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'Fox guards henhouse' in Montana programs for troubled teens
From the
Troubled kids, troubled system series LUCY TOMPKINS
[email protected] Jan 22, 2019 Updated 1 hr ago 9 min to read The
state oversight board for Montana's private programs for troubled teens and
adolescents was established after a 16-year-old girl killed herself at Spring
Creek Lodge, the now-shuttered program pictured above. The board's majority
comes from the industry it regulates.
TOMMY MARTINO,
Missoulian It’s been nearly 15 years since 16-year-old Karlye Newman
hanged herself with her sweatshirt in a bathroom at Spring Creek Lodge Academy
near Thompson Falls. Fourteen years since the Montana Legislature — spurred in
part by Karlye's death and a national focus on “tough love” residential
treatment programs like Spring Creek — vowed oversight of the programs and
their methods. Twelve since the watered-down measures approved by the
Legislature went into effect. Ten since Spring Creek, beset by lawsuits and
plummeting enrollment after Karlye’s suicide, closed its doors. Nearly two
since Ben Jackson — a toddler when the Legislature heard the urgent pleas on
behalf of vulnerable children in such programs — hanged himself at the Montana
Academy in Marion. He was 16. A yearlong review by the Missoulian showed that
even as other states move to crack down on for-profit residential programs for
troubled teens, many of the same issues that prompted the initial outcry here
remain. Programs, clustered in western Montana, continue to operate with
minimal oversight, sometimes charging parents desperate for help with
struggling children more than $100,000 a year. The programs' websites
typically tout their state licensing. But while they handle children with
sometimes severe emotional and behavioral problems, the programs are not
overseen by mental health, child safety or education experts. Instead, they
fall under the Department of Labor and Industry and a board whose majority
comes from the industry it regulates, licenses and investigates. Members of
the state board, called the Private Alternative Adolescent Residential or
Outdoor Program (PAARP), either declined to be interviewed on the record or
did not return calls for comment. (PAARP Board Chairman John Santa, who runs
Montana Academy in Marion, left a voicemail returning a phone call, but did
not respond to multiple calls back.) A review of the licensing and other PAARP
documents, as well as court and law enforcement records, found that: • Not a
single one of 58 complaints investigated in the 12 years of PAARP’s oversight
has resulted in significant discipline against any program. • Unlicensed
counselors care for children with sometimes serious emotional, physical and
mental disorders, including depression, trauma, suicidal thoughts, fetal
alcohol syndrome and eating disorders. • PAARP began granting licenses to the
programs in 2007, but didn’t do any inspections until 2010. Inspections are
announced a week in advance and, in two recent cases, were done by phone or at
a fishing site 70 miles away. • Ownership and management of the programs is
often a family affair, with nine of the 14 PAARP-licensed programs examined by
the Missoulian showing at least two family members as owners and
administrators, and one — Turning Winds, in Troy — with six, according to
state licensing records. That raises conflict-of-interest issues in the event
a complaint is filed against a program. • Students often have no way of
reporting abuse to their parents because unsupervised communication may be
forbidden for months at a time or is monitored by staff. • At two programs,
teenage residents were required to build their own housing, which was not
inspected, failed to meet electrical and other safety codes and, at one, did
not include indoor plumbing.
Student-built housing (p. 452) View the entire document with DocumentCloud
• One program, Reflections Academy, has been sued three times in the last
three months — most recently on Christmas Eve — for failing to protect teenage
girls from alleged grooming and sexual assault by an employee who has
worked in the industry for 15 years. What are these programs? The terms
are myriad, and bewildering — Alternative adolescent program; residential
school; therapeutic boarding school; wilderness program; treatment center —
suggesting anything from a hard-core boot camp to a rehab facility. At their
most basic, therapeutic residential programs fall somewhere between rigorous
military-style programs and the intensive therapy offered in rehab, although
their methods often contain elements of both. Two of the 16 programs licensed
by the state have significant differences from the rest: Selkirk Outdoor
Leadership and Education is based in Idaho but takes students on hiking trips
in Montana; Sparrows Nest of Northwest Montana in Kalispell is a program for
homeless children. The other 14, which were the focus of the Missoulian
investigation, tout counseling and behavior modification as a way of turning
struggling teens into mature, disciplined citizens, offering a lifeline to
parents at the end of their rope. “Have you seen alarming changes in your
child’s personality, behavior, or academic performance?” asks the website for
Turning Winds, a program near Troy for up to 45 girls and boys ages 13 to 18.
“Is your child engaging in self-destructive behaviors or have they just ‘given
up?’ Are you finding it almost impossible to understand your child’s change in
behavior? How do you know whether its [sic] normal teenage rebellion or
something more?” Websites and promotional videos for the programs tend to show
lodge-like facilities ringed by trees, and smiling students hiking or petting
horses, testament to the mental and physical health benefits of vigorous
outdoor activities. Those images belie a reality, at least for some students,
of harsh physical punishment, controversial “confrontation therapy,” and
isolation for emotionally fragile or even suicidal students, according to
lawsuits against some of the programs, documents outlining the programs'
procedures, and interviews with former students. According to the Department
of Labor and Industry, Ben Jackson is the only other teen to have taken his
own life at a Montana residential program since Karlye Newman killed herself
at Spring Creek Lodge Academy in 2004. Law enforcement records from Sanders
and Lincoln counties show that others have tried: In 2014, a teenage boy
jumped from a window at Monarch School in Heron. He survived but,
according to the report, with "fractured bones, in a lot of pain."
Monarch School (p. 1) View the entire document with DocumentCloud In 2015,
a 17-year-old girl
jumped from an 8-foot balcony at Turning Winds in Troy, attempting to hurt
herself.
Turning Winds (p. 1) View the entire document with DocumentCloud In 2012,
a teenage girl at Clearview Horizon in Heron tried to kill herself by drinking
bleach. Another girl cut herself and was hospitalized in that same year. In
March, a girl drank bleach at Clearview again. Programs typically respond to
these behaviors by removing privileges, restricting communication home, or
punishing youth with exercise and physical labor — methods experts say only
worsen a young person’s mental health. Yet parents pay a hefty price to try to
get their struggling teens back on track over the course of a summer, a year,
or several years. Turning Winds' website, for instance, lists its cost at
$283 per day, and demands a
six-month minimum commitment,
which works out to $51,506, plus unspecified enrollment fees. (It offers help
in financing up to
$35,000 of that cost through unregulated third-party companies.) Six of
Montana’s licensed residential programs for troubled teens are clustered in
sparsely populated Sanders County — two in Thompson Falls, three in Trout
Creek, one in Heron — with only four people per square mile. It has the
state's third-highest unemployment rate, according to
December 2018 Department of Labor and Industry
statistics. Neighboring Lincoln County — home to five programs (two in
Troy, two in Eureka, one in Rexford) — has the highest unemployment rate.
Before Spring Creek Lodge Academy closed in 2009, it was Sanders County’s
largest employer, at one time housing 500 students. Advertisement Play Current
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off Captions captions off Chapters Chapters Sen. Jennifer Fielder, R-Thompson
Falls, said she has visited many of the programs located in her area and said
they provide employment opportunities for local residents. Nearby communities
also benefit from volunteers when the programs lend their teenage residents
out for community projects, like the spring cleanup. “These schools really do
add value to our community,” she said. Their “wilderness” or “outdoors” nature
is no exaggeration: Most are located deep in the pine forests that once
nurtured Montana’s timber industry, miles from the nearest towns, which
themselves are just dots on a map. Thompson Falls, the county seat for Sanders
County and the mailing address for four current programs, has only about 1,000
residents; Trout Creek, the address for the Mountain Meadow Youth Ranch,
Explorations Phoenix Mountain Collaborative and, until last year, Galena Ridge
— about 260. In addition to outdoor activities, such remote locations offer a
unique benefit — if students are tempted to run away, there’s nowhere for them
to go. The Montana Department of Labor and Industry said it doesn’t know the
exact number of children in the 14 state-licensed programs the Missoulian
examined. Self-reported numbers from PAARP inspections show that at least 300
children are currently enrolled in these programs in Montana, although the
most recent inspections for some date to 2010. The vast majority, including
nearly every former student with whom the Missoulian spoke, are from out of
state, and some come from other countries. One program, the Ranch for Kids
(“a bridge of hope and healing for hurting families”) in Rexford near the
Canadian border in Lincoln County, specializes in adopted children, especially
from Russia, according to
its website. Its licensing application lists a Russian translator on
staff. But while owner Joyce Sterkel Sutley and science teacher Harry Sutley
have nursing licenses,
state records show no licensed therapists on staff.
Ranch for Kids lack of licensed therapists (p. 57) View the entire document
with DocumentCloud No oversight for religious programs Programs
affiliated with religious institutions are exempt from any state regulation or
licensing. This means no state agency oversees their practices, tracks the
children in their care, or inspects their facilities. In fact, even when Child
and Family Services (CFS) is called about abuse or neglect, its hands are
tied. Law enforcement can handle individual complaints. But while Montana CFS
has substantiated reports of abuse and neglect at the religious programs, it
has no authority to penalize them or their employees. Sarah Corbally, former
CFS administrator,
testified before a legislative committee in 2015 about the state’s failure
to protect children. “I can tell you in just the last five years,” she said
then, “we’ve had over 30 reports of abuse and neglect, and we go in and we
conduct investigations, and in numerous cases we substantiate abuse and
neglect, and then nothing happens, because they’re unlicensed and they're
unregulated.” Subscribe to Breaking News * I understand and agree that
registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user
agreement and privacy policy. In theory, she said, the state could remove all
the children from a facility in an extreme case, “and I’ll be honest, we’ve
had those discussions.” While law enforcement can act on complaints against
individuals, the state cannot shut down or otherwise sanction a religious
program. Even when a staff member has been found multiple times to be abusing
children, which Corbally said has happened, the results of the investigation
remain private in Montana, and the state doesn’t have the authority to
discipline unregulated programs or their employees. The Legislature has been
asked to change the law, bringing religious programs under the state
regulatory umbrella, every legislative session since 2011. The efforts have
always failed. "The Montana Family Foundation kills it every time,'' Rep.
Ellie Hill Smith, the former legislator from Missoula who carried the bill in
2017, said in an interview, of the influential conservative group. "They say
people have a right to religious education. I say to them, 'I don't have a
problem with that. What I have a problem with is religious education or group
homes that don't have to comply with state laws like the rest of our
schools.''' DPHHS spokesman John Ebelt reiterated in an emailed statement that
"per state law, DPHHS does not license these facilities. However, just as in
every situation when we receive a call to the child abuse hotline regarding an
allegation of child abuse and neglect, we respond appropriately by collecting
the information and assigning it to the field for investigation, if
warranted.” +2 A photograph of Reflections Academy contained in state
inspection reports. The program has been sued three times since Oct. 9 for
alleged misrepresentation of its therapy practices and negligence in hiring a
man accused of grooming girls there and sexually assaulting one of them. 'Fox
guarding the henhouse' Montana’s non-religious residential treatment programs
largely self-regulate through PAARP, whose five members are appointed by the
governor from a list submitted by the industry.
The law regarding PAARP mandates that three of the five members come from
the residential treatment program industry. When complaints come to the board,
they are discussed in closed meetings then sent to a screening committee
composed of two industry and one public member. It decides, also in private,
how to respond. “The fox guarding the henhouse,” said Ben Jackson’s father,
who asked not to be identified by name to protect his family's privacy. Judy
Bovington, chief legal counsel for Labor and Industry, said complaints remain
secret until there is proof the allegations are accurate. "If someone filed a
complaint against someone, it just doesn't become a feeding ground for
defamation or salacious allegations," she said. "The screening panel requires
they find reasonable cause" before the complaint is made public. In PAARP's
case, the screening panel's majority is made up of people from the industry.
Desperate parents The desperation parents feel in seeking solutions for their
children's problems makes Montana's weak oversight particularly troubling. Ann
Moderie, an attorney in Polson who has represented parents who sent their
children to programs in Montana, as well as former students who experienced
abuse, said she understands why parents place their children in the programs.
Parents often feel they’ve tried every kind of specialist in their area, she
said, and they are frantic for help by the time they send their kids to a
program in Montana. “Parents are scared and trying to do what's right for
them,” Moderie said. “I’ve seen parents use retirement funds to send them to
these schools, and then the children end up worse.” It’s important to know
that there are some good programs as well, Moderie said. Some students leave
these programs feeling it helped them. Sean Colin, who said he was sent to
Montana Academy in 2015 after being expelled from a prep school on the East
Coast for selling prescription drugs, said the 20 months he spent there taught
him to be more mature and to stop putting on a facade. But while it worked for
him, he said some elements of the program, such as banning communication with
anyone else for several days as punishment, could be a “nightmare” for his
more troubled peers. “I don’t entirely think it was a good program for drug
addiction or for people with actual problems,” he said. “I think for a lot of
kids with crippling depression and anything severe, you really need to go to
something more specialized.” Missoulian reporter Seaborn Larson contributed to
this story. Subscribe to Breaking News * I understand and agree that
registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user
agreement and privacy policy. Rep. Ellie Hill Smith, D-Missoula, shown
in this file photo from the 2017 Montana Legislature, tried repeatedly to
bring religious programs under state regulation. Thom Bridge,
[email protected]
Source:
https://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/fox-guards-henhouse-in-montana-programs-for-troubled-teens/article_86736f9b-eb6e-59f9-b312-3a9388361075.html |