CEDU Survivor. October 1989-May 1992
Hi My name is Laura DuPuy Weeks. I give full permission for my statement to be used. Let me start by thanking the people who are doing this. I have thought of this often. My friends and I have just recently made a documentary on CEDU with everyone telling there stories. Our hope is to raise awareness about therapeutic treatment facilities and to maybe, just maybe give some rights to adolescences and offer some protection, to break this horrible trend.
I was sent to CEDU October 4th 1989. I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was 14 years old and I was tricked into going there by an educational consultant and my parents. I had behavioral problems growing up, a lot dealing with adoption. I also had a history of alcohol and drug abuse. But it was the "oppositional defiance disorder" that sent me there. Basically a label thrown on me however I do not remember seeing a doctor to receive this label. I was experimenting with alcohol and weed. I snuck out of the house, fought with my parents and was an average student at school. I hung around with the troublemakers, all though it seemed that it was I that was the trouble maker, mostly do to the fact that I was always grounded and never allowed to do anything. So that is the behavior that landed me that label. Let me also include that I am from North Carolina. I was sent to the top of a mountain in California.
The program at CEDU was 2 1/2 years. I never got to say goodbye to anyone. I didn't come home for a visit till almost 2 years later. I was not allowed to speak with or correspond with siblings or grandparents for the first 9 months. I spoke on a monitored phone call to my parents every 2 weeks. My mail was read before it was sent and before I received it.
I felt completely abandoned...again. The program was based on one mans idea turned philosophy, to be implicated not by a highly trained therapist or doctor, but by other recovering addicts and criminals most of whom had no education in working with children. These so called faculty verbal, emotionally and mentally abused us repeatedly. They climbed inside our heads, used our horrible thoughts and issues against us in front of our peers. Convinced us all that obviously we were not wanted by our families and that this was the last stop. I remember specifically being told many times that we had no rights and that our parents signed them over to the school.
Three days a week were divided into groups and sent to sit in a circle and have these "raps" Basically being screamed at by the faculty and then your peers at how much your a loser, slut, whore, mistake and so on. Until you broke down and cried. I was 14.. I had not lost my virginity yet. They also had emotional growth experiences where we had 7 different ones that lasted 24 hours. They kept us up all night screaming and yelling at us telling us awful things until we all finally broke. They made us do bizarre things and humiliated us in front of our peers.
I ran away 7 times. Again I am from North Carolina. I didn't know where I was going and I did not care as long as I wasn't there anymore. I hitched hiked with strangers, wandered the woods and hung in the shadows. I always got picked up by the cops. Once I refused to go back there and told them to send me to Juvenal Hall. I sat there for three days. Once brought back I was not a loud to speak unless spoken to. I=No laughing, no smiling, no singing, and I could not be touched or touch. Only a few people were a loud to speak to me. I did work and dish detail, as well as sit at a table in the dinning room, for all to see, but they had to pretend like I didn't exist. The longest I sat at one was for 28 days.
There is so much more to say that it could be put in a book. There was no doctor or nurse during the time I was there. No licensed therapist. There were children there that needed far greater attention and could have benefited from some medication, that was not allowed. We had no contact with the outside world. Education there was a joke. I left there at 17. My education was the same as when I went in. At a 9th grade level. Somehow the school got strange things approved for education. For example, chopping and crosscutting wood was science. Tending a farm was for something else. We only had one real teacher there and she was part time. We did a lot of craft stuff as classes too. So when I started college. It took me over 2 years to catch up to a freshman level at college.
The lack of education is not what scarred me, it was the rest of the awful experience that did. I have struggled for the past 17 years with that school. I have been diagnosed with PTSD form the school. I have had night terrors ever since I left. Mostly about being sent back. Waking up in utter terror sweats and so on. I have literally run away from the emotional scarring by moving all the time, problems with drugs, anger,pain and confusion. It was not until last year that I was able to get some help and deal with the things that happened to me there at that school.
Again I give my permission for you to use my statement. If there is any further information I can give ( because I have tons of it)please don't hesitate to contact me. thank you for your time,
Laura ldupuy1
CEDU war a large organization and very much founded the term "Therapeutic Boarding School". The first CEDU school was opened around 1968 and all the school closed in 2005 due to some lawsuits.
References:
Datasheet about the boarding schools from the Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
The original statement on Youthrights
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