3 testimonies about Hyde School

These testimonies about Hyde School was found on the Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora.

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Survivor 1:

I think one of the biggest red flags in my opinion was during the time I was there I would self-harm a lot. While one nurse was compassionate whenever it would happen, the head nurse at the time and a couple other staff members including the dean of students Mr. Truluck would shame me for it. As far as I know these incidents weren’t always reported to my parents and there were never any sort of psych evaluations done.

One time after the death of a former student who was my best friend I attempted to go to my dorm parents as I was feeling like self harming but I was really trying to work on it and had been told by the compassionate nurse and other faculty that I had permission (as if this should of even needed to be given) to go to my dorm parents after lights out if I felt like self harming and to talk about the death. A staff member on duty happened to be walking through brook house at the moment and told me no and made me feel badly about that situation. I proceeded to return to my room and and do significantly more harm to the point I thought I might of fucked up and overdone it. I ended up going to my dorm parents who called in other staff and they simply tended to the wounds and let me go back to my room.

On another note either my junior year or senior year I tried to sign up to do big brothers/big sisters. The faculty in charge signed off on it and was excited for me to do something like that but Mr. Truluck decided to veto the decision. When I went to him to ask why he said “he did not trust me alone with a child” and other things painting me out like I was a pedophile. To this day I still believe Truluck was consistently unkind to me because I was open about being a part of the LGBT community.

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Survivor 2:

In terms of self harm I encountered a very similar problem when asking for help at Hyde. Mr. Truluck was the dean still and made me feel absolutely horrible. My dorm parents were completely unhelpful and tried their best to avoid helping me. I remember asking for help once and being made to feel like a reject, failure, and weirdo.. let’s just say I did not handle their response well...and then when I brought to the nurses later that day I was only made to feel worse.

My self harming behaviors reached the highest levels while I was at Hyde. I never felt like I could talk about it with anyone, so I would hide it. Staff would gossip about it and somehow other students found out (not from me, I told no one). I remember getting a note from my then~boyfriend telling me that one of the “seniors” pulled him aside and warned him about me. (I still have that note, but it has students’ names so I won’t include it).

When I completed Hyde I was able to find the right support and was told that being open and honest about the feelings that I had that were leading me to self harm would be the only way to move forward. I did so and the self harm stopped. There has got to be a way to better help students going through this, I hope things are different now, as I was there more than 10 years ago.

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Survivor 3:

I struggled with self harm a lot in high school. Especially at Hyde. One time I cut too deep and I had to go get stitches. And the staff that took me literally made jokes about it. I was on the dance team and she was one of my coaches and she made a joke saying that I should do a dance to Stitches by Shawn Mendes and completely made the situation a joke. The fact that I cut my wrist so deep that I had to get stitches was comical to her. And afterwards I got no support. Only sending me to Eustis afterwards because I was having “behavioral” issues, bc i was suicidal and they didn’t take it seriously. At all. I spent 2 years at Hyde and that was the most difficult time of my life.

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Source:
The original testimony on the Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora

Hyde School testimony

This testimony was located on the Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora in a message thread.

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A Negative Experience

I also went to Hyde School 30 years ago and am somewhat amazed to come across this forum. I can't think of a more disingenuous and destructive place for an adolescent. While the basic premises of character building and tough love seem worthy, and may even work for some who went to Hyde, the overall environment that was created was unhealthy, not to say bizarre.

After 1972 the school became increasingly strident and hysterical. Joe Gauld threw the most outrageous tantrums, shrieking and ranting accompanied by a Hitleresque waving of arms, which in any sane place would have been viewed as unacceptable and aberrant. At Hyde these were perceived as justified and that the recipient must have provoked them by a lack of willingness to accept some deep truth about themselves. I have since learned such behavior is always a cheap, manipulative power play.

The over-emotionalism at Hyde was particularly unhealthy. Manufactured crises, whether of individuals or over the school's direction, was always accompanied by wailing and crying as people confessed their supposed shortcomings and confronted others. There was an incredible lack of privacy, with every aspect of a student's life scrutinized by both faculty and peers. The term "brother's keeper" was twisted to mean betrayal and students were acclaimed for confronting and making public others negative attitudes, which really meant maintaining a capacity for independent and critical thinking.

Seminars, now evidently called discovery groups, started out as helpful and supportive, but evolved into a hysterical feeding frenzy as students were confronted over anything from poor athletic performances, which necessarily demonstrated a lack of commitment to themselves, or an inability to "give" and open up their true feelings. After 1972, these frequently degenerated into screaming and wailing sessions.

When you are involved in this environment on a daily basis, one's own sense of reality becomes perverted. Because we were basically isolated on campus with parents coerced into supporting the Hyde Way, hysteria and tantrums became normal, even commendable. There was an illusion created that had no basis in reality. This reality was to be perpetuated by students who were willing to make a lifetime commitment to Hyde. Some of these are evidently still there today.

In 1976, one student who couldn't handle the pressure tried to burn down the Mansion in the middle of the night. As this was the main building at the time, which served as a dormitory, dining area and housed all classrooms, it was a highly dangerous act. While there was considerable damage, there were no injuries.

But perhaps the sickest incident I witnessed occurred in the winter of 1974 and involved the confrontation of a faculty member who will remain nameless. This teacher was a definite Poindexter type, socially challenged but a perfectly decent individual. Evidently he proved unable or unwilling to truly "give" of himself in the faculty seminar (discovery group). Early one afternoon, then headmaster Ed Legg announced an emergency school meeting and this teacher was hauled in front of students, faculty and staff and confronted.

What followed was a scene right out of Lord of the Flies. Ed Legg set the tone, offering up a damning appraisal of the teacher's character and deep-seated problem connecting with the school. He then opened the floor to other students and faculty and 240 people set upon the teacher, screaming and crying for two hours, confronting him with how he was not only betraying himself, but the entire school. "I can't feel anything you're saying", screamed one student. "I'm so disappointed in you, how could you let us down like this", sobbed another.

After this incredible emotional purging he was given an opportunity to "give" something of himself. Obviously in a state of considerable distress, he admitted to an affair he had during the Vietnam War with his best friend's wife. "And the damn woman seduced me", he admitted, choking back tears. This was deemed by faculty and students to be insufficiently giving and the teacher was judged to not truly be in touch with his feelings. Joe Gauld then closed the meeting saying, "But the person I feel most bad for is your son". The teacher had a two-month old baby.

It was all very hysterical, tawdry and pathetic. I remember being shocked and frightened at the time by the emotional intensity of it all. It was a manipulated mob run amuck. As with all of Hyde, the experience had no positive educational value. The only lesson learned was that frightened people in a group feed off each other, and are to be avoided.

To those who feel that people critical of Hyde need to toughen up, my response is there is a difference between toughness and manipulated hysteria and false truth. I had a great deal of unlearning to do as a consequence of my experience at Hyde, which took a number of years. After time past, my parents felt deeply guilty about sending me there. The fact that the same philosophy still exists at the school, and some of the same people, or their offspring, remain in charge is disturbing. To those considering Hyde as an educational alternative, take note of some of the more sober posts in this forum and consider other alternatives.

Frederick W. Burnside

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Source:
The original testimony on the Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora

evenlesssleep at Ironwood in Maine

This testimony was found on Reddit. All rights goes to the original author known as evenlesssleep.

Here is a quick summary off the top of my head, of what I believe are the worst things I experienced at Ironwood RTC (also affectionately known as "Ironhood" by a select few residents). I have tried posting something like this to the subreddit before, however I wasn't happy with the way I formatted the information. This post is now here to stay. I can guarantee that any information I have regarding Ironwood is more transparent than the information Ironwood's secretaries are willing to release, or even speak on. So please, feel free to ask if you have any questions.

If you are reading this because you are considering placing your child at Ironwood due to concerns about your child's mental well-being, please be aware that Ironwood is not licensed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2006, Ironwood (IW) was founded with help by former employees from Turn-about Ranch (Wayne Stinson and Teresa Shinedling). I was a relatively new resident there, arriving in Winter of 2007 and "graduating" from the highest level of the program in 2008. I was escorted to this program from my home in FL, three weeks after I turned sixteen years old for the reason being that I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. I spent eight months in this program.

CONCERNING PRIVACY

I was required to write in a journal, which was explained to me as "a private resource that nobody will read" --Bonnie Rector. We were expected to write in these journals every night. Not writing your journal page for the night would result in a punishment. As a collective, our journals were systematically read by staff, who then used the contents of our journals against us during one of what we referred to as "intimidation sessions".

CONCERNING FREE SPEECH

My rights to communication were revoked for days at a time, under their rules of the "Code of Silence" (COS). I was not allowed to talk, acknowledge, laugh, make eye contact, write notes, or use sign language to communicate with other residents of the program, for things as simple as asking what their favorite musical group was. I simply cannot begin to count the amount of times I was put on COS. I recall one time I was put on COS for a day or two by Brian York, because I dared to utter the words "Jesus Christ" in a conversation that was within earshot of him. There was also another time where I asked a new resident what kind of music he had liked, while we did dishes, and Lisa Wing gave me a COS for the rest of the day.

CONCERNING MAIL CENSORSHIP

My outgoing mail was censored. We were forced to write "e-letters" home every Wednesday. These were written on A4 printing paper, which were never placed in envelopes, but instead handed straight to a designated staff member, who then scanned these documents using a computer and sent the resulting electronic file to my parents' e-mail. We were instructed that the e-letters had to be of a positive nature, regardless of you were actually feeling that day, otherwise we were to be punished. I recall a point in which I was sitting in a corner, with tears of sadness falling from my eyes, re-writing my e-letter home because the one I had originally written to my parents wasn't "satisfactory enough" per Erin Wilbur and Gordon Thayer's expectations.

I had a peer of mine confide in me that they were told by staff members they were "writing too many letters home".

Another peer of mine actually had one of his sealed envelope letters opened by a staff member named D'arcy, who read it over and told him that he didn't write enough in the letter to his parents, despite the fact that he was going on his "home visit" to see his parents the very next day. He was at the highest level in the program when this happened. Despicable.

My very first day at IW, I was forced to write a letter home to my parents while on "Impact". Impact was where you went if you didn't subscribe to the program in full. It was a 4x4 foot circle of rocks in the woods, that you were not allowed to leave. You are given a fire to keep warm. You are not allowed to let the fire go out, even if the wood is burning wet, and the wind is blowing smoke in your face for hours. If you left the circle, your time in the circle started over. You were not allowed to communicate with other residents (COS) while on Impact. You were not allowed to sleep or lay down while on Impact. Its purpose was to allow a person reflect on why they were in that situation, in addition to detoxifying new residents. Anyway, I must have written a four page letter while in that circle. When I was finished, a staff member named Greg Cooley read my letter and gave me an extra day in isolation because the contents of my letter were negative. My first four days at this program were spent in isolation.

CONCERNING TRANSGRESSIONS

I was unreasonably punished for my actions.

I was sent to "Impact" again for 3 days, after asking Aimee LeClerc if I could go outside to watch the rest of the boy's group play basketball. This was a day or two prior to Thanksgiving, marking my second week at Ironwood. This means I had literally spent 50% of my first two weeks in this program in their freeze your ass version of solitary.

A couple of months later, I had belched a single time during lunch, and was given twelve demerits for doing so (they were trying to also make laughing at farts a punishable offense, I kid you not.). This translated to me being expected to perform twelve additional hours of labor, in addition to a demerit I had already "earned". I was forced to work a total of thirteen hours on our "free" day, Sunday.
At one point, I had attempted to file a complaint to staff that certain residents were physically assaulting me when staff was not on the floor. I was punished to "Work Impact", along with the entire boy's group, to fix ruts in the road at the main entrance in order to "protect my identity". I was forced to work with the perpetrators, and they were able to easily deduce that I was the reason why they were being punished.

CONCERNING EMOTIONAL NEGLECT AND APPROPRIATE ACCESS TO MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES

I witnessed a young man in a wheelchair harm himself by dumping his body into a fire pit. He was within 30 yards of me, as we were both on "Impact", otherwise known as isolation. I can still feel the cold and sharp sting of adrenaline I felt at that moment. I can still hear the thumping of his body after he fell. I still hear the crackling of his orange jumpsuit as he writhed in the fire. I was unable to go anywhere while this happened. I was forced to stay in that stone circle, to watch and to listen. I asked to speak to a licensed therapist within the hour after I had witnessed that, and I was denied. It wasn't because these events unfolded at an unreasonable hour either--it was broad daylight.
That was not an isolated incident either. There were plenty of other times where I had asked for access to a licensed therapist while in isolation while under incredible emotional distress, I had been refused services.

Why was I refused adequate access to mental health services? This event haunts me to this day.

CONCERNING PROPER CARE OF FOOD PREPARATION AND CONSUMPTION

Food was used as a punishment. We were forced to consume bulgur wheat in it's raw and uncut form, which made the entire boy's lodge ill. I was forced to eat avocado slices that had been left to ferment on a table for three hours while we were in school session, which led to my becoming painfully ill as my insides rejected it. We were forced to consume highly unpalatable food that staff were unwilling to even taste. I wonder if there are any of my peers out there that still remember "Ashtray Chili", and "Formaldehyde Noodles".

CONCERNING MEDICAL NECESSITIES

My mother and father made clear to me that they paid money for IW to have my teeth examined. At not one point during my stay there, was I brought to a dental clinic to see this procedure through.
What happened? Where is that money now?

CONCERNING SLEEP

In the lower levels of this program, only an army blanket and sleeping bag were all we were given to sleep with (we slept on particle board with no pillows or mattresses). We were told that if we were caught using the army blanket given to us as a pillow, we would be punished. I slept in this fashion for over three months before I "earned" the right to use a pillow.

CONCERNING VERBAL ABUSE

I was verbally abused by staff members. I quote,
"You look like the type of person that abuses animals." --Aimee Leclerc "You're an asshole." --Erin Wilbur

CONCERNING PROPAGANDA

We were expected to be columnists for "The Treatment Times", a summary of our activities at IW. I was under the impression that this information we had authored was sent to our parents back at home through the same means as our "e-letters". I was shocked to find out that they were using my writings, including images of me, without permission-- as a propaganda tool for themselves on the IW website. It took over a month, and multiple phone calls in order for them to comply with my demand that they were not allowed to use my image, nor my written works without my exclusive permissions.

CONCERNING CODE VIOLATIONS

There was a ladder inside of the main lodge of the level 1's and 2's, that was built out of scrapped tree trunks the level 1's and 2's had found in the woods surrounding Ironwood. This ladder was used for access to a loft which held supplies. When code inspection day came, I was instructed along with another resident to carry that very ladder out of the lodge, and to bury it under foliage behind the level 1's and 2's facility. This same ladder was shortly brought back into use inside the lodge after the inspection officials had left.
Why couldn't IW afford to buy/install a ladder that was up to code? Shameful.

I wish I was making this up, however everything that I have written here is true, and is just the tip of the iceberg. I will try to update this as much as I humanly can, as my memories are innumerable. Anyone with a logical explanation for how any of this is an effective treatment for major depressive disorder, I urge you to please leave an answer, as I have not found one yet. I, like many of you out there, fear that I now suffer from post-traumatic stress as a result of being sent to this type of facility. I fear that I will never be granted closure regarding this experience, due to the moral apathy and inaction of Marion and Rod Rodrigue, the original founders. Cheers.


Sources:

• The original testimony on Reddit
• Factsheet about the facility (Fornits Wiki)

Video testimony about Ironwood in Maine

This video testimony was found on Youtube. All rights goes to the original author.



Ironwood was founded in 2006. In the start some former employees from Turnabout Ranch in Utah helped the management to establish the school. They have since developed their own program. The profit seems to finance the owners interests in horse breeding.

In 2014 a former employee was charged with child sex assaults. He fled the state before the investigation was finished and it is not known if the charges had anything to do with his work at the facility

Sources:

• My poetic experience, juvenile camp age 17 (The original testimony on Youtube)
• 181. Ironwood Maine (1000 places You don't want to be as a teenager)
• Ex-police chief accused of child sex assaults worked at Maine teen facility (Portland Press Herald)

Untold Story of Elan, pt.2

Here I am pulling again, watching a new kid in The Corner. “Pulling” is Elan-speak for “staying up all night” aka working the graveyard shift. There are a couple different kinds of pulling. I am pulling on the SP, which is short for Support Person. Every time a child is sent into isolation then another kid like me is assigned to his SP. Since The Corner is 24/7, someone needs to be assigned to stay up watching him at night to make sure he or she doesn’t try to escape or get into anything they aren’t supposed to be doing. I guess we can’t just lock him in the room because there are windows that they could escape from. Not to mention the suicide risk of leaving a Corner student alone. If the kid kills himself, how is Elan going to collect his “tuition”?

The Corner is a chair is shoved where the two walls meet in a room isolated from the rest of the population. You are placed in the chair. You are inches from the wall, just enough to keep your knees in place and to make sure you don’t try to do anything that you aren’t allowed to do. You cannot talk, slump in your chair, move around, stretch your legs, or stand-up. You sit in the chair all day. At midnight your mattress is brought from the dorm and thrown onto the floor of your isolation room. You sleep on the mattress while an SP pulls on you in a desk-chair blocking the door. The next day you are woken up at 7am and brought down stairs to quickly shower and brush your teeth. Then from 7:15am until midnight you are facing the corner of the room again. If you try to do anything you aren’t allowed to do then your SP calls CHIEF and you are restrained and often times put into zipties. The worst thing about being ziptied is that is makes it much harder to eat your lunch or dinner when it arrives. Being in The Corner is hell, at least 1/3 of the people in The House have been there at least once. The usual time is a few days, but being in for a few weeks is not uncommon. Being put in for a few months happens as well. One or two people have been in for the better part of a year.

When your Corner time ends, you are taken into the Dining Room to receive a General Meeting. After the GM you are returned to the population as a Shotdown. A lot of kids resist, react, or “act out” during the GM so they are taken right back up to The Corner after everyone “gets their feelings off”. This process can go on for months and months. The thing about the Elan Program is that you won’t get kicked out. And there lies the real power of The Program. Everything that you can possibly do will be dealt with by the system. Once you get into Elan, don’t expect to be released.

Another form of pulling is called “Night Owl”. That is a kid chosen to keep count of everyone in The House, all night long. Since we have both boys and girls here, there is one Night Owl for each gender. And since Elan is not stupid enough to allow a boy and girl to be alone together while everyone else is asleep, an adult is brought in to break up what The Program calls a “1-on-1”. This adult is called the Night Guard and is paid by Elan to come in every night. We have 3 or 4 Night Guards who all come in on different nights. The Night Guard calls a “run” every 10 to 15 minutes, from 1am until 8am. The boy Night Owl stays in the boys bathroom all night. When a run is called he pops out and goes in and out of all the dorms counting the boys while they sleep and then shouts his “count” to the Night Guard who records it. The boy Night Owl then switches with the girl Night Owl, who is guarding the back door Zone of The House all night. He guards the Zone while she goes through the female dorms and counts them. She shouts her count and then goes back to her Zone. Since the Night Guard sits on the Zone guarding the front door, him and the girl Night Owl have both exits covered all the time, all night. The boy goes back into the males bathroom until the next run is called.

The “run” consists of walking into each dorm with a flashlight to count the sleeping bodies. You are required to lift the covers off of everyone to make sure they are not wearing shoes or clothes. This makes getting a decent night’s sleep in Elan very difficult and you eventually learn that if you wrap your feet in the blanket, you will be woken often. The Night Owl also shines the flashlight into the closets to check that no jackets or shoes are missing. Lastly, they walk over to the window and see that it is closed and they give the screen an examination to make sure it hasn’t been cut. It is also important to check the heaters in winter. They need to be clear because someone may try to cause a fire as a distraction to make a get-away.

This process is then repeated in every dorm.

When someone is in the Corner and another kid is on his SP all night, then the Night Owl also has to climb up the steps as part of his run and physically see us and add us to the count. I am that SP right now, and that is why I have the time to write my story into the margins of this book I am pretending to read. But every 10-15 minutes, I have to listen for his approaching steps so I can hide my pen and pick the book up to my face. If the Night Owl came up and caught me sleeping on my post then I would be in a lot of trouble. He would wake up another High-Strength to take my place and I would retire to my bed in the dorms. When I woke up I would be shotdown. Falling asleep even for a second while pulling SP on the Corner is a very serious breach of security.

Shotdown is the lowest position in The House. The only person lower is the Corner student. If you are a shotdown (verb) and a brand new resident gets thrown into The House that day, then even he or she gets to eat before you do. As a Shotdown (noun), your job is to scrub a small section of the floor with a sponge all day. Shotdowns are chosen to do all the bad things in The House: scrub trashcans, showers, toilets. All day, every day. For days or weeks straight.

So falling asleep is not an option for me. Even a long blink at the wrong time and I am screwed if the Night Owl catches it. In Elan, you are always being watched, even in the middle of the night while you are forced to watch someone else.

During the day there is a system called Headcounts. Every ten minutes, from 9am to midnight, there is someone running through The House with a clipboard and a Headcounts sheet. The Headcounts sheet has the name of every single kid in The House. It looks like a piece of graph paper, with the names going down the side followed by a string of boxes. We have codes for every part of The House: SC for the Service Crew room, BO for the Business Office, X for the Security room, DR for Dining Room, etc… Headcounts goes through the entire House in about 6 minutes, records where everyone is, and then gets his run signed off by the Chief, COD, and Staff, in that order. Each may decide to double-check the run to make sure it is accurate. An inaccurate run could get you shot-down. Most New Residents have no idea that Headcounts is running all day.

As part of Headcounts, every so often the Coordinator-on-Duty calls HOUSE IN THE DINING ROOM and the Zones echo the call. Everyone, except Corner kids and their SP’s, are expected to immediately flood into the dining room and enter their chairs with military precision. During this time the Expeditors are also paying close attention to anyone who moves too slow or anyone not looking directly up front or slouching in their chair and this is all Guilt. Once everyone is in their place, which should take about 30 seconds by Elan Program standards, the Coordinator-on-Duty (or COD for short) reads each name and each person says YES after there name is called. This naming ritual happens 10 or more times a day, reminding everyone that running away is not a smart idea.

Headcounts runs from 9am to Midnight. From Midnight – 1am, runs are made the Dorm Night Owls. 1am – 8am, runs are called by the Night Guard and carried out by the Pulling Night Owls. From 8am to 9am, runs are called by the COD and carried out by the Pulling Night Owls. In Elan, you are never NOT being counted. For as many years as you are doomed to stay here.

Besides a 24/7 system of counting the children, 24/7 Zones that protect every exit and entrance, and an entire caste system of people with clipboards observing you all day; lets pretend that you do manage to get out of 1 of the 2 doors that lead outside. The only place to run is directly into the Maine wilderness. Deep wilderness that is covered in snow most of the year and guess what: you don’t have a jacket or boots. You were dressed for the Dining Room because that is the only place you are allowed to be dressed for. Every single morning a Strength with a clipboard records what every single kid is wearing. Wearing too many clothes is not allowed and if you do it you are called a “split-risk” and taken back in the dorms to change instead of eating breakfast. Wearing dark-on-dark is also not allowed unless you are a High Strength who has earned those privileges. You don’t even have enough hair on your head to keep warm because Elan only allows long hair to High Strength who have earned it!

But it doesn’t matter if you split in Winter or split in Summer, there are another set of guards in the woods around Elan. I used to think it was a scare-story that the Staff told the Strength and the Strength blindly passed on to the non-Strength. Until I reached a position that allowed me to pull and I could watch these guards exit the woods in full camo, get into their cars and then drive home when their replacement showed up. Also, the Night Guard has a walkie-talkie and I can hear him constantly chatting with them. It must be just as lonely waiting around all night in The House as it is waiting around in the forest. Anyways, the point is that 24/7 forest-guards do exist. So even if you can miraculously make it out of The House, you now have a new threat to deal with.

Anyone who tries to run away (or in Elan-Speak: split) from The House, is punished with The Corner and GM’s upon their capture. If you try to resist capture after making your escape them you will also be charged with breaking the “No Violence” Cardinal Rule and you will end up in The Ring.


Elan School is now closed

Sources:

• The original testimony (Reddit)
• Factsheet about the school (Fornits Wiki)

Untold Story of Elan, pt.1

It has taken me almost a year to reach the point where I can safely write this. I have a lot to get off my chest and before I explain anything else I really need to unload what is on my mind. I am in a place called The Elan School. It is located in Maine, deep in the forest. I am writing this in secret and I have to be careful because (even at 3am) there is a boy coming up the stairs every 15 minutes to check in on me. He is just another kid like me, barely 16 years old. My job right now is to stay up all night watching another child who Elan has placed in total isolation. He has been in isolation for the better part of 7 months now.

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)

Jonathan Ziv at Elan School (From:Youthrights.org)

This story was originally written on a webpage created to provide statements for a GAO hearing in 2007. The address is cafety.youthrights.org and it waits for your statement if you believe that your stay at a boarding school included unfair treatment or even abuse. All rights and credits goes to the author Jonathan Ziv, who posted the original story on cafety.youthrights.org

The first day I arrived at Elan I walked into a room where a "three house ring" and "general meeting" was being held. A boy's nose was the receiving end of a boxing glove and blood streaming down his face was the result from being in the "Ring". Then about one hundred and fifty students in rows of about five all "got their feelings off", which involves screaming and swearing in a persons face who is deemed to have done something "wrong" in the eyes of the so called "Directors" of the school that is a "General Meeting". The "Directors" keep the momentum of these unbelievable events going. I always wished my parents would make a surprise visit and stumble in on a "General Meeting". What would they think? ("General Meetings" could happen as often as two or more times a day. "Rings" happened occasionally, which consist of a circle of students surrounding the "offender" and the other student who are both wearing boxing gloves. The outside circle is taunting the offender while the two box. When the student gets tired another takes his or her place to be in the ring with the "offender")

The "Directors" are the ones who tightly control each of the students lives. Reading students mail, having phone calls listened to.

At night a student stays awake to guard the dorms of his or her gender. Every ten minutes for eight hours a night a "bed check" is conducted. Each student has their sheets lifted up and a flashlight is shone on the student's body to make sure they don't have any hidden clothing to take with them in the event that they try to run away. Could you imagine having your sheets pulled up every ten minutes for eight hours every night for years? Can you imagine that students are expected, who are in positions of responsibility, to stay up all night and be a "night guard"? And if you fall asleep you will be punished and be made to scrub the floors for a couple of days and have your shoe laces taken away.

"The Corner", which is really a term dubbed for being put into isolation, is used to take a child who is not conforming with Elan out of the population. Another student is then placed with them as a "support person". This support person could be subject to the other student acting out, which could involve attempts at self mutilation, being spat on, sworn at, screamed at, exposed to the students genitals, exposed to them masturbating for shock effect but Elan has a no kick out policy. The "support person" may be expected to physically restrain the acting out student. Sometimes the support person had to hold them down on the floor and have plastic restraints put on the student so his or her hands are behind his or her back. Sometimes this student who is acting out could be in the corner for over a month. Spending his or her days facing the corner of a wall and sleeping on a dingy mattress on the floor. This student could spend a month acting crazy like this and then stop and come out of "the corner" only to be put right back in because he or she starts acting out again. Usually there was at least one student in "the corner" for the two year period I was there. Also if the "support person" may take their eyes off this other student in "the corner" and he or she decides to self mutilate and succeeds then the "support person" will be stripped of his or her position of responsibility and made to scrub floors for a time of maybe two to three days. Can you believe that this is allowed to go on? A fifteen year old child being forced into this responsibility if he or she wants to succeed in Elan? Also that child who is"acting out" does so because he or she is standing up for themselves albeit it is in a damaging fashion but that is how a person may cope when being forced to stay in a place like Elan.

The school curriculum, is fabulous for an unmotivated child, with no tests, exams, or projects it couldn't be better. When parents receive news that their child, who was once possibly failing in school, is now getting great marks they could only think that Elan is doing something right. That is one of the tactics Elan uses to decept parents and school boards but ultimately rob that child of a real education.

Could you imagine not being allowed to go outside when you want? When I was in Elan you pretty much got outside once a week for a gym class. If you were lucky you got to go out for special outings maybe once every month or two but that only happens after about six months, which I would say is about the average length of time it takes for the "brainwashing effect" to be fully active in a student. After that constant fear and guilt consumes a student and everything from brushing up against the opposite sex to taking a minute longer in the shower than is allowed is written down on a piece of paper(referred to in Elan as "copping to your guilt") and given to the powers at be so they know your every move. So basically everything that Elan deems as "wrong" is instilled through feeling immense guilt and usually eventually you fess up. When I was in Elan for about a month I spat in a staff member's coffee but nobody knew except me. A year later I told on myself. By the way Elan is co-ed but no physical or flirty behaviour is allowed. Can you imagine a house full of hormonal teens being watched over so severely that you're scared to look someone of the opposite sex in the eye for too long? I received a " general meeting" for being flirty. I had people scream and swear in my face for ten minutes because I am human. This is where the ultimate control happens and the "Directors" or staff were ruthless. They would scream and swear in your face and make you feel absolutely hopeless. They controlled the level of fear among the students.

References:
Datasheet about the boarding school at Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
The original statement on cafety.youthrights.com