What am I missing?
I do not understand all the rancor around Mel's kids. Really. I imagine that their life must have been rough. Their father started the school when they were young. Experiences that should never be normalized were consistently presented as normal. We only did a few years at a cedu-esque school, but they did a childhood followed by a young adulthood. Stories of horrific abuse never reported to the authorities. Imagine growing up and hearing another teenager talk about the crap we heard and said in raps or propheets. Yuck! Or what about trying to have a normal teenage friendship and explaining to them Cedu. Let alone adhering to the normal healthy boundaries. I suspect they did not host many sleepovers.
I can imagine that their father must have been hard to contend with. Were their motives questioned for the simplest normal teenage action, like refusing to do a family activity? Or not doing chores on the timeliest basis? God forbid, they get a bad grade at school.
Also, how much time did mel spend with his children instead of at the school?
On the money front, who the fuck cares. If they have some money from the schools, so be it. I do not think there is any amount of money that would make me want to spend the first half of my life in a CEDU environment. From the article just posted, I guess Stacy is living in Spokane Last I checked Spokane is not the height of culture or opulence. Are there even any good restaurants in that town?
It feels easy to say that the Wasserman's are responsible for our fucked up experience. But I believe that his kids were just as much as a victim as we were to a society that does not protect teenage and children rights. To a system that places parent's so called choice ahead of the rights of adolescence. [or how about simple decencies: like not having to submit to repeated strip searches without provocation] To a society that would rather see a nonconformist pushed to wayside rather than celebrate the difference.
Our collective energy would be better spent on closing the facilities, on advocating for non-cookie cutter solutions to challenging family dynamics, and most importantly, on ways to make sure victims are not victimized again through dysfunctional, unregulated, weird-ass institutions.