Normally I don't address anonymous postings (you can't always tell if it is a new person or one of the site "regulars" having a little fun with you) but the situation that you describe is so touching ot me! It is exactly what we went through when my son was 15, using drugs and placing himself in danger in a variety of ways. I remember so well the feeling of not knowing what to do and who to trust, but realizing that something had to happen.
I don't know much about AARC--my son went to a CEDU school and is now in college and doing fine, personally and academically. This is not meant to be an infomercial for the school that I chose--there may well be many other schools and programs out there just as good and a better match for your particular child. You'll have to make that decision.
What you will hear at this site is, I imagine, that not everyone had the good experiences that our family had with this kind of program. You are likely to hear from some, in fact,that the very notion that some people report a good experience is proof that we are in a cult, brainwashed, etc. Obviously I don't believe that this is so. Neither does our son who has told us that being sent away gave him a future and possibly saved his life.
The parent seminars and workshops that were part of our son's program were a real growth experience for us as parents as well as for our child. It is now one of my dreams to open my own school someday, building on the positive aspects of existing programs and refining them in other ways, such as by modifying them for kids with certain dual diagnoses and less ego strength than is needed for certain confrontory approaches. To accomplish this I've gone back to school and have just gotten my masters in clinical psychology and am working on my doctorate. I watch this and other sites to get non-academic input about the whole therapeutic boarding school industry, and to hear about the perceptions of a variety of people, whether, at the end of the day, I agree with them completely or not.
My advice to you in making your decision is, as noted, to be somewhat skeptical of people who don't give some kind of identifier. If the claims made by anonymous or even named posters seem really unlikely to you (for example, the whole governmental apparatus of a certain state is covering up a particular school's abuses), check around on news web-sites or other postings here and get a perspective on the believablity of the claim. It doesn't hurt to go to the profile of a named poster---sometimes the way they describe themselves speaks volumes.
I wouldn't worry too much about the "potty-mouth", gratuitous profanity in some posts, some of these people have had at least unsatifactory experiences, and are quite angry--try to see past the words and the anger and consider whether what is being reported is believable and generalizable to all such schools and programs that you are considering.
What convinced me to send my child to the school we did was talking with other parents who had had children there--both parents who had kids who graduated and parents who withdrew their kids---our school gave us a list of both and those we spoke with gave us other names as well. We spoke with a couple of dozen people before making the decision. I really think that if you are a good judge of character talking to people directly, face to face or even on the phone can give you pretty important insights.
So good luck to you. When we sent my son away it was the hardest thing I had ever done--if there had been another way, any other way, I would have taken it. But by the time we realized that things were out of control, it was just not possible, by counselling or by reasoning or by loving him, to change things in a way that would make him safe. I had to live with the fact (and still do) that if I had been more attentive to his emotional needs earlier in his life, if our relationship had been stronger, if I had done a variety of things differently, we might not have ended up where we did. But we can't go back in time and I did the only thing I could in the circumstances. And by the grace of God (or luck or destiny or fate, some people might say) we had a happy ending.
Perhaps you can find a way to make things work out at home---if you can, that is always the best way. If you can't, really can't, my advice to you is get as much info as you can here and elsewhere, choose carefully, and do what you have to do.
P.S. As I looked over my message, I saw that it may sound extreme that my son would think that being sent away saved his life--in our case it is in fact a real possibility. A neighborhood friend who he used to cruise around and buy and sell drugs with went across a median at 3 in the morning some time after my son had gone to the school. That boy was dead that the scene and it is quite likely, given their friendship that my son would have been in the car with him if he had still been at home and running with the same crowd.
