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An Oregon School for Troubled Teens Is
Under Scrutiny
April 17, 2009
By Maia Szalavitz
See pictures of a
juvenile detention center in Texas
 On
April 28, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that
has caused anguish in the world of special education and children's
mental health.
The case, Forest Grove v. TA,
centers on the question of whether families with a disabled child
have a right to seek reimbursement for private-school tuition from
the state if the child did not first receive special-education
services in public school. The legal question is a narrow one, but
the case raises larger, more troublesome issues about student safety
and the quality of educational services that families should expect
when they place their children in private residential care, because
the school involved in the case, Mount Bachelor Academy, near
Prineville, Ore., is under state investigation for allegations of
abuse reported by students and one employee. (See pictures of being
13 in America.)
A spokesperson for the Oregon
Department of Human Services (DHS) declined to discuss the details
of the ongoing investigations, which include a second inquiry based
on possible licensing violations. But according to 10 students, two
separate parents and a part-time employee interviewed by TIME some
of whom are involved in the inquiry Mount Bachelor Academy
regularly uses intensely humiliating tactics as treatment. For
instance, in required seminars that the school calls Lifesteps,
students say staff members of the residential program have
instructed girls, some of whom say they have been victims of rape or
sexual abuse, to dress in provocative clothing fishnet stockings,
high heels and miniskirts and perform lap dances for male students
as therapy.
Sharon Bitz, executive director of
Mount Bachelor Academy, denies the charges. In an e-mailed statement
to TIME, she said the reports of abuse are "inaccurate
representations of Mount Bachelor Academy's therapeutic approach for
struggling or underachieving teens. Some of the accusations are
demonstrably false, while others have been exaggerated for shock
effect."
In response to the accusations of
sexual humiliation, Bitz told Oregon's Bend Bulletin newspaper in a
recent interview that school officials have never instructed
students to act in a way that would "sexualize them," and that the
students' costumes came from their own dorm rooms and were chosen by
the students. "We would never ask a student to give a lap dance,"
Bitz told the paper.
When the Supreme Court hears
arguments in Forest Grove v. TA this month, it will not determine
whether Mount Bachelor Academy or any facility chosen by families
offers appropriate care. The parents of the student, TA (because
he was a minor at the time the case was filed, the student is
identified by his initials, and his parents have not made their
names public), stand to gain only the right to seek reimbursement
for the child's stay at Mount Bachelor under the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
A ruling for the parents could have
serious financial implications for cash-strapped school districts.
Federal funding for private special-education placements, including
residential and nonresidential programs, totaled $5.3 billion in the
fiscal year 1999-2000, the most recent year for which data is
available from the Special Education Expenditure Project, a national
study begun in 1999 and funded in part by the U.S. Department of
Education. In New York City alone, the number of reimbursement
claims by parents who have unilaterally placed their kids in private
special education rose from 3,023 to 4,068, and the city's spending
on private placements went from $53 million in 2005-2006 to $88.9
million in 2007-2008, after the Second Circuit Court ruled in favor
of the families in two similar cases in 2005 and 2006.
It is not known how many of the
thousands of families who send their children to so-called
therapeutic boarding schools each year receive tuition reimbursement
via IDEA. The exact number of therapeutic boarding schools operating
in the U.S. is also unknown, since no official body tracks them, but
some estimates put the figure at 150 to 300. Tuition is far from
cheap. Monthly costs at residential facilities are $5,000 and up;
Mount Bachelor, which houses up to 125 students, charges $6,400 per
month, and in 2008 revenue for the Aspen Education Group, which owns
Mount Bachelor and is one of the largest chains of residential
facilities for problem students, it topped $132 million.
The proceedings of Forest Grove are
being watched with intense concern by school administrators and the
teachers union as well as children's advocates. Most advocates argue
that families should have access to private schools when public
schools cannot provide free and appropriate public education for a
disabled child, but most also say that public funds should not be
used to pay for residential schools like Mount Bachelor. Such
programs, they say, are overly restrictive and unproven, and
virtually all their students who typically have depression,
substance use, behavioral problems or ADHD can be safely treated
within the community.
"We feel very strongly that
for-profit residential facilities are completely inappropriate for
special education. They have been shown to be ineffective and
commonly employ practices that do harm," says Alison Barkoff, senior
staff attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.
But because the programs are
privately run, what happens within their walls is largely a mystery.
No one knows whether the programs succeed or fail.
The Case of Forest Grove v. TA
TA's case began in elementary school. He had trouble learning basic
math, struggled to pay attention in class and could not finish his
homework without his parents' help. In September 2000, he began
attending Forest Grove High School. By December, he was failing or
nearly failing most subjects. His parents had the school evaluate
him for special education.
This is when the major
disagreements arose. TA's mother originally agreed with Forest
Grove's assessment that her son did not have the type of learning
disability, such as autism or mental retardation, that typically
qualifies a student for special education. Notes taken by the school
district in a January 2001 meeting about TA include a comment that
says "maybe ADD [attention-deficit disorder]/ADHD
[attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder]?," but TA's parents say
they were not informed that a diagnosis of ADHD could have qualified
him for special education if the condition affected his academic
performance. The school did not further evaluate him for attention
disorders. (See
pictures of teenagers in America.)
TA's behavior and grades continued
to deteriorate. He began smoking large quantities of marijuana. He
was briefly suspended for bringing a knife to school. In January
2003, his parents took him to see a psychologist, who recommended
that they enroll him in a wilderness program and then place him in
Mount Bachelor Academy.
Later in 2003, TA's parents sought
reimbursement from the school district for Mount Bachelor's tuition,
claiming that Forest Grove never properly evaluated their son for
special education and therefore could not provide him the free and
appropriate public education that was legally required. The district
countered that, under IDEA, as revised by Congress in 1997, parents
may seek reimbursement only after the child has already tried
special education within the public system.
The Ninth Circuit heard Forest
Grove in 2008 and found that TA's parents had the right to seek
reimbursement; otherwise, the court said, school districts could
essentially avoid paying for special education simply by refusing to
classify students as disabled. Presiding over a separate but similar
case, however, the First Circuit Court came to the reverse
conclusion, saying the law requires the child to try public special
education first. In such instances, when the lower courts disagree,
the Supreme Court is often called upon to clarify the law.
Should the Supreme Court decide in
favor of TA, says Naomi Gittins, deputy general counsel for the
National School Boards Association, "it would be detrimental to the
whole framework of collaboration to figure out what an appropriate
education for a particular child is ... A lot of private schools for
which parents want reimbursement don't have to meet state standards.
How does that really serve the interest of children?"
Psychodrama or New Trauma? Mount
Bachelor's executive director, Bitz, says her school uses widely
accepted psychological treatments to help children overcome their
problems. "We also use a psychodrama-treatment approach designed to
do one or both of two things," said Bitz in her statement, "get a
student to embrace qualities of their character (such as beauty or
courage) about which they have doubt or assist them in recognizing
qualities that are unproductive (such as selfishness or conceit)
about which they have little insight."
There are plenty of parents,
including TA's, who say they are happy with the services provided to
their children. Former students have also praised the school for
turning their lives around, in comments on Internet message boards
and in letters to regulators.
"All methods of therapy are done in
a supportive atmosphere with trained professionals and the intent to
raise self-awareness and self-worth," said Bitz.
But other students and parents
describe a different experience. The students interviewed by TIME,
who attended the school at separate times in recent years, said that
humiliation, not support, was the foundation of much of the
treatment at Mount Bachelor.
One 18-year-old former student and
victim of rape wept while recounting what happened to her during a
Lifesteps seminar. Jane, who asked not to be identified by her real
name, left the school in March. "They had me dress up as a French
maid," she said, describing an outfit that included fishnet
stockings and a short skirt. "I had to sit on guys' laps and give
them lap dances," while sexually suggestive songs, like "Milkshake"
by Kelis, played at high volume.
"They told me I was dirty and I had
to put mud on myself for being raped," she said in reference to
another Lifesteps session. "They basically blamed me for getting
raped."
Bitz dismissed Jane's story and
called it "very suspect" in an interview with the Bend Bulletin,
which also spoke with Jane. "We know that some current students have
made a conscious decision to lie about our school, hoping that it
will be closed as a result, and that they would then be sent back
home," Bitz told TIME.
Amber Ozier, now 23, attended Mount
Bachelor Academy from the summer of 2002 to October 2003 at about
the same time as TA. Her parents enrolled her after she started
sneaking out at night and drinking as a teenager. She had also begun
smoking marijuana, and her grades were suffering. Several years
earlier, Ozier says, her 10-year-old sister had drowned in a lake
during Amber's 12th birthday party.
Ozier describes being made to
retell the harrowing story of her sister's death repeatedly in
groups. In a role-playing session, Ozier says, her closest friend
was asked to pretend to be her sister, so Ozier could again relive
her death.
According to Ozier and others, in a
Lifesteps seminar called Forever Young, students were placed on a
mattress and taunted with painful information about their childhood
that they had previously revealed, an apparent attempt to trigger
regression to infancy. Once more, Ozier was instructed to recall her
sister's death against her will. "That was probably the thing that
traumatized me the most," she says, describing how she thrashed on
the mattress until she vomited. "They prey on people who have
already been hurt."
When teens tried to complain in
phone calls to parents, the calls were cut off, according to several
students interviewed by TIME. Even with good behavior, students say,
they were permitted only one monitored, 10-min. phone call every
other week.
"We were worried about Amber's
life," says Jody Ozier, Amber's mother, regarding her decision to
send her daughter to Mount Bachelor. But after hearing Amber's
account of her experiences, she says, "I couldn't believe that they
did that. I see where it's done her mental harm."
Resurrected Allegations This is not
the first time students have accused Mount Bachelor of abuse, nor is
Mount Bachelor the only such program to face allegations of
mistreatment. Similar allegations of abuse were documented by the
Government Accountability Office for numerous programs in 2007 and
2008, when the agency investigated the troubled-teen industry at the
behest of California Congressman George Miller.
In 1998, Mount Bachelor was
investigated by the Oregon DHS based on claims by several former
employees that students were "subjected to frequent obscenity-laced
screaming sessions by staff members; students were deprived of
sleep; a group of girls emerged from one group-therapy session with
bruising on their arms after they were ordered to clasp their hands
in front of them and pound a mattress for an extended period,"
according to the Bend Bulletin. The Oregon DHS cleared the program
following the investigation.
"I am in a state of shock," says
Sharon Ferguson, whose complaints about her son's treatment at Mount
Bachelor in the 1990s helped spur the earlier investigation. "I
can't believe that school is still open and the same things are
being said and the same people are running it."
A former student, Melissa Maisa,
now 32, married and a mother of two young children in San Diego, had
a similar response when informed of the present investigation. Maisa
attended Mount Bachelor between 1992 and 1994 under largely the same
management that runs the school today, and graduated the school with
honors. She was sent there in part because of promiscuous behavior
as a teen, which Maisa associates with being a victim of child
sexual abuse and date rape. "Mount Bachelor made me feel even more
dirty and more shameful than either one of those experiences ever
did. I just want to make sure the things I suffered through there
never happen again," Maisa says.
She describes a Lifesteps session
in which she says she was required to perform an exercise called
"the holidays." "I had to stand up in the sluttiest way possible and
strut over to every male in the room," including the counselors,
Maisa says. She was instructed to sit on the floor before each man,
place her left foot on his right knee and say, "This foot is
Christmas." She then placed her right foot on his left knee and
said, "This foot is New Year's. Do you want to meet me between the
holidays?"
Maisa says she performed the
exercise more than 250 times. When she failed to show sufficient
enthusiasm, Maisa says, she and her peers were punished, each having
to repeat their own humiliating skit. When Maisa tried to tell her
mother about it on the phone, she says, a staff member terminated
the call.
Susan Owren, a part-time driver for
Mount Bachelor, has heard similar stories from dozens of students.
Owren spends several hours several days a week shuttling the
school's students to doctor's appointments in town; during the
rides, she says, students open up to her. She says she's seen teens
being made to run in the snow without adequate footwear and to move
rocks back and forth, apparently as discipline. "Every single kid
has told me something horrifying," she says, adding that students
who spoke with her independently corroborated one another. In
mid-March, Owren went to the authorities, prompting the current
state investigation.
Roots in Utopian Principles
The techniques that Mount Bachelor
allegedly uses, while unconventional, are not new. They are similar
to the tenets of the once popular "human potential movement" of the
1960s and '70s, which purported to change people's lives through
intense emotional experiences. The movement grew out of the
practices of Synanon and other California experiments in utopian
living, which later helped spawn so-called large group awareness
training programs, such as LifeSpring and est.
Synanon began as a
drug-rehabilitation program before morphing into a controversial
cult and is credited with putting forth the idea that confrontation
and boot-camp-style breakdown tactics could cure teen misbehavior
and addiction. Synanon's confrontational techniques influenced est
and LifeSpring, which began selling weekend seminars designed to
prompt emotional breakthroughs in participants.
Food, sleep and access to the
outside world sometimes even to the bathroom were strictly
controlled. Using intense role-playing, humiliation and physical
experience, the seminars attempted to liberate people from
victimhood by teaching them that they are ultimately responsible for
everything that happens to them, including being a victim of child
abuse or rape.
Mount Bachelor's Lifesteps seminars
appear to share these tactics and philosophy. Several of its top
employees formerly worked at a now defunct chain of troubled-teen
programs known as CEDU, which was founded by former Synanon members.
"The process of breaking kids down is very much integrated into the
therapeutic milieu," says Kat Whitehead, executive director of the
Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth, an expert on
such abuse, who has testified before Congress on the topic.
"Unfortunately, that seems to be very common, at least in the
private facilities."
Although many people report being
helped by cathartic seminars, studies suggest that programs like
LifeSpring do not produce lasting change. Indeed, in the 1980s and
early 1990s, LifeSpring lost millions of dollars in lawsuits related
to suicides and psychiatric hospitalizations of participants.
Most mental-health experts today
strongly disagree with the use of brutal confrontation or
humiliation as therapy particularly for vulnerable youths who have
troubled pasts. Research suggests that feelings of being out of
control characterize the typical patient's response to traumatic
life events; consequently, recovery requires the avoidance of
coercion. Experts say that pressuring trauma victims to retell their
stories against their will tends to increase stress symptoms rather
than alleviate them. And brain research associates feelings of shame
and humiliation to stress responses that exacerbate depression and
anxiety and may contribute to physical illness. In addition,
isolation from parents, except in situations where they are abusive,
can increase trauma further.
"There is absolutely no role for
shame and humiliation in the treatment of youth," says Christopher
Bellonci, medical director of the Walker School, a nonprofit serving
children with serious mental, behavioral and learning problems. "I
know of no clinical rationale for treating youth for any condition
in that fashion ... They are engendering new trauma, not repairing
it."
Whatever the Supreme Court decides
in Forest Grove v. TA, the case will put the spotlight on
questions surrounding these troubled-teen programs. And while
Oregon's investigations continue, yet more change may be
forthcoming: a bill introduced by Congressman Miller to regulate
private teen programs and ban "acts of physical or mental abuse
designed to humiliate, degrade or undermine a child's self respect"
passed the House of Representatives on Feb. 23. It is expected to be
introduced in the Senate this year.
Maia Szalavitz is a freelance
journalist in New York City and author of the book Help At Any Cost:
How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids
(Riverhead, 2006).
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