Fornits

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

I don't think any of us have a problem with a raging kid being placed in a proper isolation room until he or she has calmed down.

What we *do* have problem with is children or adolescents being placed in isolation rooms that are substantially deviant from 72 deg. F. and/or with a floor temperature substantially deviant from same, and forced to assume specific physical positions--facing a wall, lying on the floor, etc. for hours at a time with only short breaks to stretch, with the isolation placement continuing for days at a time.

In an isolation room, there is no excuse for not going outside the door and leaving the kid to pace or rage or whatever so long as he/she isn't banging his/her head on the walls or floor.

Bipolar rages are the longest rages anybody has.  Nobody rages longer than a bipolar, trust me.  A bipolar rage lasts four to five hours.  Nobody else has the emotional energy to sustain a raging fit for that long.

There is absolutely no excuse for keeping an adolescent in isolation longer than six hours before slowly returning him or her to a low-stress, low-stimulation, quiet, *pleasant*, un-isolated environment.

You don't calm a raging kid down by treating them like shit.

It doesn't matter what a "spoiled brat" or "rotten monster" the kid is.  You can have an art room with art charcoal, art paper, and soft music that the kids get certain amounts of time in, that you can use to transition a kid from isolation back into the general population.

I know from calming irrational and destructive rages.  I have bipolar disorder, I parent a child with bipolar disorder.  We have the worst rages there are when we're not stable, there's nothing you can tell me about calming a rage that I don't already know.

But these programs want to be such hard-asses that they'd think waiting for an end to an immediate rage and then transitioning a kid back in through a low-stimulus social environment was mollycoddling them.

So they abuse them instead.

Yes, I sure as hell *do* think that even if you threw a table at somebody you should *only* have been in isolation in a comfortable-temperatured room, with padded walls and floor, and left to pace and rage until you ran out of steam---which you would have in less than five hours, guaran-damn-teed.

Then you needed to be moved back into the normal social routine of the institution---which needed to be not so horrible as to provoke rage in a saint (and I don't just mean a garden-variety mormon).  And you needed to be moved back in through an appropriate transition environment.

The transition environment needs to have been an available option the staff could direct students to as a normal part of conflict de-escalation efforts before an overwrought kid ever got to the point of exploding in rage.

When you go out of your way to put people in an absolutely miserable, utterly intolerable environment, barren of all beauty and joy, barren of all positive emotional support, D'oh!  They explode in rage at the slightest trigger.  That's normal and human and not the fault of the raging person, it's the fault of the people who put that person in an inhumane, neglectful environment.

There should be *NO* phase that doesn't include something positive, pleasant, beautiful, or joyful as part of the everyday experience *merely for being a human being*.  Maybe the parents and facility are right if they say the particular kid isn't a very good human being, maybe they're wrong---but you ought to get one positive, joyful, pleasant, or beautiful thing a day not as a reward, and not susceptible to being taken away for bad behavior, but merely because you're a human being.

If you put people in intolerable circumstances, which the "level" programs very deliberately do, rage is a normal, human, healthy response. What *wouldn't* be a healthy response would be passively laying down and taking being put in those circumstances---which is the response the kids get beaten down into before they're allowed to "advance" a level.

I don't mind us putting Charles Manson on the guerney and giving him the needle and burying the bastard, but as long as he *is* alive even the worst human being in the world---and he's certainly the worst one I can think of---deserves to have at least one good thing to look forward to each day, not because he's anything other than a rotten monster, but because he's a fellow human being, however horrible of one he is.

To deprive a *child* of one single solitary beautiful or pleasant or genuinely joyful thing to look forward to in a day is a monstrous act that places the perpetrators in the same league with every monstrous child abusing felon rotting in jail across the country.

It could be something as simple as desert, a chance to choose and listen to *one* popular song, twenty minutes in a comfortable chair curled up with a book (with a bookmark and access to the *same* book subsequent days until the kid is through with it--because I know some sadistic slimeball would twist it so the kid could *start* a book, but would then have to toe the line to get          to read more of the *same* book), five minutes petting a dog or a cat, a game of cards with a couple of friends----something simple and good.

Everybody should wake up in the morning with *something* to look forward to that day.

Anger is not a useless, negative emotion.

Pain is not a useless, negative feeling.

Pain is a warning from our bodies or minds that we are suffering harm or in imminent danger of suffering harm if we don't get away from the danger.

Anger is a warning that some entity or group is harming us or trying to harm us.

Rage is anger combined with a sense of helplessness, and suppressed until it explodes.

The teen inmates' anger at the facility personnel is a normal reaction to the psychological harm they are doing to the teen by *deliberately* putting him/her in a situation where he/she gets up each morning without a single, solitary *good* thing to look forward to that day.

Learned helplessness as a replacement for anger and rage is not *progress*.  It's severe psychological *damage*.

And that wilful or negligent (doesn't really matter which) damage to the teen's long-term psychological health is some of the first child abuse perpetrated on the teen in the program facility.

I haven't heard anybody yet, from *any* WWASPS program, list a single good thing they could unfailingly look forward to each and every day, that was *NOT* in any way conditional on their behavior, that would *NOT* be withdrawn no matter what---that they could look forward whether they were in intake or on the lowest level or in OP or in the infirmary---no matter where they were, *ONE* specific positive thing that they could absolutely count on having happen to them that day.

So you can tell me all day you weren't abused or didn't consider it abuse or that abuse is a subjective concept.

Abuse certainly *is* a subjective concept.  CULTURALLY and SOCIETALLY subjective.

Abusers never consider what they did abuse.

SOCIETY defines abuse.  WWASPS doesn't get to get together in its little cult and define abuse and neglect all by itself to whatever it wants those definitions to be or thinks they should be.

Our larger society's standards and community standards---community standards being the community standards of the US as a whole or those of the child's *HOME* state--not the state or country the facility is in------*WE* define what abuse is.

*WE* being the rest of America.  Not me alone, not you and the little cult you got stuck in, the American people decide what is and isn't abuse.

And by those community standards, what happens at level-system program facilities *IS* child abuse.

To the lady who says she and her sister differ as to whether their parents were strict or abusive---the one of you whose opinions on your parents' behavior coincides with what the general American public would think, whether abusive or "strict", is the one who's right.

This is not a situation where neither of you is right or you're both right.

If the general American opinion would be that it was abuse, then it *was* abuse.

If the general American opinion would be that they wouldn't have wanted your parents prosecuted for it or you kids pulled from the home, but that it was too harsh, then your sister is still justified in being upset about it.  And while you might not consider yourself abused, in that situation it would be unreasonable to think she *shouldn't* be upset.

If the general American opinion would be that your parents were normal and reasonable, even if on the strict side of normal and reasonable, then your sister isn't being reasonable.

But it's NOT just a morally relative matter of opinion where your opinion and your sister's opinion are equally valid just because they're opinions.

When you parent within a society, you have a responsibility to at least meet that society's minimum community standards for proper and loving care and raising and discipline of your children.

If your parents did, they did.  If they didn't, they didn't.  And unless they were right on the borderline between acceptable and unacceptable, one of you is right and the other one is wrong.

Abuse is subjective *FOR THE SOCIETY*.

Abuse is *NOT* subjective for the perpetrators and the victims.  Parents know damned well when they are breaching society's norms.  Facilities know damned well when they are breaching society's norms, which is why they hide in other countries and hide behind locked doors, and hide the ownership trails of their facilities, and hide whether they're affiliated with themselves or not.

Parents and facilities demonstrate an Awareness of Guilt.

And children in society have a right to expect that they will be cared for *AT LEAST* in accord with the minimum expectations that society has as norms for the care of children.

One of the reasons children have the right to that minimum is that we as a society make provisions for parents who *CANNOT* provide that minimum.  We have social services--like AFDC and Medicare and Public Schooling, and when those aren't enough, we have a foster care system where we endeavor, not always perfectly, to see that kids get *at least* that minimum acceptable care---and better if we can manage it.

Which is why society is justified in punishing parents and facilities that wilfully put a child in a situation that we deem to be harmful or neglectful *by our own societal standards*.

We've provided a safety net--not always a perfect one, but still a substantial safety net---for the parents who *can't* meet the standards.

*Won't* is not an option.  We're entirely justified in removing kids and punishing perpetrators for *won't*.

So if your parents' behavior wasn't so close to the borderline of unacceptable that most reasonable people would at least sympathize with your sister, one of the other of you is wrong.

It's a matter of opinion, yeah---but it's not a matter of *YOUR* opinion.  Or hers.

Timoclea

Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300001479/circlofmiamithem' target='_new'> Ben Franklin Letter to M. Leroy, 1789.

[ This Message was edited by: Timoclea on 2005-04-22 09:34 ]

C-U-L-T.

T.

When we are pleading with foreign governments to stop the flow of cocaine, it is the height of hypocrisy for the US to export tobacco.  Years from now, our nation will look back on this application of free trade policy and find it scandalous.

1989 testimony before the US Trade Representative,September 1989
--Surgeon General, Everett Koop

An absolute dead give-away of a facility or organization that engages in brainwashing is one that describes the personality of the people they're trying to treat or recruit as in some way defective.

People may do things we don't like.  People may be rude.  People may not understand or follow the social rules of etiquette.  People may say things we don't like.  People may think things we strongly disagree with--even after we tell them what we think and why we think it, and even if we find what they think horribly unacceptable *to us* and *to some authority figure(s)*.  People may not like us or may not like people we think they should like.

Some of those things we have a right to change, like bad things minor children do, or whether they're rude, or whether they know and show the rules of etiquette, or whether they interrupt or talk in class, or whether they use speech to lie to authority figures, or whether they use speech to libel or slander or harrass or threaten or make false alarms, or whether they use speech to insult people.

We *don't* have a right to make them change or claim to change whether they agree with us.  We *don't* have a right to change their thoughts.  We *don't* have a right to coerce their affection or their love--and neither do their families.  We don't have the right to deprive them of enough free time to talk that they can express complaints and criticisms to each other or grievances to authority figures and we don't have a right to punish them for complaining, criticizing, or expressing a grievance to or about authority figures either in public or in private.

We *don't* have a right to ever prevent them from writing letters to government offices or attorneys, or fail to provide them with paper, pen, envelopes and stamps to write such letters, even if we feel such letters are false or defamatory towards their parents or our organization's employees or authority figures or a peer they allege has done something *to them*.  We can defend ourselves from those allegations with what we say, but we don't have a right to prevent them from making them even if we believe and contend that they are false.  Government offices and attorneys licensed to practice by a state bar association (or the appropriate licensing authority in the nation or territory where they practice) are *NOT* "bad influences" and there is *NO EXCUSE* for interfering with a child's right to write such letters unless they are threatening or defamatory to some third party totally unrelated to the authority organization or the parents or the allegations about the third party are *not* alleged by the child to have been done by the third party to them.  Children have a *right* to make allegations to an attorney or any government office about anything they claim has been done to them, even if any or every authority figure in their life believe those allegations are false.

Any institution that offers to reform a child's personality or thoughts is an abusive brain-washing cult.

Gach!

Catharsis?!  Okay, for someone to have a feeling of "catharsis" you have to make them feel really, really bad first---that's why "catharsis" is traditionally associated with watching a Greek Tragedy.

Otherwise known as the endorphin release you get from doing painful or humiliating things to people---in athletics, "runner's high"; in BDSM, the endorphin rush a Sub feels after being subjected to the (voluntary) power-games of his/her Dom.

So my first question is what horrible *involuntary* things are they going to do to the kid to induce this "catharsis"?

And the next buzzword that triggers my skepticism is "shine".  This, to me, either is talking about genuine happy, happy, joy, joy feelings induced by the endorphin high of the "catharsis" OR fake happy, happy, joy, joy feelings to avoid punishment.  And the reason I don't buy "real" for a minute is because we are talking about an *involuntary* pain/humiliation/degradation/power-game used at the outset of this experience to trigger the "catharsis."

As Ginger put talking about the happy songs in Straight and being punished for not smiling, Zippity-fucking-doo-dah.

Next set of buzzwords---"developed a feeling of awareness of"---okay, that's just jargon for good ol' fashioned *blame*.  So the kids have learned to *blame* "their negative feelings"--yeah, those painful thingies induced by the staff and the program to trigger the "catharsis"---on the drugs----instead of on the staff and the program which *actually* induced those negative feelings.

Which, plain as day, after you sort out the jargon, means that before the kids are let off of "Phase I" the staff has to believe they have been successfully brainwashed into accepting the Program's worldview that bad things the Program people are doing to them are their own fault "because of the drugs" and are "necessary to save them from the drugs."  And, that the "shine" they speak of is part of *this* program's false, cult personality that they implant on top of the real one.

Of course, they've already given a *huge* red flag that they intend to brainwash the kid and implant a cult personality on top of the kid's suppressed real personality when they speak of "inadequacies of personality" in the second paragraph.

Weeding out the jargon, which doesn't take that much in this case, they are saying that any kid that gets sent to their program has a personality they presume up front, a priori, is *defective* and therefore must be *replaced* with the idealized *cookie-cutter* personality defined by the cult as being NOT defective.

Ethical drug treatment doesn't seek a "catharsis" and leaves the patient's personality the fuck alone.

Ethical drug treatment *first* dries the patient out by stopping the patient's access to the drugs and treating any withdrawal symptoms, and then appeals to the patient's *rational mind* by providing factual information in a non-emotionally-loaded format, at a rate appropriate to conventional classroom learning, about the physiology and psychology of addiction and the biological effects of drugs on the patient's body.

*Ethical* drug treatment does NOT use coercive persuasion.  *Ethical* drug treatment uses conventional persuasion that appeals openly to the conscious, rational mind, not the emotions and not the subconscious.  *Ethical* drug treatment allows the patient the *choice* not to be persuaded by the arguments presented and provides neither consequence nor punishment within the treatment program tied to the intellectual and emotional choice not to be persuaded.  *Ethical* drug treatment respects freedom of thought and does not apply "consequences"---even lack of "advancement" through the "phases" of the program---for differences of opinion or feeling or long-term intention.

It is not an ethical drug treatment program unless you can graduate from it dry but with the full, absolutely uncoerced personal intention to *either* use drugs or not use drugs after you walk out the door.  You should be able to graduate an *ethical* drug treatment program even if you maintain through the entirety of the program until the day you leave that, for example, marijuana should be legalized, you like to use it, you don't mind the *inherent* negative effects of the drug, and you just plan not to get caught when you use it.

An Ethical Drug Treatment Program detoxes the drugs out of the patient's body, provides treatment on a strictly voluntary basis (by licensed therapists following professional ethics to the T) with zero consequences to advancement of any underlying things that may be bothering the patient emotionally, presents information to the rational mind of the patient regarding the effects of various drugs on his brain and body and the legal consequences of being caught using drugs, and applies *NO* consequence or lack of progress through the program for disagreement or whether they like a patient's personality or find it totally obnoxious.

The only thing that can change a person's personality is brainwashing.

It can only do it by implanting a replacement personality on top of the patient's natural one.

Normal people's personality, whether introverted or extroverted, whether oriented towards thinking or feeling, whether oriented towards intuiting or sensing, whether oriented towards judging or perceiving---Normal people have individual combinations of those traits that remain constant throughout their entire lives *unless* they are brainwashed.

The cult mantra applied by so many program cults of "you're in your head" is a direct assault on the personality trait of thinking versus feeling.  The program judges an orientation towards thinking to be an undesirable personality trait and forces a replacement personality that has a "Feeling" oriented personality trait as a major component.

It's obvious why programs prefer Feeling personalities to Thinking ones.  Other personality traits in a cult's idealized personality that they implant vary depending on the specific cult doctrine.  Usually depending on the cult founder.  Frequently the idealized personality used as a template to be imposed on all members over their genuine personality is the personality of the cult founder.

Any institution that offers to reform a child's personality or thoughts is an abusive brain-washing cult.

"Thought reform" does not become magically morally right if the victim is a child.

Some things that are legal are horribly morally wrong things that *nobody* has a right to do to another human being of whatever age.

People's *conduct* may be defective, but *nobody's* personality is defective.  Nor is "conduct" like facial expressions, ideas, thoughts, feelings, absense of feelings we want them to have, or verbal expression of those thoughts and feelings during free time and in a manner that does not threaten violence to self or others, or lack of verbal expression of thoughts or feelings we want them to have or wish they had *ever* defective conduct.

Not *ever*.

KHK's service plan as displayed above in this thread constitutes a stated intention to do violence to the human mind.  It may be legal, but it is horribly, obscenely immoral, and should be *MADE* illegal.

All statements in this post constitute my personal opinion of the "service plan" provided in this thread.

Timoclea

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
--Isaac Asimov, Russian-born American author

[ This Message was edited by: Timoclea on 2005-04-21 13:05 ][ This Message was edited by: Timoclea on 2005-04-21 13:06 ]

Definite Kudos to Amy for good journalism!

 ::rocker::

(Okay, I just like the head-banger emoticon. :smile:
Kudos, Amy!)

Timoclea

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
--Isaac Asimov, Russian-born American author

And to split another hair:

We disagree.  That's not at all the same thing as "being at opposite ends of the spectrum."

The whole point of this discussion is that you are at one end of the spectrum and I am basically in the center of the spectrum.

I believe that for mental health problems that are not major mental illnesses where the patient is not actively psychotic or suicidal, or doesn't have a personal history of violence, patients and parents should have broad lattitude about whether to use psychiatric drugs or even whether to seek treatment at all.  And that even in serious violent cases patients should be afforded the choice of a locked mental ward rather than forced medication if that's their preference.

The other end of the spectrum from you, the *other* fringe, believes in forced medication with no option of locked mental ward (because of expense and hazard to health care workers) if a patient is or has been psychotic or suicidal, and believes not medicating your child for even relatively minor mental health problems is child neglect.  As well as various other things, but that's enough to illustrate the difference between the fringe and the center on the other side of the spectrum.

My own views aren't perfectly mainstream, but their pretty darned centrist, and the more you limit the group you ask to people who know what they're talking about, the more the center moves towards my general view.  Not having a scientific poll in front of me, "fairly centrist" is about all I can reasonably claim.

Timoclea

If All it takes is an infinite number of monkeys with type writers, then how come there's no Shakespeare coming out of AOL?
-- Anonymous

My friend that went to Swift River---she got to stay at a hotel with her parents over Christmas.

She asked her mom if she could call her best friend and wish her Merry Christmas.  Her mom and stepdad said no.  It was against the Swift River rules.

She asked her dad when she was with him.  Her dad said yes and she called and got her friend's answering machine and told the answering machine Merry Christmas.

Her dad then turned informer on her to Swift River and said "it wouldn't have been right" to *not* inform on her.

Swift River, according to her friend (who is, by the way, legally adult, another girl, a college student, and as clean cut as they come), put her in solitary for *three days* for this and made her write a fifty page paper, by hand, explaining why calling a clean-cut friend on Christmas was "wrong."

So Swift River also obviously encourages parents to inform on their kids to the program.

And the parents are obviously so brainwashed that, just like the communist youth under Stalin, they don't see anything morally wrong about turning informer on family members for minor things that will garner draconian punishments.

That's just plain evil.

But most people, we know from the Milgram experiments, will do horribly evil things if an authority figure tells them they "must."

Which is a sad commentary on the lack of humanity of humanity.

How could someone inform on his own family for anything short of rape, murder, child molestation or grand larceny?

How could anyone be so morally bankrupt and gullible to buy the lie that turning informer on your family is "for their own good"?

But program parents are among the more gullible percentage of humanity by definition.  And self-selected for the ability to rationalize that the end justifies the means.

Sick.

Timoclea

Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
--Ayn Rand, Russian-born author

I think different people disagree about things even when they've researched them in good conscience.

The paranoid denial on your part where I have a problem with you on this issue is that you don't appear willing to admit to other people (hell, maybe you don't admit it to yourself) that out of all the people who have done a great deal of background literature research and/or actual research on this subject and have looked into it in great depth in good conscience----out of all those people, your position is an extreme minority position.

I don't know if: you know that and just don't like to admit it because it doesn't help the case you make trying to persuade others;

OR

you don't even admit to yourself, or maybe *can't* even admit to yourself, that you're in that extremely small proportional minority of opinion on this subject.

See, because there are very few people discussing this on Fornits, and because Fornits is not a statistical sample of people anyway, out of the group of people here that really care about this issue, when you argue with me it can look to observers like opinion is pretty evenly divided across the country and the industrialized world.

It's not.

I would be frankly amazed if even 5% of people with *at least* an undergraduate degree in psychology, or biology, or nursing, or pre-med, or any other related field, who had read enough to form an opinion on mental illness and pharmacology, shared your opinion *on the major mental illnesses and the known effective treatments for them*.

As you whittled the numbers down to people whose degrees were more and more related to brain physiology and human behavior and abnormal psychology, the percentage of people who agree with you would shrink even further.

The more people know about the human brain, the less of them agree with you.

You can *always*, in any field, find *someone* with pretty credentials who's a flake and will say whatever it is that you want to hear.

That disregards the huge majority of people with equally pretty credentials in the same field who are all basically saying the same or very similar things, and who won't necessarily call your guy with pretty credentials a flake flat out (because calling a colleague, however strange, a flake would lack proper scientific dignity), but they will tell you that his position is an extreme minority position in the field.

You have a very small minority of people with pretty credentials telling you what you want to hear on this subject, but they're flakes.

Occasionally in scientific history a flake has been right about something and not been a flake but been a genius.  However, the flakes who were actually geniuses and not just plain flakes have been less than one percent of the people who were called flakes because they REALLY WERE FLAKES.

You have no idea how polite I am usually when I say that your collection of flakes might possibly be right, barely possibly, no matter how on the fringe your "experts" are.

But frankly, they're flakes.  And by listening to what you want to hear instead of the mainstream, on this subject, you're a flake, too.

You're fine and frequently insightful on most other subjects, but on this one, you're a flat-out flake.

I think program survivors sometimes *feel* like flakes against the rest of the world because *in the programs* they were outnumbered by people drinking the kool-aid.

The *truth* is that the dissident (from the program) survivors on Fornits are the ones in line with mainstream society's opinions on the proper care and treatment of children---mainstream society just, for the most part, has no idea what's happening in the programs behind closed doors.  The survivors are mainstream in a "pool" of flaky program people that tries very hard to make the dissidents and survivors think they're flakes and that they're abnormal.  It's the program people who are the flakes.

I don't call all people with minority opinions flakes.

I've got some minority opinions myself.

The difference between having a minority opinion and being a flake is someone who's *NOT* a flake can and will admit that their opinion on a subject is in the minority----and can and will admit approximately how small of a minority their opinion is.

Maybe I missed it, but I've never seen you admit that your position is a very small minority position among people with college-level education about human biology, brain biology, or abnormal behavior.

That's what makes you a flake.  Not that you have a minority opinion, but that you're so reluctant to admit that it *is* a minority opinion, and how small that minority is among people with a college level amount of mainstream education in related fields.

I'm not saying those people can't *also* have all kinds of in-depth study of certain minority opinions and what they're based on---I'm saying among people with enough basic mainstream education to know their ass from a hole in the ground to even begin to determine what's a reasonably scientifically supported position and what's wishful thinking or personal prejudice.

If you have even half a clue how much of a minority position yours is on this subject, I've never seen you admit it.

"differently educated"----if you call personal prejudice that ignores the vast body of data "educated" I suppose your stuff would qualify as educated, but not otherwise.

There's nothing at all wrong with having a minority opinion.

There's everything in the world wrong with, when you expound that opinion to others, you try to pretend it's *NOT* a minority opinion---or that your minority is a larger percentage of educated opinion than it is.

I'll go you one further----among all people who graduated with an undergraduate degree from *any* accredited science and engineering college or university *OR* with any science, math, or engineering degree from *any* accredited college or university----among all those people, your opinion is *still* a very tiny minority.

A mark of being a flake is when you discount the overwhelming majority of other people educated in related fields as "miseducated" or discount their opinions in computing whether your opinion is a minority opinion or not.

It doesn't matter what size group you use----from all those with accredited science, math or engineering undergraduate degrees, down through every succeedingly smaller filter until we get to people with graduate degrees in psychology, psychiatry, or neurology-----it doesn't matter what size filter you use----people with enough education to find their ass with both hands very largely just don't agree with your position.

And you can't admit that.

And that's what makes you, on this subject, a flake.

Timoclea

There is not a "fragment" in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
-- John Muir

Fighting Irish:  Go to Wrightslaw (link:)

http://www.yellowpagesforkids.com/

Retain an attorney in the same state as the school, go immediately and get the attorney to go with you.

Take your custody papers.

I refer you to wrightslaw because they do child disability and education and one of the attorneys they refer to should be up on when a kid has a problem, or is alleged to have a problem, and divorced parents disagree about how to handle it.

The cops may or may not be supportive.  If they're inclined not to be, having an attorney with you may work wonders.  If you can get a cop, plus your attorney, plus custody papers, plus you, there, great.

But the important part of getting an attorney licensed to practice in that state is he's already there--you don't have to fly him in except maybe across the state---and once he hands them his card and they see an in-state address, they know he can walk straight out of there to a judge and get a court order faster than you can say "big bucks lawsuit" and "interference in child custody" and "kidnapping."

Get a lawyer, get down there, get your kid---now that you have reason to believe something is terribly wrong---they moved heaven and earth to keep you from talking to your own child---don't wait.

Timoclea

It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples

--Charles Dickens