children. It's also an expensive service. Tuition and fees are about $3,500 per month.
"We're in a pretty controversial industry," said Mr. Finlinson, who oversees about 500 students and a staff of about 230. "When you're trying to change people's lives, there's controversy. If I didn't want the controversy, I'd go wash cars."
Ivy Ridge comprises a cluster of nondescript brick buildings and a playing field on the campus of a former junior college overlooking the St. Lawrence River. The campus is on the outskirts of Ogdensburg, a small town set amid farmland, about 128 miles northeast of Syracuse.
Its white cinder-block hallways and classrooms are remarkably quiet, and the students - the boys, with close-cropped hair and uniforms of khaki trousers and white shirts; the girls in plaid skirts - move around the building in single file. The children, who are high school age, come from all over the country and abroad and arrive with records of drug and alcohol use, tangles with the law, truancy, domestic violence and splintered families. But they share one thing in common - parents who, at wit's end, have decided that the academy's steep tuition is a small price for a last-ditch effort to straighten out their children.
The academy is affiliated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, a chain of six behavior modification programs in the United States and abroad run by a small group of businessmen in St. George, Utah. In recent years, local governments and the United States State Department have investigated allegations of physical abuse and immigration violations leveled against World Wide-affiliated programs. Affiliates in Costa Rica, the Czech Republic and Mexico closed under pressure from local authorities, and one in Western Samoa closed for "business reasons," according to James Wall, a public relations representative for World Wide.
Ivy Ridge's program, which Mr. Finlinson said was based on a plan developed by World Wide, is highly regimented and emphasizes discipline. Students try to progress through six levels based on a system of merit points. Privileges are granted at each level. Residents are not allowed to receive telephone calls from their parents until they attain Level 3, which can take several months.
The program includes an academic curriculum, though it is primarily computer-based and self-directed: students spend several hours a day in front of computers working silently on programs.
In the days after the disturbance in May, Mr. Finlinson said, a few parents withdrew their children. But he said that the school was now stable and running smoothly.
Nevertheless, his troubles - and the threat of more damage to the academy's reputation - have not disappeared.
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Mr. Spitzer, in his investigation of the academy's status as an accredited school, has forced Ivy Ridge to stop issuing high school diplomas. The academy was accredited until recently by the Northwest Association of Accredited Schools in Boise, Idaho, which is not a registered accrediting organization in New York State. As a result of the investigation, Northwest Association suspended the academy's accreditation.
The New York Department of Education has determined that it does not have oversight of the academy. "It is a behavior modification center," said Jonathan Burman, a department spokesman, "and not a school."
The state police are also investigating three cases involving the academy, a state police spokesman said. He declined to reveal the nature of the cases, except that one was concerned with the May 16 disturbance.
Mr. Finlinson said he believed the cases involved allegations of child abuse.
On Internet sites that criticize Ivy Ridge and other World Wide affiliates, abuse allegations abound, including charges that staff members punched children and deprived them of food as punishment.
Mr. Finlinson and other administrators deny all the allegations. "We go to great lengths to make sure it's a safe environment," the director said, listing a number of precautions, including staff training, security cameras throughout the school and a rule that forbids private one-on-one interactions between adults and students.
He pointed out that no criminal charges have ever been filed against the school in spite of numerous police investigations into abuse allegations.
Leah Swigert, 20, of Eastin, Md., was a student at two World Wide-affiliated programs, including Ivy Ridge, which she left in 2002. Her parents committed her to the program because, she said, she had become unruly and was smoking a lot of marijuana.
On some level, it appears, the program worked. Ms. Swigert is about to graduate from community college and is working as a paralegal. But her memories of Ivy Ridge are entirely negative. She called the program "a scam," noting particularly the academic curriculum.
"I'll still have bad dreams and wake up sweating and crying," she said in a telephone interview. "Nothing really terrible happened. But I think that just about every single day I wanted to run away."
Still, Ms. Swigert says that she never once witnessed any of the kinds of abuses that are regularly posted on the Web. "I never saw anything like that," she said, speculating that many of the allegations probably came from former or current students "who are mad and are trying to get the place shut down."
In interviews at the academy last week, six students - four selected by the administration and two randomly chosen by a reporter, said, in the presence of other students, that they had never been victims of physical abuse or witnessed physical abuse of any kind. They said the staff was allowed to use force on residents only when they became violent and, even then, they used a restraint technique resembling a bear hug.
"I heard about the investigations, but I think it's ridiculous," said Houston Woolery, 18, of Cottonwood, Calif., who has been at Ivy Ridge for nearly nine months and was one of the students selected by the administration for the interviews. "This is the best thing that ever happened to me."
Five of the students said they had initially hated the academy but eventually came to appreciate and, to a certain degree, embrace its tough-love approach.
The sixth student, Gabrielle Sorenson, 14, of Ava, Mo., had been sent to the academy only three days earlier. With her eyes lowered, she said, "This is probably the best choice for me."
