Here's another article which was published alongside the one posted in the OP ("
School of Troubles: Another chance for abandoned boarding school")...
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School of Troubles: Students, parents recall Carolina Springs AcademyBy Kirk Brown · Anderson Independent Mail
Posted December 10, 2010 at 7:02 p.m.Ryan works at a grocery store in Maryland and Mattie is a sophomore at an Upstate college. Two years ago, they were classmates at Carolina Springs Academy.
Ryan's mother said she sent him to the boarding school near Due West because he was using drugs and displaying threatening behavior toward her.
"It was a desperate situation," she said.
In a blog posted earlier this year, Ryan boasted about smuggling marijuana into the school.
He quickly became disenchanted, however, with the school's emphasis on discipline.
"It was kind of like a prison and I felt like I didn't deserve to be there," Ryan said in an interview.
On the runRyan and two others boys at Carolina Springs ran away on a cold and rainy night.
"So we busted out and ran as fast as we could toward the tree line because we knew the directors wouldn't be too far behind," Ryan said on his blog.
They were not the first Carolina Springs students to flee from the school.
Marion Johnson, the chief deputy in the Abbeville County Sheriff's Office, said more than 30 runaways were reported at Carolina Springs during a 12-year-period after the boarding school opened in 1998.
Most of the missing students were found in a few hours, Johnson said. But Ryan's case was an exception to the rule.
Ryan said on his blog that after getting separated from his companions and walking all night, he hitchhiked to Anderson and shoplifted four candy bars at a store.
He spent the next several days living in a family's Homeland Park trailer.
Concerned that school officials and other authorities were not doing enough, Ryan's mother traveled to South Carolina to search for her son.
Johnson said authorities found Ryan through a traced phone call.
A week after he ran away, Ryan said, his spirits sank when a deputy knocked on the door where he was staying. He felt certain that he would be sent back to Carolina Springs.
"I just lost all hope," he said.
Instead, his mother took him back to Maryland. She said Ryan's behavior improved for a while. But she ended up kicking her son out for smoking marijuana on the day of his high school graduation.
In his blog, Ryan wrote that "nobody should ever have to suffer not even a day in Carolina Springs Academy. And to this day, over a year and a half later, I still have occasional nightmares of the wretched place!"
Saving MattieMattie's parents didn't know where to turn.
They had spent $30,000 to send their teenage daughter to a 30-day program at a highly regarded drug treatment center in Pennsylvania. When Mattie came back, she was even more difficult to control.
"We were in a hopeless situation," said Mattie's father, who was born and raised in Anderson. "She probably would have died within six months."
In a last-ditch effort to save his daughter, Mattie's father hired a teen escort service to take Mattie from a drug dealer's home where she was staying to Carolina Springs Academy in November 2008.
Mattie stayed at Carolina Springs for only a month. After hearing about the boys who ran away from the boarding school, her father decided to bring her home.
When he picked her up, he said, his daughter's hair was falling out and she was covered in flea bites.
But something else was also different, her father said.
"The person that I picked up was my little girl," he said. "We got our daughter back."
Mattie's father credited Carolina Springs with breaking his daughter's addiction to drugs.
"That program really is a blessing," he said.
Mattie is now attending college, where she is studying broadcast journalism, her father said.
He also said he is aware that some parents were not pleased with how their children were treated at Carolina Springs.
"I think the people who were unhappy with Carolina Springs were the parents who took their kids there prematurely," Mattie's father said.
© 2010 Anderson Independent Mail.