Tough love may be a little too tough for some students at the exclusive Swift River Academy.
By Stephanie Kraft
Nestled among the hills and rocky streams near the part of Franklin County known as Little Switzerland, the Academy at Swift River is a newcomer in a region known for such elegant prep schools as Deerfield Academy and Northfield-Mt. Hermon.
But ASR, which opened last summer at the former Swift River Inn in Cummington, is not geared toward well-adjusted pre-Ivy Leaguers. Its clientele are students who, in the words of its smartly written brochure, "are experiencing difficulties managing their lives at home or in school." Superimposed on a picture of the charming colonial inn buildings in ASR's promotional material is this description: "The Academy at Swift River is a compassionate educational community which fosters personal growth and healthy self-expression, inspires academic excellence, and teaches individual responsibility and service to others."
What balm to the mind of the anxious parent, the parent of a teenager who is depressed, alienated, skipping school, dabbling in drugs, in danger of arrest for shoplifting, at risk for unwanted pregnancy, or simply exhibiting what is referred to vaguely as "oppositional behavior." ASR is far from alone in employing marketing language that at once reinforces parents' anxieties and offers reassurance that with care from the right handlers, their children can be, in the language of the '90s, reformatted. Indeed there is an entire industry of wilderness adventures, treatment centers and schools like ASR, all promising to put young people back on the right path. "When teenagers are off track," reads one typical ad on the World Wide Web, "family life unravels."
Of course, the teenager will need affluent parents, because none of these programs are cheap. ASR, for example, costs $4,000 a month.
The business of helping troubled young people find their way isn't easy. As psychiatrists know, hostile, acting-out teens are among the most difficult patients to treat -- geniuses at manipulation, and almost entirely without physical fear. But these aren't the kids who end up at ASR; the school does not accept violent teens or teens under court order to be placed in restrictive environments. Instead, ASR caters to a much broader category whose behavior may be described quite differently by different parents, depending on the parents' own experiences as teenagers and their ability to deal with anxiety.
And so students with nothing worse than minor depression or attention deficit disorder may find themselves at a remote, isolated school with only 20 or so companions, some of whom may be battling serious drug or mood problems.
Some students emerge from such an experience with understanding, confidence and a new lease on life. "[ASR] saved my son's life," said one mother from a southern state, whose child was sent to ASR to end his involvement with drugs and drug dealers.
In other cases, however, such programs may load additional stresses onto an already struggling young psyche.
That's what Dean Kent feels is happening far too often at ASR. Kent, a former employee of the school, is so concerned about the treatment of students at the academy that he has gone public with his fears, drawing the attention of the state Office of Child Care Services.
The state started looking closely at the school several months ago after Kent spoke out about things he'd seen and heard while working there. As a cook at ASR last year, Kent grew increasingly disturbed by the way the staff treated students: viewing them as manipulative and untrustworthy, shouting obscenities at them during so-called "communications sessions," holding all-night group therapy meetings that students seemed to dread, and severely restricting their communication with the outside world. And he saw bored students who seemed to be growing increasingly unhappy and agitated.
Eventually his concern turned to fear -- fear that the use of sleep deprivation, forced work and tough wilderness outings as behavior-modification tools amounted to emotional and physical abuse.
For Kent, it seemed a natural move to take a job last July cooking meals for the staff at ASR. His wife and a few of his neighbors had worked in the kitchen at the Swift River Inn, and when the inn's new owners turned it into a private school, they were happy to inherit some support staff who were familiar with the layout.
The first students, and more staff, came a few weeks later from Mt. Bachelor Academy in Oregon, another school owned and operated by ASR's parent company, College Health Enterprises of Huntington Beach, Calif. CHE owns a chain of health centers, nursing homes, schools and outdoor rehab programs for teens.
As ASR prepared for its fall session, Kent said, program leaders from Oregon gave the other locally recruited workers only one briefing. It included no information about the philosophical or psychological underpinnings of the program, except for a few one-liners lifted from Erik Erikson's classic works on developmental psychology. Essentially, the new staff were given warnings.
"We were told not to trust the kids," he said. "They said some of the kids had drug or alcohol problems, some had attention deficit disorder. They told us the kids were devious and evasive. They told us to lock our cars and roll up the windows. We had to lock up the kitchen knives. They said, 'Don't be in a room alone with a kid.'"
Eventually the number of students at the school reached 27. They came from all over the country. Working in the kitchen, Kent said, he found himself chatting with the students as they came in for food or brought their dishes in after meals. "One kid, one of the original kids, would come and hang out with me," Kent said. "I was happy. I thought, the kids are getting some emotional nurturing from the food. But there were things they were hesitant to talk about."
Kent is an artist, and in the winter taught a course in mask-making in addition to his kitchen duties, which gave him another way of getting to know the students and the school's program. Though ASR's alluring brochure mentions "well-equipped classrooms and laboratories," Kent said that when he left ASR in mid-January there were no science laboratories, no more than one or two computer work stations, and only a minimal library. Yet the program, under which students attend the academy for two years without summer vacations, cost parents $4,000 a month.
"What were they doing with all this money?" he asked.
On occasion, Kent had to get equipment from a maintenance closet next to a room that by September was being used for communication sessions. Often he heard the staff members who conducted the sessions shouting at the students; once, he said, he heard one of them yell at a student, "You fucking bastard!" Another time, Kent said, "I observed Brett Carey when he was literally hoarse after one of these sessions." Carey, who had been the dean of student life at ASR, is no longer at the school.
At other times, Kent saw students compelled to do degrading make-work as punishment. One time, he said, he saw a girl forced to spend an entire day scrubbing a staircase with a toothbrush. He was also alarmed by the few bits of information he heard about the so-called Life Step sessions, forms of group therapy in which several students would be taken to one of the buildings for day-and-a-half to three-day stays.
"I was instructed repeatedly on paper to prepare very minimal meals for these overnights," Kent said. "I would put up carrot sticks, celery sticks, crackers, cheese, hummus, a few turkey sandwiches, and this plate would be sufficient for two mealtimes. Then I would send a very light breakfast. The staff would have bagels and cream cheese, the kids could only have fruit and cereal. I worried about the fact that the food for the staff was different, and I felt that these were very light meals."
Kent worried about whether the food was being rationed on a punish-and-reward basis during the sessions. The question was one of many the Advocate was unable to discuss with ASR officials, who declined to be interviewed about the program.
Kent had other concerns about the Life Step sessions. He did not witness them, but he heard that the students were kept up most of the night for "therapeutic" group conversations that were a more intense version of the communication sessions he had overheard.
One of the students Kent remembers best was a boy with a talent for drawing, whom he got to know through the mask-making class. One day Kent came to work and the boy was gone. Other staff members said he had been taken from the school in the middle of the previous night and sent west for a wilderness trip. Three weeks later, Kent said, the boy was back, and looking depressed. Another staff member told Kent that when she greeted the student with "Hi, it's nice to have you back," he burst into tears.
Other things worried Kent too.
He noticed that the students were not allowed to make telephone calls, even calls to their parents, without a staff member listening, and that their incoming and outgoing mail was read. After he learned that a boy who had broken his collarbone had been forced to move heavy cans and jars and wipe down shelves in the kitchen as punishment for a trifling infraction just a week after being injured, Kent became so worried that he decided to contact the state Department of Social Services about the school's practices. DSS passed the information on to the state Office of Child Care Services, which sent an investigator, Eric Lieberman, to the academy.
Academy administrators told Lieberman it was true that students were denied sleep for 19 or 20 hours during the first Life Step session, called "The Truth." Staff and students might stay up all night, then break for a nap between 5 and 7 a.m., then continue the session until 2 the next afternoon, the administrators said. One administrator also acknowledged using profanity toward the students during communications sessions, and added, "Some days I have said things to students that I wish I did not say."
The Office of Child Care Services' investigators found that the school had not been remiss in getting medical treatment for the student with the broken collarbone, but it did substantiate most of Kent's other concerns. It cited the school for "using behavior management techniques which subject students to verbal abuse, ridicule and humiliation, denial of sufficient sleep, and repetitive exercise as a response to an infraction of a rule."
OCCS also cited the school for monitoring students' telephone calls and mail. The agency said that the right to privacy in communications, even for juveniles, can be restricted only by court order -- for example, if a therapist believes that the teen's communication should be monitored, perhaps to support a young person through a crisis in relations with his or her family -- and then only temporarily.
The citation struck at another bone of contention between the state and ASR.
A few months ago OCCS found itself at odds with ASR over whether the school needs to be licensed in Massachusetts as a treatment center, something College Health Enterprises had not done.
ASR officials seemed to be having it both ways by enforcing rules usually associated with treatment programs for people with emotional or behavioral disorders, but refusing to have the school licensed as a treatment center, which would give OCCS the right to oversee its operations. The disagreement is still unresolved, and has turned into a battle between lawyers for the state and the school. [Same thing happened with HLA. Took three investigations to get to the truth. HLAs attorney told the state they didn't provide therapy, they were a boarding school. Three's a charm. In this case, and in the case with HLA, the states are not really investigating thoroughly enough to determine what services are provided.]
Meanwhile,
Kent was suspended from his job, and later fired, for calling the state and the press. Not content with firing him, school officials also had their lawyer, Northampton attorney Ed Etheredge,
follow up the termination with a letter threatening Kent with possible libel action if he continued to speak. [Where's that Slap icon when you need it. Shut they mouth, or have it shut. That's some damn sure-fire effective BM, right there, I tell ya.]
In addition to declining to speak to the press, ASR officials seems to have become more defensive in recent months. When OCCS staff visited the school last month to discuss another complaint, school administrators
refused to answer any questions and escorted the state officials off the property. At press time attorneys with the OCCS were trying to arrange a meeting to discuss differences between the school and the agency, which still maintains that ASR needs a license.
Neither Kent nor anyone else has alleged that there are deliberate patterns of abuse at ASR, or at its parent school, Mt. Bachelor Academy. And there is no doubt that some children are helped by programs that remove them from harmful environmental influences and provide protective structures for them through two emotionally precarious years.
One parent, Larry Carlin, described Mt. Bachelor Academy as "a godsend" in an interview last month with the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin. Kathleen Amezcua, whose son was a student at Mt. Bachelor, said, "It takes intense emotional work to work with kids who have built up walls around themselves. Nothing helped at all until we found people willing to work this intensively with kids."
Kim Hicks of Northampton taught English and social studies at ASR for a semester, then left, she says, only because she was offered a full-time job at Holyoke Community College. Hicks said she had no criticisms of the Academy except that its staff and facilities seemed "underprepared" for its opening last fall. Hicks confirmed Kent's statement that there were no science labs, but as she tells it, equipment was only one level of the problem. For example, she said, the staff strictly enforced rules governing such things as dress, but many school policies, such as those governing excused and unexcused absences, had not been thoroughly thought out and explained to faculty and students.
[Ironic. HLA advertised a sciene lab that didn't exist too.]
In a program like ASR's, which motivates students by using an intricate punishment and reward system, small pleasures are very important to students, so rules governing the distribution of daily perks are vital to the program. "Things like who got to play the music during lunch were portrayed as very important, and yet not clearly figured out," Hicks said.
But Hicks said she felt no undertones of cynicism among the faculty or administration, and that in her view the group therapy sessions -- a few of which she attended -- were not abusive. "I never felt that any of the staff didn't try to love the students," she said. "I think the students felt cared for. In fact, it amazed me that sometimes the same kid who'd been in a screaming match with a staff member one day would be giving them a hug the next."
Another mother, who spoke on condition that she and her child not be identified, said her son benefited from his time at ASR.
"My son is brilliant. He has a high IQ, but he was in with the wrong crowd. He had gangs after him, he had drug dealers after him," she said. "He thrived there. He jumped almost three grades in his writing. Those teachers really care about the kids."
But this boy will be leaving ASR, his mother said, because the controversy between the school and the OCCS diminished his confidence in the program. "As far as I'm concerned, this is another Massachusetts witch hunt," she said of the OCCS investigations.
Still, she agreed with Hicks that the school was poorly prepared for its opening here, and confirmed that the lack of lab facilities for science classes had been an irritant to parents. She also expressed concern about the school's management of health care for the students. "They gave my son a Tylenol 3 pain killer [which contains codeine], when they knew he was not to have controlled substances," she said.
She concluded that ASR had a good program plan but that its parent company didn't give it enough time and resources to prepare for its opening in Massachusetts. "They set up too quick, and the school grew a bit faster than they could handle," she said. "College Health Enterprises should have let them go more slowly, and should have put in more capital."
Even a little experimentation with high-voltage group therapy marathons may be harmless or even beneficial for some young people, but dangerous for others. That's even more true of physical punishments such as primitive accommodations and forced labor. The state of Oregon is investigating Mt. Bachelor Academy, partly because of a formal complaint by one student about an incident last October.
This student was one of a group of girls who had been assigned to work on a ranch and "think" for six days after allegedly breaking school rules. One night, she said, they were sleeping in the open in near-freezing temperatures, though some of them were sick. At midnight they were wakened for a 90-minute talk session, then forced to remove rocks from a dirt road for two hours before going back to their camp site to sleep.
The local press also quoted teachers who resigned from Mt. Bachelor Academy because of concerns similar to Kent's. One woman who was fired after a six-month teaching stint there said she felt the yelling and obscene language used by staff members in group sessions was abusive. Using such tactics with children who may be depressed or angry "only adds to the crap they carry around all day," she said.
Another problem reported by a former staff member at Mt. Bachelor Academy appears to echo conditions at ASR. Jason Brown, who left Mt. Bachelor for another teaching job in the Bend area, told the Bulletin that constant turnover at the school makes it difficult to organize educational programs and carry them out successfully. ASR, too, has seen a lot of turnover since it opened last fall. Kent, Brett Carey, and his wife, Lisa Carey, a teacher and mentor, are gone. So are Lance and Jessica Kirley, who left in the winter -- only a few months into their teaching stints at the academy -- for reasons they declined to discuss in detail.
Jessica Kirley insisted that she was not leaving because she believed the school was harming its students, but did acknowledge that she wrote a list of "suggestions" to the school administration before she and her husband left for new jobs in Japan. One of Kirley's comments has been echoed by other teachers at ASR and Mt. Bachelor: "You're dealing with teenagers ... whose parents are going to send them someplace, and if they don't go to Swift River, they may go somewhere else that is worse."
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