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SPECIAL REPORTS: DUNDEE RANCH |
Thursday 26 June 2003
Tough love school sent to timeout
• Academy's doors closed indefinitely
By James Varney
Timespicayune.com
Now that the shouting from teenagers and police and prosecutors has
faded, there is something almost pastoral about Academy Dundee, this
hotel cum tough-love school near the sea.
Stone fountains gurgle among the
hacienda-style buildings, the foliage is lush and green, and a
brilliant sun burns on both the swimming pool and a pond with an
elevated wooden walkway leading to a small island. In the cavernous
dining center, some of the handful of remaining staffers eat with
parrots perched on their shoulders.
But the story behind this snapshot is
anything but serene. Academy Dundee never made it as the tourist
spot its builder intended it to be, and it is closed not for the
summer but possibly for good. The tumult began in October, when
Carey Bock of Mandeville arrived and, accusing the
behavior-modification program of being more brutal than beneficial,
marched her twin sons out the door.
The saga grew even more bizarre at
the end of May, when Costa Rican authorities invaded the campus,
told the roughly 200 American teenagers enrolled there they did not
have to stay, and arrested the school's owner and founder, Narvin
Lichfield.
The echoes of that wild day, which
Lichfield said included outdoor orgies and vandalism, are still
reverberating. A criminal case is in motion against Lichfield, 41,
in the nearby mountain town of Atenas, Costa Rica, an accusation of
torture has been filed with the United Nations, and Dundee's
supporters and critics are engaged in a battle concerning tactics at
Dundee and at 10 other schools chartered by the World Wide
Association of Specialty Programs, based in Utah. The brouhaha has
thrust the company and its curriculum into an international
spotlight.
All these developments come as no
surprise to Bock.
"I think the closing of Dundee was
inevitable," she said. "I believe the only reason that Dundee had
remained open as long as they had was because they were operating
under the radar of the Costa Rican regulatory agencies. The children
at Dundee were subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment; there is
no doubt about it."
Bock is not the only New Orleans-area
parent in the fray, and not everyone shares her harsh view. In a
recent letter to the Tico Times, a popular English-language weekly
circulated in Costa Rica, Yvette Miller of Harvey said Academy
Dundee had done wonders for her daughter.
"I am so happy with the school and
what it has done for my child," she wrote, saying the girl had
opened up in ways the mother never dreamed possible. "Dundee Ranch
did this for her."
The hullabaloo has prompted both the
U.S. Embassy and PANI, the local child welfare agency, to claim they
were on top of the situation and had been raising red flags for
months -- claims greeted with skepticism in some quarters.
"I think what we're witnessing here
is a real cover-your-ass scenario," said Bruce Harris, the executive
director of Casa Alianza, a children's advocacy group that last
month asked the U.N. Committee on Torture to investigate Dundee.
Lichfield dismisses Casa Alianza as
unqualified to pass judgment because Harris never visited Dundee or
spoke with any of its staffers.
That criticism is a red herring in
Harris' view. Though he conceded he hasn't seen the school
personally, he said the group's complaint was made on the basis of
at least three sworn statements from parents and children about what
went on at Dundee, and the agency is trying to arrange for other
former students to return to Costa Rica and testify against
Lichfield.
"The reports we've gotten from
parents and kids relate what we regard to be cruel and unusual,"
Harris said, mentioning physical restraints on concrete floors,
using food as coercion and lack of adequate health care. "They were
breaking kids down, all right, but they weren't building them back
up."
Lichfield, meanwhile, says it's his
reputation that needs to be rebuilt. Barred from leaving Costa Rica
for six months while the case is investigated, he is holed up in a
San José hotel. He's no monster, he said, but rather the victim of a
monstrous misunderstanding.
"As far as I'm concerned, Costa Rica
came in here under spurious allegations and closed down a place that
had operated without incident for two years," he said. "I know
exactly what is abuse and what isn't, and there was no abuse at all
at Academy Dundee. We never held any kids there against their will.
I was like Uncle Buck to those kids."
Lichfield, who spent 24 hours in
custody following his arrest, said he is unaware of any ongoing
criminal investigation of him or his school and hopes to reopen for
business within two months.
But that may be overly optimistic.
Prosecutors confirmed there is an ongoing probe of activities at the
school, but no date for proceedings has been set. Meanwhile, both
sides are busy gathering depositions, statements known in Costa
Rican law as "anticipated evidence."
"Tough-love" or
"behavior-modification" programs such as Academy Dundee -- Lichfield
is an owner or part-owner of similar establishments in New York
state and South Carolina -- are controversial by their nature. With
tuition and costs topping $2,000 a month, they're designed for
troubled teenagers and make no bones about the rigors they impose on
them. No one denies, for instance, that physical restraints were a
part of the Dundee experience.
"But if it sounds like it was hurting
people, it's not like that at all," said Antonio Cespedes, 16, a
Costa Rican who essentially has been managing the school since it
was shut down. "It was used only to calm people down." Cespedes
credits the school with saving his life after he turned to drugs two
years ago.
Dundee is not the only school
chartered by the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs that
is in the hot seat. In the past few years, a girl committed suicide
at the Jamaica school, and authorities in both Mexico and
Czechoslovakia filed criminal charges against the couple who ran
WWASP schools in those countries.
WWASP officials say most of the
complaints against them come from manipulative teenagers who are
proven liars, a retort that Harris and Bock dismiss as evasive.
In Dundee's case, some of the most
stinging criticisms were made not by students but by a former
director, Amberly Knight. Now living in Michigan, Knight wrote a
detailed letter to PANI in March outlining what she said were
scandalous conditions at the school, including severe overcrowding
in triple-bunks; dubious medical care that included prescribing
drugs without parental knowledge, double-charging for doctor visits
and the like; and widespread reliance on physical punishment and
restraint.
Both Ken Kay, the head of WWASP in
Utah, and Lichfield have been scathing in their denunciation of
Knight, whom they describe, variously, as a disgruntled former
employee and a woman spurned romantically by Joe Atkin, Dundee's
acting director at the time Bock appeared.
Knight insists she never meant her
letter to PANI to be made public and acknowledges it may have
violated the terms of a nondisclosure agreement she signed with
Lichfield, but she stands by her accusations, she said, and
considers Lichfield's and Kay's assaults on her character as a base
smear.
"Lichfield did not care, and the
children could not complain to outside authorities," she said. "The
children were imprisoned in deplorable conditions that we would not
tolerate for adult, death row inmates in America. The parents were
manipulated and misled by this organization."
Some authorities said Knight's letter
triggered PANI's investigation, but officials give different
starting dates for the probe. Indeed, all the dates and claims made
by groups are confused. For example, last October the U.S. embassy
said it had made eight visits to the school since 2001, and that it
forwarded concerns to PANI, but none of those concerns appears to
have generated a response.
Whatever its starting date, the
investigation's pulse quickened May 20 with the arrival at Dundee of
Prosecutor Fernando Vargas and an entourage of police and PANI
officials. The authorities told the roughly 200 teenagers there
that, according to Costa Rican law, no one could compel them to stay
at Dundee and they were free to do as they pleased. Pandemonium
ensued, with some kids vandalizing cars and property and others
engaging in group sex around the pool, witnesses said.
"We had police officers with years of
experience telling us it was the most grotesque, pornographic thing
they've ever seen," Lichfield said.
Some three dozen students bolted.
Though most returned by the end of the day, a handful wound up in
PANI shelters. Vargas and his team slapped Dundee with citations for
15 violations of Costa Rican law, ranging from sanitation issues to
staffers working without proper permits or students with expired
visas. In addition, Costa Rica insisted that Dundee register itself
with the Ministry of Education, something Lichfield says he was told
he did not have to do when he opened his doors. With the school
effectively shut down until those problems are sorted out, Lichfield
said his staff worked with parents to fly students back to the
states or to other WWASP schools in Mexico or Jamaica. More than two
dozen of those students are reportedly enrolled at Tranquility Bay
in Jamaica, which is widely regarded as the toughest WWASP
institution.
Since then, another prosecutor has
taken over the case from Vargas, who was substituting at the time
for a prosecutor on vacation. Court officers declined to comment on
the case, but the chaotic and confusing nature of the investigation
has led to some finger-pointing behind the scenes. Last week, the
government announced it had appointed an "ombudsman" to review the
actions not only of the prosecutors and PANI, but also of the
Ministries of Health and of Education.
Lichfield freely acknowledges he was
not registered with any of those agencies. Though that appears to
support Bock's contention the school deliberately flew under radar,
Lichfield said Dundee was no secret to the government. In the past,
he said, some PANI officials had dropped by Dundee and there were no
problems. Had they been willing to discuss the matter, rather than
appear in force on the campus, he said he would have rectified any
alleged violations.
"I've got $2 million invested down
here in Dundee, and do you think I'd let that all go down the drain
because of some ticky-tack complaints that I could easily fix?" he
said.
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