I am not a writer and I may not use proper punctuation and I will probably ramble on, but the story I am going to tell is unbelievable in every possible way. It is hard to organize my thoughts as I scribble these notes into the small margins of a book I grabbed earlier. The kid checking up on me assumes I am reading the book, because why wouldn’t I be? The truth is that it is the only place I can safely write. Everywhere else is compromised! Afterwards I will slip it back into the shelf amongst the hundreds of other books. I pray nobody finds it. I chose the book with the most uninteresting title I could find. If anyone finds it they can match it to my handwriting.
But if nobody does then when I finally escape this place I will bring it with me to show the authorities or anyone who will listen.
Elan is a horrible place. They make the kids here fight each other in a ritual called “The Ring”. They put the kids into isolation and they stay there for weeks and months, until they barely act human. These are kids! Some as young as 13. They have a thing called a General Meeting where they force our entire House of around 60 children to scream and degrade one poor unlucky kid chosen by the Staff. It is called a GM for short. It should be called the 30 minute hate. We have all been chosen for a GM. Sometimes The House has 4 or 5 in a single day. All day in Elan is just screaming. Kids screaming at each other in Groups, in GM’s, in Dealing Crews, in Blasts, or screaming and cheering when a kid is getting his ass kicked in The Ring.
They get away with it because all of our communication to the outside world is censored. I was not allowed to write letters for a long time and when I finally “earned” the privilege all of my letters were read and sometimes sent back to me with edits for a mandatory rewrite. The first letter I was allowed to write my parents was called a “Guilt Letter” and it was supposed to be a list of all the bad things I had ever done. No “Hi Mom and Dad” intro. No explanation of why I was writing it. Just a straight up confession of everything wrong I had ever done. And I mean everything. My first was a couple pages but after being threatened with a GM, I eventually turned it in with over 20 pages. Some kids wrote over 50 pages! Staff then read my Guilt Letter and told the other kids in the program about the content. They are encouraged to use the information against me, it is all part of “The Program”.
And I cannot tell anyone outside of Elan what is happening. All of our phone calls are monitored. Your first phone call to your parents is scripted and you work it out with Staff for weeks before you are allowed to make it. When you do it is over speaker-phone in a conference room full of the adults who run The Program. If you make any mistake or go off topic they end the call and bring you back for a GM and you get Shotdown. And then you can’t earn your weekly phone call. Even when you do earn it another kid in a higher position is always there listening to what you say. They will hang up the phone if you try to tell your parents how things really are. Sadly, I have hung up other kids calls when I was assigned to be the “Support Person” (or SP for short). It is all part of The Program. I had no choice.
I have been forced to do a lot of horrible things to the other children here. Scream and degrade them daily, monitor them and write reports on them to give to the Staff, beat them up in The Ring, beat them up when they are put in isolation. We call isolation “The Corner”. It is all a part of The Program and if I refuse then those things will happen to me! None of us ever know when we can finally leave Elan. Some kids have been here for almost 4 years with no end in sight.
Sometimes we have three-House Rings and three-House GMs. There are three Houses in Elan and I am in House 8 with about 60 other kids, both boys and girls. We never see people from the other Houses but sometimes they bring all of us to House 3 (because they have the biggest Dining Room) and all 120 people on the complex give one person a 3-House GM. A 3-House Ring means you get beat up and 120 other kids watch and cheer for the people fighting you. You see these things even once and you know you are no longer in America. You know that Elan can and will do anything to you and get away with it. That nobody will ever come here and stop them. And that you do not have the resources available to tell anyone about it. Sometimes I feel like nobody will even believe me when I finally escape from this place. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
The entire Elan system is run by children. Staff oversees everything like Gods but The Program is strictly based on “peer accountability”. All of the children are in different positions like the military. Every House has two kinds of people: Strength and non-Strength. The non-Strength are not allowed to talk to each other. They are not even allowed to look at each other. They are kind of like the slaves of The House. Whenever one non needs to talk to another non, they have to find a Strength and ask them to “be aware” of the conversation. Being a Strength isn’t easy either, one mistake and you will get demoted back to non-Strength.
The non-Strengths of The House have to shower at night instead of the morning, sleep in top bunks instead of bottom bunks, and they cannot do anything without a Strength around to watch them, not even use the bathroom. All day they have to clean The House and since 60 of us live in this little House, it is always dirty. They also have to get their food last at meal times. Even us Strength are hungry all the time, everyone who comes to Elan loses weight. I go to sleep hungry every single night. But when I was a non-Strength, it was even worse.
This is how everything in Elan is set up. But even amongst Strength you have different levels. I am at the rank of Department Head in The Program. So while I am a Strength, I am not a High Strength. High Strength positions get to eat before Strength and they get chosen every month to go out on special trips. Everyone wants to be a High-Strength but a lot of people will never reach that level. The best High-Strength position is called Coordinator. There are higher ranks than Coordinator but most kids will never reach them. Everyone wants to reach Coordinator because if you can hold that position for 6 months or a year then you can ask Staff for Graduation dates. Every once in a while we have a Graduation in The House and we all say goodbye to him or her. There is a big ceremony and it lasts 2 hours or more. It all focuses on that one kid and how well he or she did in The Program and about all the good things they are going to do when they get “out there”. Everyone here calls the real world “out there”. I remember thinking it was strange when I was a New Resident but now even I use the phrase. I remember during one of my first meals, a kid at the table asked me “What is it like, right now? Out there?” That was a weird moment. That felt like a lifetime ago.
Everyone in our House is in different ranks but we also have different “Crews” that run The House. We have the Service Crew that basically deals with keeping The House clean, ordering new supplies, dealing with the New Residents. We have the Communications Crew that deals with how people are communicating in The House and Encounter Group rosters for the week. We have the Business Office that deals with various paperwork that needs to be done and distributing materials throughout The House. We have the Kitchen Crew that deals with meals and getting the plates/cups/utensils on time from the Big Kitchen. And we have the X’s Crew, the X is slang for Expeditor. Basically the X’s deal with House security, making sure people don’t run away, setting up people on Zones, and making sure The House is secure. There is a kid called the Chief Expeditor and they are basically the Chief of Police. Everybody in The House is scared of the Chief because he or she can basically do whatever they want. If they deem you a threat then they can order people to tackle you on the spot, restrain you with zip-ties, and then haul you off to The Corner.
When people in our House get scared they yell “Chief!” as loud as they can and the Chief and a bunch of the High Strength show up and someone usually ends up on the ground. Communication in The House is built on the concept of different kids who “echo” calls. They stand at strategic points throughout The House that we call Zones. So when someone in any part of The House yells “Chief!” then the people at the zones echo the call but add the place where the call came from, like “Chief Dining Room!” or “Chief Service Crew!”. And The House is not so big so kids in the high ranks can respond to any part of it within a matter of seconds.
But the Zones also have another, more important function: they are the guards. And I cannot stress this enough: these are kids on the Zones. The entire Elan Program is run by children. We are the ones who guard each other. We are the ones who order supplies for The House. We do everything. Too many things to list right now. Anyways, we have Zones placed strategically around The House and obviously only Strength are allowed to hold them. So every door is blocked or overseen by a Strength. Every entrance or exit to another part of The House is blocked or overseen by a Strength. And we only have 4 Zones. I told you our house was small.
Really, being in this place with 60 other people is a living nightmare. It is always so loud. It is always so dirty. Someone is always screaming or freaking out that day, usually a few people. Everyone is always running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Some kid is always watching you from a Zone. People are everywhere, holding clipboards and their job is just to fill up the clipboard with "Guilt" and suspicious things going on. I know because I used to do it, it is the rank before Department Head. And it is not an easy job. The position is called “Expeditor”.
There are usually a lot more people in the position of Expeditor than any other position in The House. It is the first Strength position and one of the most demanding, so it usually takes a kid a long time to earn the next promotion to Department Head of a Crew. I have seen people stuck in Expeditor for 6 months to a year. The most crucial part of being an Expeditor is completing your “Clipboard Packet” every day. If you do not you will be punished. All Expeditors are required to carry around a wooden clipboard and the other Strength are always trying to steal it from them, like a game. If you can take an Expeditors clipboard when they are not paying attention, you are actually praised because you have shown a hole in the security apparatus of The House. The idea is that if a Strength can manage to get one then a non-Strength could too. And if a non got a hold of one it would be a serious security breach.
Every Expeditor carries a wooden clipboard, but attached to the piece of wood is a packet of paperwork and that is called the Clipboard Packet. It is kind of like a test, with answers that need to be filled in and given to the Chief Expeditor at the end of every day. Weekends are no different. Surveillance in Elan never ends. The Clipboard Packet contains different sections. One of the pages contains something called an Attitude Report Form (ARF for short) and it names a non-Strength that you are assigned to for the day. In order to complete your ARF you need to talk to the kid and ask him questions and pretend to just be “having a chat”. In reality you are building an evaluation of them based on questions listed by the Staff. How do they feel about the program? How likely are they to run away? How many friends do they have in The House? How many are Strength? What do they talk to the Strength about? What Coordinators do they look up to? And lots of other questions that the target has no idea about, they just assume you are being friendly.
Another example from the Clipboard Packet is the Dining Room “Guilt” section. There are 3 or 4 blank pages with circles on them representing the table layout of the dining room. Using small handwriting, Expeditors are expected to fill in those pages with Guilt that the people in The House are “acquiring”. Most of the day, people are in dining room and almost everything in Elan is deemed Guilt, so an average Expeditor can fill up those pages in a day while a more ambitious one will ask for even more pages to fill up. Since Expeditors are now Strength, they are trained and put on Zones for the first time. So they are standing at the best vantage points of The House. Guilt can be doing anything from glancing out the window to taking an extra bite of your lunch after the meal time runs out. Acquiring Guilt is like breathing in Elan, everyone is doing it all the time and The Program requires that you “cop to it”.
About once a week you are handed a blank sheet of paper by another kid and told to “cop to your Guilt” and when you hand back that paper it had better be full. Sometimes Staff asks you to write down your own LE’s (learning experience) = punishments for your Guilt. So a lot of people actually end up “shooting themselves down” or being demoted to Shotdown, the lowest and most miserable rank of The House.
Guilt is a big part of the Elan program. We have three “Cardinal Rules” and they are: No Sex, No Drugs, No Violence. But since we are in the middle of the woods and in a House with constant surveillance, these rules take on a different meaning. “No Sex” is the first Cardinal Rule and it is taken so literally that even glancing at the female side of the dining room during dinner will get you in trouble. If anyone in The House were so bold as to pass a note to a member of the opposite sex they would not only be demoted, they would get a General Meeting, maybe thrown into the Corner for a while, and undoubtedly would have to “restart” the program from scratch. I have seen people in The Program for a year or more get caught passing notes and they were sent back to zero as if all the previous time never even existed. Even having a crush on a member of the opposite sex is Guilt and as Staff knows we are teenagers who cannot help it, we are constantly having to cop to our Guilt and if we DON’T name names of who we have a crush on, then that is an even more serious sign of Guilt: deception. And a sure sign that you have a whole lot more Guilt below the surface.
The next Cardinal Rule is “No Drugs” and is also taken to the extreme. We are in the middle of nowhere and getting drugs here would be next to impossible. So people do crazy things like steal the shaving cream bottles to separate the nitrus canister from inside. During Spring a kid once hid some fruit in the pockets of his Winter jacket which was hanging in the closet with the hope that it would ferment throughout the Summer months and become alcoholic.
Some kids cannot stand that we are always hungry and they secretly hide bits of food. When they are caught they are shotdown and given a GM or two. Staff will say things like “Food is your drug. And you are an addict! You are breaking the Cardinal Rules!”. It is amazing how a couple rules can be twisted so out of proportion to make our lives a living hell.
The final Cardinal Rule is taken to the extreme just as badly as the first. “No violence” is defined as anything aggressive, even a gesture or a look. If a High Strength feels threatened in any way, even imaginary, they can call CHIEF! and the person (usually a non-Strength) will be physically confronted and most likely tackled to the floor and restrained. Since the word of a High Strength is much more credible than the word of a non-Strength, there needs to be very little evidence, if any, to prove the threat. Residents are not even allowed to shake hands or give each other high-fives. Nothing physical because this is considered an act of violence by Elan. Bumping into the wrong (powerful) person in the hallway could be construed as a violent attack and lead the offended person straight into The Ring.
Elan School is now closed
Sources:
- The original testimony (Reddit)
- Factsheet about the school (Fornits Wiki)
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