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Facility Question and Answers / Re: Will answer questions about Summit Nyack
« on: May 01, 2010, 08:45:20 PM »Quote from: "Free Will"
Ok, but the key word there is influence. Can you explain peer resistance and the others you mentioned? I'm trying to understand the underlying structure of the program. If it's voluntary, i'm personally cool with it, as long as people know what they're getting into. If it's 12 step based? If so, do they explain to people prior to "treatment" that it's a calvinistic religion that preaches a deterministic philosophy that denies the existence of free will? What i'm getting at is: is there informed consent? Is the program accurately marketed? Are people being told not just that they are going to be "cured", but also how? Once in the program, can people decline to participate in activities they feel uncomfortable with without consequence or does release require cooperation?When I say "peer influence", I'm referring to the physical lumping together of the sane with the insane and the addicted with the clean that goes on there. Summit is truly a high school for delinquents in the sense that if you're not a "delinquent" when you arrive, you'll probably be one by the time you graduate or leave due to negative peer influence and staff apathy.
The best way I can describe the school's underlying structure is as a normal boarding school with a very non-"normal" student body, with inconsistent and often absent supports for these kids' problems.
The program there has nothing to do with any 12-step philosophy, although a staff member once told me that interested students were vanned into town for AA meetings in the past. The amount of informed consent kids are given before agreeing to be sent off usually depends on the parents, to be quite honest.
Although any student can (hypothetically) choose to leave and never return at any time, release on the school's terms (meaning graduation or transfer back to district) usually requires intense academic and personal effort in order to make feasible. Quite obviously, students with poor/missing grades and those with worse-than-average behavioral records (i.e. AWOLs, drug incidents, fights) are the least likely to leave legitimately.