Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

Please share this link to the Facebook pages that I'm sure y'all are associated with:

http://www.vice.com/read/thousands-of-a ... nt-centres

There are at least four things that I think are worth taking away from this article:

1.  Josh Shipp is basically unrepentant.  As much as he claims to be informed and educated, he's still taking the position that his placements were safe.  This doesn't surprise me.  I think the most credit we can give him is that he wasn't willing to produce a television show that put kids in even more harms way for the purpose of ratings.  But we don't know.

2.  Josh Shipp is well suited to be part and parcel of the Troubled Teen Industry.  I think he must ask himself how much good can I do and how much can I get paid to do it?  While evaluating his the quality of his work through anecdote.  While never stopping to think what are the unintended harms of what he's doing, or minimizing the reality of those harms by justifying how little the young people he's working with have to lose.

3.  The industry still needs to make a reckoning with its Synanon-influenced past.  i would like to believe that after the first Miller hearings, the Elan and FFS Truth Campaigns, the closing of Mount Bachelor, a smart businessperson would realize that the world was changing and that having food and sleep deprivation and forced exercise as part of the program milieu was bad business.  But other than some writings by Tom Croke, I haven't seen anything that even reads like an excuse (i.e. well, back in the 90's CEDU was the best thing going for us since medical psychiatry wasn't effective at getting our kids to grow up fast enough, but now we know we can achieve forced maturity without torturing kids).  Without the industry taking accountability for it's past actions, how can we be sure to what extent it has actually changed - so... Whooter you have the floor.

4.  This isn't taken so much from the article but something I read earlier today.  This was taken from an article written by a critic of the charter school field.  I think it fairly well explains the difference between TTI family involvement and the kind of family involvement that we talk about in Wraparound.

I’ve attended too many meetings where polarized groups of charter and public school parents are pitted against each other in contentious, at times ugly debates over resources, facilities and priorities. This polarization has its roots, not just in clashing short-term interests and an inadequate pool of resources, but in conflicting conceptions of the role parents should play in public education. For the charter movement, parents are mainly customers seeking services with no major role in school governance or advocacy for all children. But in a system of universal public education, parents are citizens seeking rights and, collectively, the owner-managers of a fundamental public institution in a democratic society.

From what I can tell there is very little civic family involvement in the NATSAP/IECA world.  Sure there are lots of parents who become educational consultants or develop non-profits to support the industry, or start their own programs, but where's the equivalent of parents who just join the school board.  Who want to help the development of the industry without there being any dollar amount in it for them.

Anyways, look forward to all of your thoughts.

There was a time that WWASP was the go-to brand name in adolescent behavioral modification.  That brand name is now toxic.  They can't leverage their network the same way that they used to with impunity.  So ultimately from a branding perspective, their five individual programs are left to compete with the rest of the industry.  And as consumers of the industry have more information to make their decisions, they are able to ask the kinds of questions that put the WWASP programs at a disadvantage (hence the non-profit label).

In a sense the entire NATSAP/IECA infrastructure makes sense as a quality assurance mechanism if and only if you're comparing it to the WWASP programs and the other programs that have in-house educational consultants.

I don't think WWASP will ever be what it once was, but unfortunately Jade Robinson isn't going anywhere nor are the other individuals who make up the industry, short of them being convicted of a crime and sent to jail.  Just look at this fellow - still working in the recovery field - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/bill-hoffman/39/930/60 although thankfully is now working with adults.  

At the very least though, a state shouldn't be giving him a license to run a teen behavior modification facility.

I did a check of the Utah Department of Licensing website and Cross Creek Academy/Cross Creek Programs are nowhere to be found, nor is Horizon Academy.  As far as the Utah licensing department is concerned, the only "WWASP" program that is left is the Youth Foundations, Inc.  

As I was doing my research I also found another interesting factoid.  Kelly Anderson is the licensor of Youth Foundations, Inc., same Kelly Anderson who is the licensor of Diamond Ranch Academy.  Makes some sense as they're both in Washington County, Utah.  In fact, Kelly Anderson is responsible for the oversight of most of the facilities in Washington County, Utah (Greg Hirst is responsible for a few).  Here is the list of facilities that Kelly Anderson is responsible for the oversight for:

Kolob Canyon
Cinnamon Hills Youth Center
Desert Solace
Diamond Ranch Academy
Falcon Ridge Ranch
Lava Heights Academy
Liahona Academy
Red Rock Canyon School
The Bridge Recovery Center
Youth Foundation, Inc.
Red Cliff Ascent
Abundant Life Academy

So, in light of the incident at Youth Foundation, Inc. this week, and in light of George Miller reissuing SCARPTA, I think we have an opportunity to prove a point.  So what is it Utah, do you have a licensing system worth a hill of beans or not?  Because right now it looks like you're complicit in the whitewashing of child abuse.  If Utah isn't willing to lift a finger to keep a WWASP lifer from abusing and neglecting youth, and is even complicit in allowing them to change names to try to cover up their past, than what assurance do we have that they have any ability to keep the youth in other programs safe?

If anyone needs a short pithy quote to sum things up:

"Dr. Drew might as well have sent this youth to live with Jerry Sandusky"

Just to be clear, I agree with Che on this, that most of the time these are situations that are instigated by staff.  But unless you can find a written policy that says staff should instigate youth, there's little you can do to the program.

Incidents such as these are usually met with calls for more training, and maybe firing of the staff who gets involved in a lot of restraint incidents at most, not the wholesale closure of the program.

And unlike say the Family School, almost all referrals to Green Chimneys come through D.S.S. or local school districts.  An internet "smear" campaign isn't going to have an impact on referrals.  You need to talk directly to the source.  Find out which schools and which counties are sending kids their and talk about your experiences directly with them.

The other thing is, what Green Chimneys was able to do in the 70's and 80's - is not what they would be able to get away with today.  Wayne, if Ross called you at your sister's house today, I can't believe that's something they wouldn't be heavily cited for if you told the right person.  Even though I'm sure they would have gotten away with it in the 70's and 80's.

Here's my gut reaction to the content of the website.  Everyone is entitled to legal representation.  A lawyer is entitled to defend his client.  A lawyer is not entitled to defame or libel the accuser.  Child sex abuse cases often are defended by in effect defaming the accuser.  It is the equivalent of saying that a rape victim asked for it.

Joe Amendola (Jerry Sandusky's lawyer) is a classic example of this, and frankly after the Penn State victims are done suing Sandusky, and Penn State, and the Second Mile, they should go after Amendola for defamation.

There are ways to argue a case even when a pedophile is guilty that do not call into question the character of the accuser.  Like arguing facts, or timeline, or intent, or culpability.  To that end, I would trim down the website to focus those lawyers who in their defense of their clients have gone on the attack against their accusers.  

As you sat in on the deposition of the Utah Boys Ranch case, I think you can make your own judgement about the character of those lawyers.  Same with Joe Sandusky's lawyers as they have been quite publicly disgusting about the way they have handled the case.  I don't know enough about the others to say one way or the other.

Just my .02.

Two very interesting things about this center.

Vincent Shrialdi who is the person responsible for overseeing the opening of the center, brought a panel of youth from said center to a meeting of the Coalition on the Ratification of the Convention of the Rights of the Child in D.C. a few years back.  And he has overseen the downsizing of our juvenile justice system in New York City in his new role as the Commission of Probation in NYC.  Generally speaking, given his career he's an odd person to have been responsible for opening a juvenile institution, as he is very much about non-institutional care.

To that end, at a panel that I was a part of in Washington D.C. last year at Georgetown University, it was explained to me how lawyers in D.C. try to get their youth who are deemed in family court to need residential placement into New Beginnings, and that it is not uncommon for youth who "fail" at New Beginnings a number of times to end up in places like UHS-Pines or Coastal Harbor Treatment Center or Glen Mills Schools.  The lawyers prefer the "state-run" institution to the private institutions.  

I can tell you that in New York that is not the case, as generally speaking lawyers try to get their youth out of the state-run juvenile programs (makes sense given the DOJ came in and sued them for human rights violations) and try to get them into private non-profit RTCs, when in-home care isn't an option.