http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... tart=20&29Sunday, September 5, 1999
TROUBLED HOMES ACADEMIES FOR WAYWARD YOUTHS HAVE THEIR OWN PROBLEMS WITH RULES
BY SUSAN DRUMHELLER STAFF WRITER
Caption: SHELTERED LIFE. During a break in classes, the boys at Elk Mountain Academy play a game of volleyball on the court in front of the school building. Photo by Liz Kishimoto/The Spokesman-Review
Parents across the nation spend thousands of dollars to send their misbehaving teenagers to private behavioral schools in North Idaho. Ironically, some of those programs seem to have a hard time following the rules.
Just months after vowing not to increase their numbers at Elk Mountain Academy, owners Carl and Loretta Olding have asked the county to allow the school to house up to 12 more students at their woodsy campus below Scotchman's Peak.
And now, county and state officials are investigating Glacier Mountain Inc., a group home north of Sandpoint that may be violating the terms of its group home license and county code. Another group home for youths has expanded from Bonners Ferry to Sagle, Idaho, but doesn't have a foster care license with the state for either facility, or a special use permit with Bonner County to operate a school.
Neighbors of Elk Mountain Academy keep watch as that school now seeks approval for up to 36 students. The teenagers at Elk Mountain come from all over, but primarily from California. Their parents pay $3,375 a month to straighten them out and keep them from bad influences. It's a family model facility, where up to eight boys live in each residence with house parents, some of whom raise their own small children there, too. The biggest structure on campus, the Achievement House, has living facilities on the top floor, classrooms on the second floor, and a gymnasium and wood shop on the ground floor.
Students help build the buildings, as well as the Oldings' new garage/ guest house at their private residence on the Hope Peninsula. To make the students feel more at home, the Oldings hauled in tons of sand for a beach volleyball court - perhaps the only beach volleyball court in the Cabinet Mountains.
These are not dangerous kids, the Oldings and their staff insist - despite the neighborhood rumors of gun thieves and worse. ``We don't get crazies here,'' said Mark Rocha, a youth minister and Elk Mountain employee. ``We're talking about youth. We're not talking about a nuclear reactor here.''
Education consultant Lon Woodbury sends a lot of kids to Elk Mountain - the type who ``when in a safe environment, the decent kid comes out.'' He said that private behavioral schools have to launch aggressive public relations campaigns to overcome the fear factor in the community. ``People assume they're criminals. Most of these kids aren't,'' Woodbury said.
But it's not so much the kids that concern the neighbors. It's the administration.
``Until they learn how to abide by the laws, they shouldn't have more kids there,'' said Jeannie Roach, one of a coalition of neighbors near Elk Mountain.
Neighbors have a running list of violations at Elk Mountain: building dormitories without the county's blessing or knowledge, exceeding its licensed capacity, housing students in incomplete buildings without proper safety inspections, failing to test water and even a poaching incident.
Most of the problems have been resolved, but any trust between neighbors and the Oldings has vanished. And some neighbors still grumble about the roar of Elk Mountain's dirt bikes in their peaceful outback.
``Who's kidding who?'' said Carl Olding in reference to one vocal opponent to the bikes. ``We'll never be buddies.''
Elk Mountain recently was licensed by the state as a children's treatment facility, which allows for more than 12 students. But the license still is on provisional status. The school also persuaded the county to issue a conditional use permit that allows up to 25 students for two years, when the permit will be reviewed. But that permit didn't include the academy's Base Camp program, which houses as many as 12 additional students for six to nine weeks in an unfinished cabin on the heavily treed mountainside above the main
campus.
It's those students that the school still needs permission to house. Two or three teens were up there this summer, cooking up Campbell's soup for dinner and sleeping on bunkbeds without mattresses.
``They've flaunted the fact that they don't have to abide by the rules,'' Roach said of Elk Mountain. ``If they get away with it, we'll wind up with 100 little schools around here that get away with breaking the rules.''
One little school under scrutiny is Glacier Mountain Inc.
Like the directors of many local teenage residential facilities, Glacier Mountain's directors got their start at another behavioral school in the region.
``People learn how much money others are making, and they start adding it up on their fingers,'' said Brenda
Hammond, former director of the now defunct Eagle Mountain Outpost. ``But anyone who goes into that business, to be successful, can't be in it for financial reasons. It's very draining.''
Olding started planning Elk Mountain Academy while working for less than $8 an hour as a counselor at Eagle Mountain Outpost. He and his wife started their family-based group home in Clark Fork in 1993.
Their group home was allowed under Bonner County's zoning laws only after the county's legal counsel agreed that attention deficit disorder qualified as a disability. Olding claimed that all of his students had the condition.
Glacier Mountain markets to ADD support groups, according to Woodbury.
``Since when does a delinquent teenager qualify as handicapped?'' wonders Marty Taylor, Bonner County's planner. ``I'd be interested in seeing more review of that.''
In Glacier's case, both Larry Bauer and John Baisden used to work at CEDU Family of Services, which operates Rocky Mountain Academy, Northwest Academy, Ascent and Boulder Creek Academy in Boundary County.
[More on the philosophy and methods of CEDU:
http://www.fornits.com/wwf/viewforum.php?forum=11&6209 ]
Baisden was CEDU's director of admissions from November 1994 until July 1995. Now he and Bauer operate a group home in the Colburn area on Oliver Road.
Baisden was reluctant to discuss the business, which is under investigation by the state licensing arm of Family and Community Services and by Bonner County Planning and Zoning. Baisden said the home takes up to eight kids, but had no students as of the last week of August.
``We don't have any plans of being an Elk Mountain or a Rocky Mountain Academy,'' he said. Baisden would not say how many people Glacier Mountain employs. But according to an inspection on Aug. 10 by Jean Hughes, an environmental health specialist at Panhandle Health District, the home had 12 teenage residents. She reported that the unfinished basement was being used as a classroom.
According to Glacier's state license, it can have only eight residents. And because it lacks a conditional use permit as a school, it cannot teach students there.
``We did do instruction,'' Baisden said. ``We're not going to do that anymore. We don't think that's the real world. When they go home, they go to real schools.''
Glacier Mountain has provided inconsistent information to the county about the facility, according to a letter from Taylor that was in Health District records.
Bauer has told Taylor that the students attend classes at the group home, but another letter about a week later said they would attend public school. In the first letter, he stated an intention to obtain a conditional use permit to become a children's treatment facility, which allows for 13 or more residents.
The Health District also is looking into the home's water and sewer systems. Hughes said the district could not approve either in a letter to Jim Puett, a state licensing specialist.
Like Glacier Mountain, the operators of Northwoods Trailside School like to keep a low profile. The school was founded in Bonners Ferry in 1993 and is run by former CEDU employees David Yeats and Matt Fitzgerald. They have two homes, with up to four boys in each, in Bonners Ferry. They recently started taking in boys at Fitzgerald's home in Sagle, too.
``We want it very small and very unobtrusive to North Idaho,'' said Fitzgerald, who left CEDU because of philosophical differences. CEDU's schools have more than 100 students each. Fitzgerald said they don't work with ``at-risk'' kids as much as those who their parents fear will fail in a big-city atmosphere.
``We deal with kids who want to come here and like to be here,'' he said.
Northwoods has yet to apply for a permit from Bonner County to operate a school in the Sagle area. It is in the process of applying for a foster care license, which allows up to six unrelated children in a home. Northwoods isn't the only facility expanding. Elk Mountain is moving part of its program across the border.
``To be at Elk Mountain is to be in a bubble,'' Olding said. ``How do you get loaded at Elk Mountain? If anyone smarts off in class, they're out picking rocks immediately. They live in this surreal world where there is no temptation.''
So Elk Mountain has spawned Elk Creek, 86 acres the Oldings just bought near Heron, Mont., where they plan to build another home for boys who progress to their second year at the academy. Those students will go to public school in Noxon, Mont.
The Oldings already have four students enrolled in Noxon, but for now the teens still live at the academy north of Clark Fork.
Noxon High Principal Bob Goodrich has had students from other group home settings. Northwest Montana seems to be a magnet for the behavioral school industry, he said.
One well-known school is the boot-camp style Spring Creek Lodge near Thompson Falls, which is expected to soon have more students than the entire Noxon School District. Those students never leave the facility.
``It's one of the enterprises of Sanders County that's somewhat lucrative,'' Goodrich noted.
Elk Mountain's move to Montana was partially motivated by pressure from neighbors. Montana has fewer restrictions on group homes and private schools.
``We get a lot of, `Well, we'll just move to Montana,''' said Puett, the Idaho state licensing specialist.
In Montana, Olding sees an opportunity to offer more services to students who aren't ready to leave the support system that Elk Mountain offers. He also has 86 acres to play with - plenty of room for a dirt bike track that won't bother anybody, he said.
``No matter what happens,'' Olding said, ``I'm going to continue to do this work, whether it's in Montana or Idaho.''
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