Did you receive them unopened?
No. All mail is opened, going both ways. All phone conversations have an older student present and are limited to 15 minutes once a week. If you write something negative about the school, they won't send it out. They will give it back to you and ask you to re-write it, if memory serves. If you start talking shit on the phone that you are not supposed to, such as ask about your friends, or family members who you don't have to the privilege to speak with yet, or talk negatively about how the school is treating you, the older student monitoring you will force you to end the phone call.
I honestly don't know what they do for mail they receive that you are not permitted to have.
When I was there, we gained the "privilege" to seal our own mail and make unmonitored calls after the Values propheet, which is when you reach the upper part of the challenge family. I remember that it was an election year, and it was going to be my first year ever to vote. I officially had "sealed-envelope" privileges, so I put my absentee ballot in the mailbox to be sent. Then I went on my wilderness challenge. Fifteen days later, I come back. It's the night before the election, and my fucking ballot is still in the mailbox in the challenge mudroom, apparently because it was an unidentifiable type of envelope, so the tard-heads in challenge staff weren't capable of wrapping their brains around the fact that someone from Rocky Mountain Academy MIGHT ACTUALLY BE VOTING.
I grab it and go and scream at Greg Springett to drive my ballot down to Bonners Ferry and put it in the post office mailbox NOW. That was the only time I got really really pissed about the mail situation. Can anyone say federal offense on two counts? 1. Tampering with the mail. 2. Tampering with a ballot.
Doesn't matter anyway. It was Bush vs. Dukakis. Yeah, right.
The other thing is, a lot of times, the kid won't say anything because they really don't *want* to say anything. They think the school is the best thing that ever happened to them. My parents were more than just a little surprised when I told them that the place was so fucked up. Their response was "but you looked so happy."
For the record, they know how I feel about the place now, and that it was a shit-hole. Whether they agree with it or not, I dunno. But I won't go into detail with them about what happened there, because it would break their hearts. Or at least, I hope it would. I mean, I hope they are the kind of people who would be horrified that they inadvertently put their child through that, you know?
I don't know anything about this new doc, but it's good that Ulrich is gone, because he was a greedy quack who just wanted to dope up kids and get a lot of money by referring them to his own private treatment facility for $1000 a day until he felt they were "better enough" to return to the school.
For the record, I was there before CEDU started using meds. I'm going off of others' testimony on this. In fact, when I was there, I don't think there was one single person who had any kind of license that would allow them to counsel kids. They were very anti-med, anti-science, anti-psychology, type people. i.e. fuckin buncha birkenstock-wearing granola-eating hippies who got hard-ons listening to james taylor, john denver, carole king and the plastic ono band album.
I also checked with admissions when I called NWA a while back. She said that almost all of the people who were around when I was there have moved on. Even Patsy Thompson, who was pretty much a fixture from inception to closing.
Also, they said that at least for the NWA program, which is only supposed to be a year long, ALL students must attend some sort of wilderness school before going there. My guess it that would be the same for BCA. I know that she said it did not have to be Ascent, which is the CEDU wilderness school, so I am assuming they can be sent to SUWS, or SageWalk, or other such nonsense. So essentially, every kid coming into NWA, and I would assume BCA as well, just came off wilderness.
And of course... now they have also introduced 12 step. Brilliant. Let's mix two cults into one. Especially because so many kids who go to these places are convinced by staff that they are druggies or drunks when they aren't. Ironically enough, a lot of them come out, and start using drugs like a fiend, when it never even crossed their minds before they got shipped off to that place.
