In August of 2004, in my junior year of High School, I was forced to go to Miracle Meadows School, a Seventh Day Adventist school to help troubled kids. I was not a troubled kid, I was a teenager.
MMS has since been shut down for child abuse and neglect. It took a girl drinking toilet cleaner to be able to tell her story at a hospital. Was everything bad? No. Was every staff horrible? No. But unfortunately, most of the staff that were there for the right reasons were not aware of what was going on, and if they did know, they hid it well. Also, it is probably good to add that the staff were not educated or certified in helping troubled youth.
There is a reason so many children who were sent to those places have nightmares, insomnia, PTSD, trust issues, anxiety, depression, anger issues, and more. The reason is that many of those places are not “fixing,” they are hurting. You cannot tell me that the 8-year old who was there with me needed to be, or that I needed to be. Most of the people that I met there had suffered severe trauma in their lives and instead of family or staff saying, “hey maybe this behavior is because they went through ‘xyz’, let’s work through that,” we were put in another traumatic experience.
Kids are not inherently bad. Product of environment? Sure. Hyperactive? Yes. Treatable with isolation? NO. If you look at the videos for MMS it looks like a quaint little place in West Virginia, run by Christians. What they did not show was the staff waking us up in the middle of the night to run laps until we threw up, or being locked in isolation for weeks while copying down “social rules,” and memorizing many verses, or entire chapters, of the Bible. We were digging ditches for hours then told to fill them back in. Digging the feces-covered rocks out of the sewer, and wheeling them a mile up the road.
Let that sink in.
Children digging in a sewer with no protection. Scrubbing an entire Gym floor on our hands and knees at 4 am. Those are just some of the things I endured.
I read an article that said the quarantine rooms were not like isolation in jail but more like a time-out. Wow, I would love for the adult that wrote that statement to be locked in a quarantine room for 23 hours a day with a bed, bible, and pillow. Be fed toast with fruit, and rice and beans for your meals. It could last days to weeks or months. That is not a time-out, that is torture. To be a child and have no access to the family who is supposed to protect you. To be left with people that are putting you through that. Can you imagine the deep-seated issues that you would have? Every phone call was monitored, every letter was monitored, if we told the truth about what was happening, we were called liars.
I played by the “rules,” and was used as a pawn to go around and sing in front of churches, to show other parents how a broken child could change. This gained me access to be able to run away, which I did.
I ran away with three girls in the ghetto of DC. That night was a terrifying experience but we turned ourselves in, because we knew we did not want to be runaways forever, and we knew we would be if we did not make a decision to go back. We turned ourselves in to our parents and were met with passive restraint in a parking lot, and spent three months in quarantine.
During the day we would dig, and at night we would be in isolation, memorizing a chapter out of the Bible and writing the rules, without clothes on. See, runaways were stripped of clothing.
We ran because it was awful. Because our families could not see the truth. Because we needed peace, freedom, safety. We came back because we knew running was not the answer, and we did not want to be seen as fugitives or delinquents. That decision was not acknowledged, and we were still labeled as such, and abused. Should we have been disciplined? Yes. We ran away from school. Should we have spent three months in quarantine digging ditches, etc? No. If you look at the picture of the quarantine room below there are now windows on the door. Those windows were not there when I was. I wonder what happened to make them install them. To be able to watch the child locked inside? Does that look like timeout to you or isolation in prison?
The defense attorney of the woman who started the schools admitted to the court that crimes had been committed.
He said, “the measures taken by Clark and her staff were perhaps what was required to take on this ministry of dealing with troubled youths.”
Wow, maybe he should read some of our case files. Maybe some were “troubled kids,” but it does not, under any circumstance, give you the right to abuse us. Prosecutor Rachel Romano felt it was telling that, while 45 letters were filed to the court in support of Clark, only eight came from students–one of which was the character witness–after decades of the school being open.
If things were not that bad, do you not think some of us would have spoken up? Do you not think if it helped us we would have gotten on the stand to defend her? But no we were not there. She was charged with abuse but plead to a lesser charge. She never had remorse, she simply asked for leniency because she could not imagine living out the rest of her life as a criminal. Physical and sexual abuse happened, and she was more concerned with wearing the title “criminal and sex offender,” not worried about the countless children that lived through hell.
Now you could look at me and say, “Hey it worked. You are successful, have a great marriage, great job, great friends, you’re not an addict, or in jail.”
That is because of me! I made those changes outside of that place. I struggled with drug abuse and destructive behavior for years after MMS, running from my trauma. I decided to make the change to do better. To want better. To be better.
I never thought I would have something in common with Paris Hilton, of all people, but who knew. I cannot explain the feelings that came up watching a billionaire’s daughter have the same issues I have from being sent to one of these places. It does not matter if you are rich or poor trauma is the same.
Nikky Hilton said “the thing is about trauma, the mind may forget, but the body never forgets. It’s trapped in you and it can come out whenever.”