There is nothing more that we would like is to prove that unlicensed schools need to be licensed in MA - if anyone ANYONE has information of children with IEP's in these places that are not licensed please let us know also if you know of abuses (not past unfortunetly that is not helpful for the present) they can and should be reported to DSS in MA the Child Welfare Agency. This is the only way to stop these unlicensed programs; unfortunetly they can't always be stopped proving they take the required amount of special needs students is difficult and I will add much to MA credit the term special needs with OCCS is much broader than elsewhere. It was done with Desisto a few parents became educated on their rights and children's rights found us and started reporting incidents to the state, then the others came out of the woodwork like flies on fly paper, even former staff. Residential Schools are for a short term period of time or should be - most of them well the licensed one's in MA don't take your child/teen whose parents just think they are out of control, they turn away a lot of kids and families, these kids are suffering from Mental Health Issues, and Developmental Delay's, most often Addiction is secondary if involved, have been sexually reactive, and or PTSD. They have lots of differently challenged children but they don't take "parental dumps" per say. Kids have rights - parents have rights - and we encourage them to work with the programs (you get better information that way and also better outcomes) but never at the expense of health, welfare, safety, or service delivery. We have many state agencies in place for licensing, oversight, etc. and also use the Protection and Advocacy Agency in MA as well. It is not perfect or 100% abuse free but we are getting better - had you seen it from 97 - 02 you would have seen kids going home in body bags, rampant sexual abuse, miss medications, unjustified restraints from untrained staff, we are moving towards a 0 restraint model in a lot of places including the psych hospitals. Again better educated consumers!