Sunday

Sunday, May 1, 2005

Web Gives Ivy Ridge Net Gains and Losses:
Complaints, Praise Follow School in Cyberspace

Section: Capital Albany
By Chris Garifo, Times Albany Correspondent

An important tool the Academy at Ivy Ridge in Ogdensburg has used to recruit students has in turn become a weapon its foes are using to try to close the behavioral modification program for troubled teens.

The Internet is sprinkled with sites where anguished parents of troubled teens can find programs such as Ivy Ridge, which serves 400 students.

Just as prominent, however, are sites filled with allegations of physical and emotional abuse, all created by former clients of Ivy Ridge and its support and programming organization, the Utah-based World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, that are filled with allegations of physical and emotional abuse.

"The Internet, any time you're in a controversial business, is a double-edged sword," said Kenneth E. Kay, WWASPS president. "It can assist you in getting positive word out and in promotion. The problem is, it's unmonitored and anybody can send unsubstantiated allegations."

The allegations have brought Ivy Ridge inquiries from New York Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer and the state Office of Children and Family Services, who are examining the school's academic and development programs.

On Web sites criticizing Ivy Ridge, the majority of allegations include:

Staff punching students, throwing them to the floor or forcing them to remain sitting in excruciating pain without moving for hours on end.
Depriving students of medical care.
Providing students with an inadequate amount of food.
Staff verbally berating students to force them into responding negatively, then severely punishing them no matter how slight the response.
Staff refusing to let students use the bathroom to the point where the children would soil themselves.

Ivy Ridge Director Jason G. Finlinson said the allegations are false, but something he and his staff just have to deal with.

"That's part of the job," he said. "It's tough, but we do it and we do the best we can with what we do."

A CHANGE OF HEART

Negative information on the Internet caused one parent, Sally I. Winter, to pull her 17-year-old son, Christopher H. Harris, out of Ivy Ridge, where she and her ex-husband had sent him in the mistaken belief it was a drug rehabilitation center.

After her son's trouble with the law, a counselor advised Mrs. Winter to contact the Teen Help hot line, which also has a Web site with links to WWASPS-affiliated schools, including Ivy Ridge.

Teen Help recommended Ivy Ridge, she said.

"If you don't get him in this program, he will die within a week," Mrs. Winter said the person on the hotline told her.

After her husband took their son to Ivy Ridge, Mrs. Winter, who said she holds a master's degree in special education, began searching the Internet for more information about the school. That's where she found the complaints and allegations. She admitted she never had looked at Ivy Ridge's Web sites.

As a result, she traveled to Ogdensburg and demanded to see her son, who in March had written her that his roommate ran around their room and the halls naked, that two teens living in his "family" had oral sex and that Ivy Ridge staff would not let him see a dentist about his aching teeth.

Upon seeing her son, Mrs. Winter promptly removed him from Ivy Ridge.

Mr. Harris's removal April 5 was just one of a number of problems Ivy Ridge and WWASPS have had to deal with this year.

Reports of abuse at the school led to a visit in February by workers from the Office of Children and Family Services. The state attorney general's office at around the same time subpoenaed records from the school, purportedly to determine what kind of school it is and whether it improperly claimed to be a diploma-writing institution.

"We welcome people to visit the school. We want people to know what we do at Ivy Ridge," Mr. Finlinson said. "We've invited people for three years to visit, and all of a sudden they come in the same week. That's their prerogative."

As a result of the state attorney general's inquiry, the Boise, Idaho-based Northwest Association of Accredited Schools suspended Ivy Ridge's accreditation. Ivy Ridge's Web site now includes a statement that it is not accredited and that it is not "licensed, certified or registered in any way with the New York State Department of Education."

The site also says that Ivy Ridge is working with the state Education Department to get permission to offer state-approved diplomas. Until the attorney general's office inquiry, the site had said Ivy Ridge offered general and college prep diplomas.

Another WWASPS-affiliated school, Majestic Ranch in northern Utah, is being sued in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City by a California mother accusing the boarding school of physically and emotionally abusing her son while he was a student there.

On April 20, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., introduced the "End Institutional Abuse Against Children Act," whose provisions include the establishment of federal civil and criminal penalties for abusing children in residential treatment programs, and expanded federal regulatory authority over programs operated overseas by U.S. companies. A WWASPS-affiliated school is located in Jamaica, and WWASPS-associated schools in Mexico, Costa Rica and the Czech Republic reportedly were closed down by those governments because of allegations of physical abuse, a claim Mr. Kay denies.

As a result of allegations against WWASPS schools, Mr. Miller last year wrote a letter to then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft asking for a federal investigation of WWASPS and its affiliated schools. Mr. Ashcroft rejected the request, claiming his department lacked jurisdiction.

ORGANIZED OPPOSITION

Almost since the day it opened in January 2002, the school on Route 37 and its staff have faced allegations that it or WWASPS have mentally and physically abused children in their care.

"They're not true," Mr. Finlinson said of the allegations. "We have schoolteachers, we have professional therapists who work at the school, there are nurses, and part of their responsibilities are to report abuse if they see it."

The allegations are more than just a result of a few unhappy parents or disgruntled former students, Mr. Finlinson said.

"I definitely believe there is an organized effort to discredit the school," he said.

Mr. Finlinson blames most of Ivy Ridge's problems on Susan L. Scheff, founder and president of Parents Universal Resources Experts, an organization that helps parents find appropriate programs for their troubled children.

"I've never met the lady," Mr. Finlinson said. "I think she's a competitor and she wants our business, so the way to take our business is to make us look as bad as she can."

Ms. Scheff denies the charge.

"To be a competitor I'd have to own programs," she said. "Am I competing with them? No. Am I trying to put them out of business for that? No."

Ms. Scheff, originally from Pleasant Valley but now living in Florida, said that she was a follower of WWASPS, even enrolling her daughter in one of the schools that uses its program, Carolina Springs Academy near Abbeville, S.C. She said she believed WWASPS and its associated schools were a perfect opportunity to help her troubled child.

"WWASPS is all over," she said. "You do an Internet search and they're everywhere, in different colors or different schemes."

After attending a few required parental seminars, Ms. Scheff realized she may have made a mistake and, shortly afterward, withdrew her daughter from Carolina Springs. The girl eventually began making allegations about abuses at the school.

As a result, Ms. Scheff decided to provide parents a source of information about alternative programs for their children and about programs and schools to avoid, especially WWASPS and its affiliated schools.

WWASPS sued her for defamation and other claims in federal District Court in Salt Lake City, but a 12-person jury rejected those claims.

"I'm the scapegoat for them to hide behind while they abuse children," Ms. Scheff said. "They put so much power into me and I don't know why. I'm just trying to create parent awareness."

Ms. Scheff says there are too many former students accusing WWASPS of abuse to ignore the claims.

"It's not just one child," she said. "It's the consistency that WWASPS has. They've all been at different WWASPS programs at different times, but they still have the same stories."

A LITANY OF ALLEGATIONS

Former students, many of whom have been in contact with anti-WWASPS Web sites and have put at least some of their experiences on the Internet, provide eerily similar descriptions of students who are constantly berated, screamed at, ill-fed, choked and thrown to the ground as part of the institution's behavior modification program, even though girls and boys routinely are kept separate and many of the students have never met.

Marc F. Shea, 18, Winchester, Mass., who spent seven months at Ivy Ridge and admits the program did get him to change his way of life, said more students have been harmed than helped by the school.

"A lot turn out worse than they did before," he said. "You have 13- or 14-year-old kids there who would play too many video games, and run into me, who did drugs and stuff."

Mr. Shea said he saw several children who were physically restrained by staff members and forced to the floor, for the slightest rule infractions.

"People think it's like a prep school; it's not," he said. "If you went around Ivy Ridge and asked kids if they'd rather be in jail, I bet 90 to 95 percent would rather have been in jail. At least you can read newspapers or see your family or talk on the phone."

Another punishment occurred in what was once called "worksheets" but is now referred to as study hall, Mr. Shea said.

Students are forced to sit upright in a straight-backed chair - feet together, knees a fist's width apart and back held 3 inches from the back of the chair - for hours, depending on the severity of the infraction, Mr. Shea said.

"You would just sit in this room all day long, in structure for hours and hours," he said.

Students didn't get enough food and often would try to steal food from each other, Mr. Shea said.

Nathan Lovelady, whose mother pulled him out of Ivy Ridge, said in a written statement that he was physically restrained his first day at Ivy Ridge. His infraction: He flinched while being given a haircut.

Students often were refused bathroom privileges, causing many to soil themselves, Mr. Lovelady said.

"Dozens of times I witnessed staff members denying students use of the bathroom, and abusing students (including me) that included punching students in the testicles, punching students in the chest, and restraining students for no apparent reason whatsoever," he wrote.

Mr. Lovelady said he saw staff members and upper-level students, who have more authority and benefits than incoming students, slam other children's faces into the walls.

"Nobody should ever have to suffer that," he said.

Mr. Lovelady's mother, Regina L. Bollman, said she had her first inkling that she might have made a mistake when she dropped her son off at Ivy Ridge and saw the staff.

"They had Tasers hooked onto their belts," she said in a telephone interview.

Ms. Bollman began checking Ivy Ridge's Internet bulletin board to find out how other parents felt.

"A lot of people were feeling the same way and convincing themselves that it was the best thing and their child otherwise would be dead," she said. "A lot of them, their kids had worse troubles than Nathan, like drugs or living out on the street. Nathan wasn't a street kid."

Over time, her concerns grew to the point that she decided to remove her son from the school, driving nine hours from her Detroit home to get the boy. The final straw was when, after he had been there three weeks, she called Ivy Ridge to talk to him but was told that the teen had lost all of his accrued points, which are needed to move forward in the program and get any privileges, because he had been caught masturbating.

"I hung up the phone and said, 'you know what, they obviously have no privacy there and that's just weird,'" Ms. Bollman said. "It's normal for a teenager to do that."

Rather than drive straight back home with her son, they stopped at a hotel and that's where Ms. Bollman discovered the bruises on the boy's body. He also had lost 25 pounds in the short time he'd been at Ivy Ridge, she said.

"He had obviously been repeatedly punched in the chest," Ms. Bollman said. "He said they did that to him for smiling or looking out of line."

The two went to the state police post in Ogdensburg to file a complaint. In his statement to state police, Mr. Lovelady described what had happened to him and to other students, whom he named, while at Ivy Ridge.

The state police would not comment about its investigation of Ivy Ridge and refused to release copies of any complaints or reports filed by any former students or their parents, citing privacy prohibitions.

After Mr. Lovelady returned home, he was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, Ms. Bollman said.

"It took a good year for him to get back to normal behavior for a teenager, and another year to get back on track at school," she said.

"There are sadists in that place," she said.

"BULLIES AND SADISTS"

Behavior modification boarding schools can be breeding grounds for sadists, said Alexia Parks, an expert on the subject and author of "An American Gulag: Secret P.O.W. Camps for Teens."

"The more rural and remote some of these schools are, the more you find bullies and sadists, because there's no oversight," she said.

Ms. Parks said she gets contacted almost daily by former students of these schools or their parents.

Part of the problem is children who are emotionally troubled or are having problems at home or school are placed in remote facilities, in other states or even overseas, where they are surrounded by strangers, setting up a situation perfect for violence, Ms. Parks said.

"The children have no voice," she said. "The children disappear; one day they're here and the next day nobody knows where they went."

Ms. Parks referred to the occasional practice of removing students from their homes, often late at night and in handcuffs.

Two men working for just such a service, Utah-based Teen Escort, faced criminal charges last year while transporting a student to Ivy Ridge. State authorities believe the business is owned and operated by WWASPS - Robert B. Lichfield, who purchased Mater Dei College from the Diocese of Ogdensubrg is from La Verkin, Utah, where the company is based - but Mr. Kay denied such a connection.

The men were charged with misdemeanor assault and felony imprisonment after they beat the boy while he was handcuffed. The boy, while not in the handcuffs, grabbed the car's steering wheel and caused it to crash.

The men pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment and were fined.

"Enormous violence is visited on children at the hands of strangers," Ms. Parks said.

Once at the school, some children are placed in isolation - with no contact from family or friends - for enough time that, once released, they will do whatever they can to prevent being put back, she said.

Ivy Ridge gives parents a 60- or 90-day satisfaction guarantee that allows them to return their child to the school if he or she begins to exhibit improper behavior again.

Despite the abuse allegations, schools such as Ivy Ridge are flourishing because they are huge moneymakers, Ms. Parks said.

"The New York Times estimates it's a $5 billion industry, and it's growing," she said. "It's the second-fastest growth industry next to the growth of prisons."

VOICES OF SUPPORT

Though the Internet provides plenty of places to find allegations against Ivy Ridge and WWASPS, Web sites and other postings also abound about their success and the benefit they offer to parents who are at their wits' end trying to deal with troubled teens.

On Ivy Ridge's Web site are dozens of testimonial letters from parents praising the school and thanking its staff for helping their children turn their lives around.

One such couple, Douglas A. and Sharon S. Ahrenberg, Chesapeake, Va., continue to have nothing but praise for what Ivy Ridge accomplished with their son, now 17-year-old Bryant C., though they pulled him from the program early.

"He got educated there and got a good understanding of what we have in our house," Mr. Ahrenberg said. "We've had zero problems since he got back and no slippage of any kind. We still recommend people to go there and still will."

The younger Mr. Ahrenberg said Ivy Ridge did "set me straight."

However, he admitted that staff members choked him and threw him to the floor as part of that effort, something he had not told his father, who was listening to the interview on another line. The staff member who choked him was fired for it, the teen said.

"There were a lot of kids who were pushed around and stuff and definitely treated unfairly and unprofessionally," he said. "One kid was slammed on a table and the table collapsed."

Though he said he'd never been restrained, he did see it happen to other students.

"Some restraining was called for; the kids would flip out," the younger Mr. Ahrenberg said, adding that he saw a staff member hit a student in the face.

When he tried to write to his parents about the incident, staff members, including Mr. Finlinson, admonished him about it, he said.

"They had me in a meeting with Mr. Finlinson and my family rep and they said nothing happened and to write my parents back and tell them nothing happened," the teen said.

While many on the Ivy Ridge staff are great people, Bryant Ahrenberg said, others "are horrible people."

Despite what he'd seen and heard, however, the boy said he thought the program was valuable.

"I'm not fearful for my life from these staff members," he said. "All the staff members who did something wrong, they were fired, they didn't get a second chance."

Mr. Ahrenberg was surprised by his son's revelations.

"I don't know how it's happening," he said. "Slamming kids into tables, that's something I'd want to hear about."

Mrs. Ahrenberg, though she did not listen in on the interview, called shortly after it was concluded to express her concern, not about what may have happened to her son or other students at Ivy Ridge, but about what effect such revelations might have on the school.

"That school is so darn good, it scares me that it might be closed down and other kids not be able to benefit from it," she said.

Mr. Kay rejects allegations that students are systematically abused at Ivy Ridge or any other WWASPS-related school.

"When all the truth comes out, these people look at the claims and review their public school records under law and look at their psychological examinations and reports, and look at their activities and their lying over the years, when it comes out there'll be nothing to it," he said. He said the organization and its schools never have lost a lawsuit alleging such abuse.

"The sad thing is a lot of people misrepresent the truth," Mr. Finlinson said. "People believe the allegations rather than the people doing it. Everyone associated with me are good people and they do a great job, but it doesn't seem like people believe us on that.