Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Aspen Education Group

Lone Star Expeditions

<< < (3/30) > >>

Deborah:
Facts and hard numbers are available here:
http://www.teenadvocatesusa.org/INMEMORIAM.html
http://www.caica.org/NEWS%20Deaths%20Li ... mitted.htm
http://www.isaccorp.org/deaths.asp

Although none of the lists are conclusive.

TheWho:

--- Quote from: ""Deborah"" ---Facts and hard numbers are available here:
http://www.teenadvocatesusa.org/INMEMORIAM.html
http://www.caica.org/NEWS%20Deaths%20Li ... mitted.htm
http://www.isaccorp.org/deaths.asp

Although none of the lists are conclusive.
--- End quote ---


some thoughts:

When I first started visiting fornits and was pointed to these sites as proof of the problems in the industry I found it a daunting task to decifer/wade thru, if you will, the long list.  I appreciate the work that goes into documenting and posting this information but I found there is no chronological order or categories which could help the parent if he/she wants to see problems in just Wilderness or TBS’s or maybe residential care facilities.  There are deaths listed on these sites which occurred at home (outside the industry) some were by natural causes others were not.  It just didn’t provide enough information for it to be meaningful to me as a parent.  I wanted to see if the problems were contained or focused in one area, did they effect TBS’s more than RTC’s?  Were Wilderness programs safer than Residential care?  Has the problem improved over time?  Were they unique to the TBS industry? Etc.  Would my child be safer in a TBS/wilderness program than where he/she is now?

I was surprised this information wasn’t available and suggested many times over the past years that it might be more meaningful to put the data in some type of order that may help guide the parents and shine a light on the problem areas.  I don’t understand why these sites don’t do this?
Anyway, maybe I am the odd one out but I found it more meaningful and clearer to approach the data positioning in a matrix format which allowed the parents to view a specific area or date or the industry as a whole.  This is why I have been reorganizing the data and updating it here on fornits.  I have received some very positive feedback so We have continued and will expand on the template that we have have.

hanzomon4:
All of the different titles are really bunk, TBS, RTC, Wilderness, Emotional Growth, or whatever is meaningless. It's the model and philosophy that causes the abuse and most of these places follow the same philosophy and one of three abusive models(CEDU, Straight, Life Spring(est?). Wilderness therapy and boot camps have their own little spin  but suffer from the same fucked up think.

If you truly want to do something productive start by helping survivors report abuse. Some post their stories on the web but when it comes to reporting abuse the situation becomes difficult. Reporting abuse to the state can be complicated by red tape or impossible because the program is not state licensed or regulated. Reporting abuse to NGO's like NATSAP or JCAHO can be difficult because they're pro-industry and keep their regs under lock and key or a hefty fee.

Your numbers are really pointless because they only take into account deaths. If you use deaths as the only indicators of abuse then programs like Casa by the sea or Peninsula Village can slip under the radar. Even if you added reported abuse to your numbers you would still come up with a distorted view of the problem because reporting abuse is difficult and rarely done by abuse victims. Just think about all of the people who were abused at straight, how many of them died there?

You see where I'm going?

Also being shot at school is different from being killed by someone who has complete control over you. Deaths in programs are culminations of abuse not random acts of idiocy.

Anonymous:
You guys are breaking my heart.

A few qualifiers and disclaimers if I may: You must do your research before leaving your child in ANYONE'S care for ANY length of time. SO I'm not going to make any generalizations about all wilderness camps or even all of Aspen's programs. I also know that by the time a family is thinking about wilderness camps their kids need pretty serious help.

I don't give a shit about Aspen because I have never cared for their corporate approaches. But they are the parent company of LoneStar Expeditions...and I worked there for three years, including the time frame when Matt died.

Matt was not in my group (I worked with girls) but I did hang with the guys for a bit one afternoon right after Matt got there. I met him and shook his hand. And I know every single one of the people that worked with Matt very well, in fact, I personally trained most of the people working there now. If you don't know me or my former coworkers, please don't judge us as sicko sadists who like to punish kids and make them suffer.

Truth is...everyone I ever knew at LoneStar was there for the love of children. We know how awesome it is when you do something difficult and succeed...and we knew those kids needed some self-esteem. We did not push our kids to dangerous places either physically or mentally. And we did NOT neglect their health, we had kids in and out of the doctor and ER every damn day, half of them faking and us wanting to be sure there wasn't something really wrong. In fact, half our staff was coming out of wilderness first responder class (80 hours total to handle things like this) on our week OFF the day that Matt died. We piled into about 3 vehicles and drove like bats outta hell to get there. There were about 20 medical professionals with Matt that day. 8 WFR trainees plus our instructor from out of state, an ambulance crew, our field medic, and Matt's field staff members could not keep Matt alive. It just was not true that people just stood back and watched him die unconcerned.

What happened is that Matt sat down by the tree away from his group and started making snoring noises. His group and staff thought he was goofing around, joking about how tired he was. Why? Because Matt was a funny funny guy, I know that just from meeting him in one afternoon! Why else? Well, do any of YOU know what a death rattle sounds like? I don't and neither did his staff. But they knew Matt...and they knew that he was pretty respectful to them, so when he didn't stop snoring when they told him enough was enough...they went to check on him and found him in cardiac arrest and started CPR.

Matt's autopsy revealed that he died of an unknown heart defect that no one could have found prior to his placement with LSE, and that it would have killed him that day whether he was hiking in the Texas heat, or sitting home in the AC watching TV.

When all this happened we were all devastated and we weren't just out to cover our asses either. We were horrified that something could happen to one of OUR kids. Our staff was made of people who had made their LIVES of helping kids...and we did a damn good job of it too.

LoneStar is the place where I met some of my best friends and have some of my fondest memories...because when I worked there, I was part of something WONDERFUL. If I'm a sadistic prick who enjoys victimizing children, I will eat the roof off my house.

What you guys don't see in the statistics while you are looking for ways to horribleize my job, is that I met about 200 kids in three years there, and I know exactly that many stories. I could tell you EVERY ONE of them just by a picture alone...and about 20 of them are still in touch with me on a weekly basis. About half of those 200 kids hugged me and sobbed when they left...and a handful of mothers knew all about me from letters their children wrote home, and wanted to hug me and thank me for all I had done to take care of their baby. And I'm just ONE that happened to be a lot of kids' fav. I trained another round of staff as my legacy and they are helping kids as I type this.

LSE helps many many many kids, usually when we get them we care more about them than they care about themselves. Not because it is Aspen, not because it is wilderness, but because of the people who live and work with these kids every day.

nimdA:

--- Quote ---What happened is that Matt sat down by the tree away from his group and started making snoring noises. His group and staff thought he was goofing around, joking about how tired he was. Why? Because Matt was a funny funny guy, I know that just from meeting him in one afternoon! Why else? Well, do any of YOU know what a death rattle sounds like? I don't and neither did his staff. But they knew Matt...and they knew that he was pretty respectful to them, so when he didn't stop snoring when they told him enough was enough...they went to check on him and found him in cardiac arrest and started CPR.
--- End quote ---


That poor kid. Were there other kids around?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page