“I grew up in a wonderful town, went to highly renowned schools, and received the best education. My family, which includes my mother, father, younger sister, and brother, would settle for nothing less. We traveled the country and abroad, had family game nights, family dinners every night, and read thousands of books together. Our house was constantly filled with laughter and remains full of happy memories to this day.
When I was about 14 years old, I discovered I had an alcohol and drug addiction, mixed with some mental illnesses, which my parents could never have anticipated. They tried with all their resources to help me after multiple rehabs, hospitals, and private school expulsions. They turned to an educational consultant who assured them it was time to consider a boarding school for troubled teenagers. Feeling like they had no other choice and that I may get seriously hurt or die if they did not intervene, they opted to send me to the Family Foundation School in Hancock, New York.
They took a tour of the school, which was given by one of the students, who assured them how wonderful the school was and how grateful she was her parents sent her there to turn her life around. The school was only a 2-hour drive from our home, which eased my parents’ worries about being able to visit me. I arrived at the school the following week on October 16, 2001. I was 16 years old.
After my parents left me there, it took me less than 20 minutes to realize that I was about to spend the next two years of my life in a traumatic foreign atmosphere. There were prayers on the walls and a giant triangle within a circle that read “honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love,” in front of an even larger crucifix. I was taken into the locker room and stripped down by staff in front of two other female students. Then made to shower with lice shampoo, and squat and cough, as if I were in prison. All of my clothes were sent home because they were a part of my “old identity.”
My parents were instructed to gut my entire bedroom when they got home and throw everything away except the furniture. I was to now wear “poverty” clothes, so I could see how the less-fortunate feel, and no longer “idolize” materialistic things.
I cried for the entire first 30 days I was there and was denied any contact with anyone outside the school, including my family. After 30 days, I was allotted a 5-minute, monitored phone call to only my parents, twice a week. This privilege was often taken away from me as a means of punishment. I was told my family did not want me anymore, and that this was my new family. Our school was broken up into eight “families” made up of about 30 students each. “Family Four” was my new family now and would “fix me” so my parents would want me back again one day.
In the first year I was there, I was sanctioned heavily for bad behavior and breaking rules, which were quite difficult to follow, as there were so many. For example, I once had to scrub pigs, out by the barn, in the pouring rain for four hours, because I was caught making “eye contact” with a boy for too long.
Each punishment was called a “sanction.” During the first year, I was deprived of food and only served dry tuna fish on a dry English muffin for weeks at a time, all while forced to watch the other students enjoy full meals. I had to stand facing the corner of the room, with my shoes off for months at a time because I did not deserve to be a part of my boarding school family.
Every day for months I was taken out of school and put on a “work sanction.” The work sanctions could only be meaningless work, including, but not limited to, digging holes in the ground, cutting grass with my hands, shoveling snow paths that led to nowhere on the soccer field, carrying cinderblocks and buckets filled with rocks up and down the road all day, and scrubbing large areas such as the gymnasium with only a sponge or toothbrush. Manual labor, all while malnourished from food sanctions.
The fear the school instilled in me went so deep I was terrified to tell my parents what was happening. If I did, they would ask the staff about it. If they asked the staff about it, the staff would tell them I was a liar and I was trying to manipulate them to get what I wanted. Then I would get sanctioned even more and lose my privilege to speak to my mom and dad. I was trapped, abused, alone, afraid, and forced to smile and tell my parents I was happy.
Table Topics were petrifying. A practice adopted from East Ridge, a commune in New York, where many of the staff members were born and raised. One at a time we were asked to stand at the front of the “table,” which was shaped like a horseshoe. While standing at the table, we were to remain silent and keep our hands behind our backs. The staff, and submissive students, would take turns verbally assaulting the students’ character, with the purpose of breaking us down to absolutely nothing, so they could “reprogram” our thinking. They would scream, throw things, flip chairs and tables, use vulgar names and profanity, and only feel successful when one could no longer handle anymore and broke down to tears or physical rage. About 10 students would endure a Table Topic of their own every lunch and dinner. Sometimes multiple Table Topics in one day.
It was not abnormal to see students physically restrained, punched, shoved, locked in isolation rooms, slammed against walls and floors, or chased down and tackled.
After my first year of physical and emotional abuse, and daily fear for my well-being, I came to realize the only way I was going to survive that school was to comply and become what they wanted me to be. I brought my grades up, took on responsibilities, started telling on fellow students that were breaking rules to get them in trouble, and make the staff happy. I continued to lie to my parents and even gave unsupervised tours to parents who were considering sending their child to our prison. If I gave a good tour and convinced the parents to send their child, I was rewarded. I upheld the rules and held other students accountable. I had become the staff I hated with my whole heart.
It worked. They broke me and made me what they wanted. On home visits, I would not run away, nor even consider it. I would cry and tell my parents it was because I missed them so much when inside I was screaming and dying to tell them what was happening to me. I would not listen to “negative” music or television, as I had been trained. I would not call or reach out to old friends because I was taught they were bad influences and part of my old “bad behavior.” I had become a perfect specimen of their tiny secret abusive cult in the Catskill Mountains. I was ready to graduate and get dumped back out into the real world, expected to be able to function in society.
Since my “graduation” in 2003, I have been plagued with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have been in violent and abusive relationships. Drugs and alcohol became the only thing that could make me feel better. I associated all 12-step programs with the school and wanted nothing to do with them. It took years to tell my parents what really happened at the school because I did not want to break their hearts and have them carry the guilt I had been carrying for so long. We are dying. There are over 120 of our classmates that are dead. A majority are gone from a drug overdose or suicide.
The Family Foundation School has since been shut down and featured on the front page of the New York Times on September 2, 2018, exposing some aspects of the school but hardly scratching the surface. There are still more schools out there and children enduring the pain we did. These schools are still preying on parents that are desperate to do anything to save their child’s life. This has to stop. We need to be heard. I am not voiceless anymore. It has been 19 years and not a day goes by that I do not think of that school. The fear, isolation, neglect, and humiliation are alive and well in the existing schools. Why are they still operating?
The school no longer defines me. I have grown out of my fears and worked through traumas with medications and counseling. I am clean and sober today. My family and I share the love we once had before the nightmare. I have remained friends with my fellow survivors who I sincerely consider family. I am alive more than ever. This is my story.”