But conversion therapy—the attempt to turn gay
people straight, which is deemed harmful by the
American Psychological Association—has been
just one of this school’s problems.
As part of the “tough-love,” troubled teen
movement, the Christian boarding school, Escuela
Caribe, has a long history of alleged abuse, and
although a new faith-based Fort Wayne, Indiana,
company has taken over its leadership, it has
retained most of the same staff appearing in the
movie, and former students of the boarding
school want answers.
IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS BLOSSOM
Escuela Caribe was founded in the 1970s by
Gordon Blossom, a former student of Floyd
Starr’s Starr Commonwealth boarding school in
Michigan. Under Blossom, his son Tim, and other
leaders, New Horizons Youth Ministries (NHYM)
operated Escuela Caribe and schools in Michigan.
Inspired by Starr and profit, Blossom used his
connections to woo Michigan judges, legislators,
and governors, most notably George Romney,
Mitt’s father.
In
1973, in fact, Gordon Blossom addressed a
gathering at a George Romney-attended event in
honor of Floyd Starr’s work with juvenile
delinquents, as Keith Fennimore details in his
1988 book Faith Made Visible: The History of
Floyd Starr and His School.
How close to George Romney pastor Blossom was is
not known, but many past teenagers who were held
in the NHYM schools believe George Blossom’s
political clout had something to do with why
abuses went under the radar of officials.
George’s son, Mitt, of course, is
well-entrenched with those in the troubled-teen
industry. Recently, Mother Jones’
Kathryn Joyce noted that “key
fundraisers for Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012
campaigns
hail from Utah’s teen-home sector.” The
co-chairman of Romney’s Utah finance committee,
Robert Lichfield, even came under fire for
running troubled-teen boarding schools rife with
allegations of physical and sexual abuse.
When Blossom lost his Michigan licensing after
media exposure questioning his boarding schools’
harsh practices, he packed up and moved to the
Hoosier state, operating, besides Escuela
Caribe, a school in Canada, and one in Marion,
Indiana.
Even though the state was paying NHYM, there
wasn’t much instruction at the schools, and
students did most of the work on their own,
alumni say.
Not only did the Blossoms get some of their
students from court-orders, they also duped
parents, some spending upwards of $40,000 for
services and losing their homes in the process,
to send their kids off to NHYM’s various
compounds.
Under the Blossom family operation, there were
alleged incidents of sexual misconduct,
statutory rape, forced exercise to the point of
vomiting, beatings, chaining girls to beds, and
severe brainwashing at the boarding schools. One
former staff member was arrested for fondling a
girl.
In 2010, survivors of NHYM boarding schools
decided to take action. NHYM alumni from
different years started posting horror stories
on the website
The Truth about New Horizons Youth Ministries.
Here, many speak courageously about “The
Quit Room,” where students, locked in
complete isolation in a “small concrete cell
without lighting or furniture,” were stripped
down, had their hair chopped off, and were
forced to “sleep on the concrete floor and scrub
the cement for hours on end.”
One Marion, Indiana, boarding school survivor
writes of how, after she attempted suicide,
the leaders beat her, forced her to do hundreds
of push-ups, and called her a whore for “fucking
her brother,” accusations made because she
admitted that she loved her brother in letters
she sent to him when he was kept in the
Dominican Republic compound. There, her brother
was beaten by several men until he was forced to
lie that he had had intercourse with his sister.
Another past student
alleges that “Founder Pastor Gordon Blossom
suggested rape as a means of curing low libido,
stating he tore his wife’s underwear off and
raped her when she wasn’t in the mood.”
THE SAME LINE FROM LIFELINE
In late 2011, when Fort Wayne-based Lifeline
Youth & Family Services took over the NHYM
business, forming
Crosswinds and renaming Escuela Caribe the
Caribbean Mountain Academy, many saw this as
damage control over Julia Scheeres’ New York
Times best-seller,
Jesus Land, a memoir detailing her abuse at
the hands of NHYM staff.
A former Escuela Caribe student told me that
“the continuation of the same staff as trained
by NHYM and from as late as 2005 indicates that
the takeover was merely a fancy legal way of
trying to dissociate from all the bad
publicity.”
In fact, it appears that none of the current
school leaders were hired after Lifeline took
over, even though the group, on its
website, deceptively says that counselor
Grant Anderson has been with Crosswinds since
2010, when the company didn’t even exist.
Crosswinds’ new director, Scott Taylor, has been
involved with the Dominican Republic compound
since at least 2007. While working at the Summit
Church in Arkansas before moving to the
Dominican Republic, it appears he was associated
with the Fellowship Bible Church, too, which
gave
$10,000 to support the state’s 2004 marriage
amendment. Its leader Robert Lewis published one
of his books with the anti-gay Focus on the
Family press and has appeared on FOF’s
broadcast hyping his Men’s Fraternity.
Taylor and two other current Caribbean Mountain
Academy staffers, Rachel and Jon Sawyer, once
worked at Heartlight Ministries’ teen
residential treatment center in Texas, a program
that HEAL, one of the nation’s leading watchdog
groups, has called a “money-making
cult” which controls the entire family of
kids in its boarding school and uses mail
censorship to possibly conceal abuse.
Heartlight’s program charges $5,000 a month and
includes allowing the child to attend public
school, if they earn the right. HEAL also
questions Heartlight’s practice of forcing kids,
under certain circumstances, to sleep in the
same room as staff. HEAL suggests that “parents
should also investigate whether or not the
program is violating child labor laws.”
Under an
odd picture of the kids at Caribbean
Mountain Academy, Rachel Sawyer, on her blog,
writes:
“Um - WOW! Nine of our students came to know
Christ as their personal SAVIOR last week. In
addition, many powerful, wonderful, exciting
things are happening within this ministry at
this time. Never have I seen more movement
amidst such utter brokenness.”
Teen-brokenness brings in money, and one of
NHYM’s tactics was to use young and low paid (if
paid at all) workers to look over the boarding
school. It appears hordes of missionaries are
still descending upon Caribbean Mountain
Academy.
In 2011, volunteers from the Sagemont Church in
Texas arrived to spread “love” at the compound.
Besides being known for its 170 foot cross, the
Sagemont Church is where Andrea Yates attended a
home school
support group with her children, all of whom
she later drowned in a Texas bathtub. Sagemont’s
pastor, Stuart Rothberg, too, describes how gays
are
like lepers and deserve conversion therapy.
Then there’s this, written in January of 2012,
from a 21-year-old missionary named Matt:
I want to share a couple of specific things with my supporters and the churches and groups which have made mission trips or are planning to make trips this year. First, thanks so much for your support through gifts, prayers and friendships. I could not have made it all these years without your support and encouragement. Second, know that Caribbean Mountain Academy is still committed to working with mission teams and ministry outreach. As I prepare to leave the ministry, I have been training and supporting our chaplain and his wife, Scott and Meleah Taylor, to take over the community outreach and mission team’s ministry. Scott has been involved in ministry for almost 20 years as a child-care worker and youth pastor, and is very excited to be a part of the ministry of Caribbean Mountain Academy.
Matt goes on to say that even though “New
Horizons Youth Ministries has ended its time
as a non-profit ministry and Escuela Caribe has
now been renamed Caribbean Mountain Academy… the
ministry focus of our campus will remain the
same, which is to bring hope and change to
struggling teenagers and their families through
Jesus Christ.”
As the Taylors and Sawyers hob-nob in
pictures with generals and the Ambassador
from Columbia in the Dominican Republic, who is
looking out for these kids?
LIFELINE, MARK SOUDER, AND THE
FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES MOVEMENT
Lifeline Youth & Family Services, the school’s
new owner, is also politically entrenched in
Indiana.* Besides running the Pierceton Wood
Academy boarding school and detention center in
Pierceton, they overlook a good section of the
family services programs in the state.
Lifeline’s CEO Mark Terrell claims the group
doesn’t do conversion therapy, like NHYM, but
his friendliness with members of the anti-gay
movement is not reassuring.
In 2002 and 2003, Terrell was invited by former
Republican Mark Souder to testify in favor of
George W. Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiatives”
program. In a session filled with questions
about pornography, homosexuality, and wife
beating, all popular topics for the religious
right and boarding school leaders, Terrell said
that, in terms of the “community service” his
group does,
All of the facilitators that go in are Christians. It is amazing, the results that are happening. That is not by accident. That is truly a belief that is ordained by God that that has happened.What would it do with the donors? We raise a significant amount of our budget outside of the contracts that we get with probation, welfare, and Department of Corrections. They give to us because they know that we are a faith-based organization and that we are hiring Christians. We are hiring people with faith. They are going to make a difference.
In the American Prospect in December
2001, troubled-teen industry expert Maia
Szalavitz criticized Souder and Bush’s
faith-based initiative, noting that the
president had a history of ignoring deaths and
abuses in troubled-teen camps and boarding
schools across the country operated by religious
extremists, and
in 1997, after Texas regulators had tried to shut down a Christian rehabilitation program called Teen Challenge because its staff failed to meet educational requirements, then-Governor Bush responded by scuttling all the state’s training and safety regulations for such facilities. And in a speech two years later, Bush praised the fact that at Teen Challenge, “’if you don’t work, you don’t eat.’” Now that he’s ensconced in the White House, Bush intends to deregulate Teen Challenge-type programs nationwide.
In fact, Souder seemed to enjoy it when one
faith-based panel member from Illinois claimed
that the reason why his group became active in
Indiana is that there is no regulation.
In 2004, Souder invited conversion therapy
promoter Mike Haley and several other Focus on
the Family members to the faith-based committee
meetings. In response, Americans United for the
Separation of Church and State’s Executive
Director Barry W. Lynn said that the
“so-called ‘ex-gay’ groups are nothing more
than covers for fundamentalist indoctrination
programs. They don’t deserve one dime of
taxpayer support. It would be outrageous if the
Bush administration and Rep. Souder are
seriously considering giving public funds to
this sort of program.”
Haley—who has recently accepted that he is gay–spoke
at Bethel College in Indiana on September
28, 2009; Maggie Troyer, whose husband was then
running Lifeline’s Center for Responsible
Thinking, spoke there, too, a few days later.
Souder is also friendly with Crossing
Educational Center, a faith-based group which
operates a school and helps
hire teachers for Lifeline’s Pierceton Woods
Academy. Crossing lists state Republican senator
Carlin Yoder, best known for introducing the
Indiana gay-marriage ban, as its director in
2010 tax records.
In 2008, Souder awarded Crossing’s founder and
director Robert Staley the Appleseed award and
even
picked one of Crossing’s students to be his
Washington aide, before the Fort Wayne lawmaker
resigned because of adultery.
Formed by Solid Rock Ministries, Crossing’s
school is for high school dropouts, kids kicked
out of alternative schools, and others with
behavioral problems. Not only does the group
receive funding from
20 Indiana school districts, it is also
involved in the prison ministry movement,
running the Fresh Start program.
ADDING THE BIBLE TO BAD RESEARCH
A recent story in the Goshen News
highlights how a juvenile locked in
Lifeline’s detention center for being an
accomplice to murder reads the Bible, but it
doesn’t mention another curriculum the child is
probably getting spoon-fed.
For the “Thinking Errors” curriculum, Lifeline
runs the Center for Responsible Thinking (CRT),
which offers classes at Pierceton and in
parent/student meetings throughout Indiana. CRT
was until recently directed by Rich Troyer, an
ordained minister at Woodburn Missionary Church
and motivational speaker who sold his home,
rented an RV, and started travelling to
motorcycle races across the country to turn
people onto Christ.
In his 2002
statement before the Souder panel, Mark
Terrell mentions how CRT curriculum is based on
the 1970s inmate research of Samuel Yochelson,
with a heavy dose of Bible study thrown in.
When Yochelson died, his research partner
Stanton Samenow became a conferee for Ronald
Reagan’s White House Conference on a Drug-Free
America, part of the anti-drug “Just Say No”
crusade of the 1980s.**
In the 1990s, Fort Wayne pastor A. Wyatt
Mullinax first adapted Yochelson’s research for
the Indiana Department of Correction (DOC) to
use with the Bible in prisons. Holding a Ph.D.
in the Ministry and several counseling
certificates, Mullinax serves on Mitch Daniels’
Governor’s Commission for a Drug Free Indiana,
and gives speeches for the Indiana Department of
Education on school safety.
It appears Yochelson and Samenow’s “Criminal
Personality” books were highly favored by
religious leaders, and, in the words of one
federal prison chaplain, prison ministers
“should preach and teach with the Bible in
one hand and The Criminal Personality
in the other.” The Indiana DOC, in fact, still
teaches former prisoners lessons from Samenow’s
book in its
PLUS faith-based housing program.
Yochelson and Samenow’s “Thinking Errors” theory
is extreme, based on the belief that criminals,
sex offenders, and drug users choose to be
criminals, sex offenders, and drug users and
that social factors, environment, bad parenting,
genes, brain disorders, etc. play absolutely no
part in how people turn out. Samenow, in his
1998 Straight Talk about Criminals,
even claims that sexual offenders have not been
victims of sexual abuse themselves, but are
merely lying about it.
From the get-go, criminologists weren’t buying
into Yochelson and Samenow’s one-size-fits-all
“criminal personality” theory. Today, the theory
holds even less weight, with neuroscience
completely revamping psychological research and
criminologists finally playing catch-up.
Since Lifeline bases its “therapy” for young
drug offenders, sexual offenders, or just
troubled youth on antiquated theories, this is a
problem.
Mullinax’s anti-bullying program with the Fort
Wayne Community Schools has also been
questioned, since
reports of battery to staff and students, as
well as disorderly conduct, almost doubled after
the program was put into place in 2007.
Quite shockingly, the Indiana Department of
Child Services has even used the “Thinking
Errors Worksheet” to
train new caseworkers to deal with sexual
offenders, and it is a part of DCS’s
Day Treatment/Day Reporting programs.
IS TOUGH-LOVE SEEPING INTO THE INDIANA
DEPARTMENT OF CHILD SERVICES?
This summer, a special Indiana legislature group
will examine the Department of Child Services.
The DCS has been under attack recently for
failing to remove children from abusive homes,
many of them ending up dead.
In fact, from 2006 to 2010,
198 children died from abuse and neglect in
Indiana. A WTHR TV
investigation found that “in a one-year
period, DCS hired 511 new case managers.
Twenty-one transferred to other positions during
that same time, while 280 simply quit. It
created a loss of 18.1 percent agency-wide,
roughly the same loss as the previous year at
18.7 percent.”
In 2010, however, the DCS gave back
$103 million to the state’s general fund,
claiming the money wasn’t needed. That same
year, a DCS official in
Gibson County was convicted for keeping a
teenager in a shelter for 30 months without a
court order, and lying about it.
This March, IU’s forensic pediatrician
Antoinette Laskey
resigned from her DCS role, after declaring
that DCS’s death-numbers were misleading.
And this May, DCS took fire when Morgan County
judge Matthew Hanson, in a statement, wrote that
“It
would seem DCS is simply waiting around
until the child commits such egregious or
dangerous acts that the (juvenile delinquency)
system has no choice but to file charges against
a child with a mental disease/defect, and then
the DCS can simply ignore any pleas thereafter
to aid such a child.”
Also, in May, when the DCS said that its
caseworkers could not release confidential info
on abuse and neglect cases to the courts, Allen
Superior Judge Fran Gull called DCS’s behavior “absurd.”
The DCS has an overwhelming large number of
workers who hold degrees from Indiana
faith-based colleges like Grace College and
Indiana Wesleyan, and some DCS people have
worked for Lifeline, too.***
Lifeline, actually, plays a major role in DCS,
with DCS contracts in 60 Indiana counties,
offering everything from home-based services,
residential care for kids removed from their
families, to court testimony, the latter being a
conflict of interest, since Lifeline
representatives help determine which kids are
removed from homes.****
Lifeline has a lot of power for a group which
hires many of its counselors from religious
colleges in Indiana who have been indoctrinated
with “biblical truths.”
Mark Terrell unabashedly admits that Lifeline
only hires Christians, and this Christian outfit
is raking in taxpayer money. In fact, in 2010,
Terrell was paid $158,457, with an additional
$18,774 (
7) in other compensation. That same year,
Lifeline brought in over $11.5 million in
welfare fees, almost $266,000 of school money,
and only $48,527 from private fees (9).
Lifeline holds contracts with the Department of
Education, the Department of Correction, and the
Department of Child Services.
A 33-YEAR OLD WARNING
Speaking at the U.S. Senate’s congressional
hearings in January 1979, one month after the
Jonestown massacre committed by Hoosier Jim
Jones, the National Coalition for Children’s
Justice’s Kenneth Wooden reminded lawmakers he
had warned them about Jones’ dangerous child
care facilities, and they refused to listen.
Wooden, at this hearing, pointed fingers
directly at NHYM’s Escuela Caribe boarding
school, too, as one of several being run that
were putting the lives of children at risk (see
pages 204-205 in
PDF bar). Having visited Escuela Caribe in
1974, Wooden wanted to know, since years earlier
he had reported his NHYM findings to the State
Department, why nothing had been done to close
down the boarding school and why Gordon Blossom
was raking in $8,360 of taxpayer money per child
to abuse these kids.
After 33 years, nothing has changed. Lifeline
and Crosswinds have plans to reopen the NHYM
Canadian school, too.
Presently, the US Congress is once again
introducing the Keeping All Students Safe Act,
which, in 2010, passed in the House but failed
in the Senate. The bill would have banned the
overzealous use of physical restraints and
seclusion chambers like the “Quiet Room,” before
it found strict opposition by lawmakers in
districts where tough-love schools were rampant,
including Mark Souder, as blogger
Andy Kopsa noticed.
To the best of my knowledge, Lifeline has never
been accused of abusing kids. Nonetheless, a
full investigation by the Indiana Assembly and
the U.S. Congress needs to take place
immediately concerning the Caribbean Mountain
Academy, at least. In fact, the Indiana
lawmakers looking into DCS should start
investigating all Indiana boarding schools, for
the
Hephzibah House is another with a long list
of alleged offenses, as Cooper Anderson has
noticed.
Lifeline’s Pierceton center must get more than a
brief positive review by Indiana’s Faith-Based
office, which it has lately. Hoosiers and former
boarding school students also have a right to
know whether Lifeline intends to use our tax
money to ship more kids to the compounds in
Canada and the Dominican Republic, where US laws
don’t matter.
Kids continue
to die in these compounds all across America
and in other countries. Indiana and U.S.
lawmakers must not sit around as another child
becomes the next “troubled-teen” statistic.
NOTES
* Mitch Daniels, too, is well aware of Lifeline.
In 2007, while a non-profit management major
at Christ-centered Huntington University, Adam
Shoemaker was picked to be the youth member on
Indiana’s Office of Faith-based and Community
Initiatives (OFBCI) board, a new office started
by the governor. In 2010, Daniels selected
Shoemaker, while he was employed with Lifeline,
to be a commissioner with the
Indiana Commission on Service and Volunteerism (ICCSV),
a program now in the hands of Indiana’s OFBCI.
In 2009, OFBCI awarded Lifeline a grant through
its Good Works Indiana Initiative. Shoemaker,
who now works with the Indiana Youth Institute,
was Lifeline’s Family Consultant from 2008 to
May 2011.
** Samenow’s connection with Reagan is not
surprising, given that many “troubled-teen”
programs were
spawned out of the Nancy Reagan-supported
Straight, Inc., started during the anti-drug and
anti-gay crusades of the 1980s.
*** Not everyone receiving a degree from a
religious institution is an extremist. Actually,
Oral Roberts University has its own LGBT
organization. I, personally, have met many
highly-qualifed and professional therapists who
have went to faith-based universities. Questions
concerning Indiana’s DCS, nonetheless, need
raised.
**** Or maybe not, since under Indiana’s Safely
Home-Families First program, kids are often kept
in abusive environments. South Bend’s
Tribune and other media outlets not known
for investigative reporting have published many
stories pointing out that, among other things,
DCS has been notorious for leaving kids with
parents who are beating them.
A Walt Whitman scholar, Doug Martin’s
teaching experience has covered K-graduate
school. His exposures of corporate education
reform have appeared or been referenced in the
Associated Press, the Parents Across America
blog, Charter School Scandals, Susan Ohanian's
Testing Atrocities and Outrages, KochWatch.org,
the Washington Post Answer Sheet blog, NPR/State
Impact Florida, NPR/State Impact Indiana, the
Pulp (Broward-Palm Beach New Times), Big
Education Ape, School Matters (Indiana),
Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education
blog, the Indianapolis Star, Fort Wayne Journal
Gazette, Scathing Purple Musings, Terre Haute's
Tribune Star, the Times of Northwest Indiana,
the Post-Tribune, HoosierEd.com, and Firedoglake,
among others.