“Recently, some things have come to light about something I experienced when I was younger. There are many things about this experience that I had blocked out for many years, and even still some of my memories are fuzzy. I never realized that I carried trauma with me, and just how much that trauma affects my life today. After seeing new information come out, it’s almost as if I’m now re-living the trauma that I felt as a child. The trauma that was buried so deep inside of me. All of the emotions of feeling abandoned, neglected, terrified, and completely hopeless came flooding back. Documents have been retrieved about my experience, and so many others experiences with this program. I have been feeling more and more emotional with each picture and document that I read. I’ve been angry, anxious, and sad, but also thankful for the group of people that went through this as well, and who are here to go through these emotions with me now. I feel like in order for me to begin my healing process, I need to finally open up about what I went through, and maybe then I can start to move forward. This is not an easy thing for me to talk about, but it’s something I need to do for myself now. I also want to say that my experience was very mild in comparison to some others. I had the most simple and basic experience of a girl at Academy at Ivy Ridge, and I will share just the very basics of what the day to day life here was like. And as you’ll come to read, that alone was enough to cause irreparable emotional damage. I want to add that I still have many blocked out memories, so what I’m writing down is just a small portion of what I remember, and not my whole story.
When I was 13, I was sent to a boarding school for “troubled teens” called Academy at Ivy Ridge. This school was not a normal boarding school. It was more like a children’s prison. While I can admit that I wasn’t the perfect child in my teenage years, I never did anything so serious that warranted being subjected to the emotional trauma and abuse that this place inflicted upon me. The program worked by using manipulation and brainwashing tactics, on both the students and the parents. Parents were typically unaware of what this place truly was. The reason was that the school marketed themselves as being something entirely different. Students were also not allowed to speak with their parents, aside from writing one weekly letter to them and receiving two letters a week from them. All of our letters were monitored by the “family representatives”, so if there was anything negative written about the program, the letter would be blocked and our parents would never see them. The same thing went for the letters from our parents. If our parents tried to mention that they wanted to pull us out, we would not be able to see those letters and were instead told by staff that our parents were committed to the program and we would be stuck there no matter what. In fact, I was told this exact statement up until the night before my parents finally took me home. When I first entered Ivy Ridge, my parents were with me. Other kids were literally kidnapped straight out of their beds by very large men and thrown into vans to take them there. So I was lucky to have my parents bring me. When my parents left, I was brought into a small bathroom and was told to remove all of my clothing. They made me take off all of my jewelry and told me they would be sending it home to my parents (something they never did and I never got back). They made me bend over and cough, and they made me jump up and down, completely naked. I was only 13 having to do this in front of a strange woman. I remember my first day in the program, I started hysterically crying after realizing what I was in for. A staff member pulled me out of my group and sat me down on the floor. She got in my face and told me I needed to stop crying and get over it, because my parents would not come to get me and I was stuck no matter what I did. And if I continued crying, they would stick me in the intervention room (essentially isolation) until I calmed down. The thought of that terrified me, so I forced myself to stop crying and get back to my group (family as we called it). I refused to eat for my first 3 days. After that I was threatened with corrections (punishments that would cost points – I’ll get into that later). So I decided to eat my food but tried to hide the parts that were absolutely disgusting. My “buddy” at the time raised her hand immediately and told the staff member in charge to “tell my buddy that she needs to finish ALL of her food”. This of course got me in trouble. I was so angry for a while about that, but quickly learned that this is the way we all had to be just to survive in there without being targets ourselves. The food was so incredibly fattening that I gained over 50 pounds in just 1 year and was covered in bright red stretch marks. I came in at 100 pounds and left at over 150 pounds at just 13 years old and 5’0”. Even with the rigorous gym program, nothing could stop what that food did to our bodies. Speaking of gym, you always had to do everything you were told. I remember the first time I was told to run 50 laps around the gym. I made it to about 20 and couldn’t breath. I was literally hyperventilating and felt like I would pass out. I wasn’t used to running like this yet. The gym teacher screamed in my face that I needed to keep going or I would be facing a category 3 correction. I didn’t have enough points yet so I knew this would put me into study hall. I ran the rest slowly, being screamed at the entire time while crying and barely breathing. It felt like being in military school.
I was there for exactly 1 year. Others spend over 3 years there. The family representatives would often tell our parents made up stories to paint us in a negative light to try and manipulate the parents to keep us there longer, because we “weren’t ready to come home”. In some cases, we would be dropped levels (I’ll get into that in a second) for no reason at all, or for a made up reason that the staff decided would work, just to show our parents “proof” that we couldn’t come yet because we were still not doing well. The documents that were recently released (by former program students who retrieved them) actually show proof of this manipulation, as well as show us that these staff members actually made commission based on how long they could keep us there, so of course they did everything they could to us to get that extra paycheck.
The program was based off of a points system. You start at level one – zero points, meaning you have no rights or freedoms at all. You couldn’t speak without permission, to the point that people would lose points even for just sneezing out loud. You couldn’t sit or stand without permission. You couldn’t go to the bathroom alone. There was no TV, no music, nothing. We had to walk in straight lines in the hallways and every so often, staff would yell “hand check” (or something like that – I don’t remember the exact words) and we would have to touch the person in front of us to show that we were walking at arms length. If you couldn’t touch the person in front of you, you would lose points. We had to pivot at every corner. If you turned your head out of line, you would lose points. If you looked at a boy who was passing in the hallway (boys and girls were split up), you would get a correction. Not following any of these rules would result in corrections – loss of points. If you did not have enough points to cover your “corrections”, you would be sent to study hall, where you had to write pages and pages of things from the student handbook. I still have a bump on one of my fingers from how many times I had to write for long periods of time. If you refused to follow the rules, you would be sent into an isolation room or be restrained or tackled. Many people were even tackled, for no reason at all. If you search “Academy at Ivy Ridge” on youtube, you will even find some video evidence of it. We were threatened with being sent to a worse program in Jamaica if we didn’t comply. A big thing was that you could leave Ivy Ridge when you turned 18, but Jamaica had different rules and laws, so that was a terrifying threat. We had to wear our hair in braids, which caused many of the girls to get mold in their hair. We were not allowed to shave. We only had 7 minutes to shower, get dressed, and get back in line and were repeatedly yelled at to hurry up. We had to eat all of the food that was given to us, no matter what it was, no matter how disgusting. If you threw up from the food, you would also be punished.
All of our schoolwork was done on computers and was basically self taught. You needed an 85% or higher to pass, which was fine, if we would have at least had real teachers to help us. In my year here, I was helped by their unqualified teacher maybe twice. Many people received their high school diplomas here, except it was later found out that the school was not licensed or accredited and all of these diplomas were fake. People who did 3 years of school and thought they graduated now had to come home and get their GED because all of their hard work was for nothing. You can find the lawsuit about this through a simple google search.
Once you acquired 200 points, you would get to Level 2. The “privilege” for this level was to get a candy bar once a week. Otherwise, the rules were the same.
Level 3 granted you permission to have 1 phone call a month with your parents, which was completely monitored and you would be punished if you tried to “manipulate” them with the truth.
Level 3 was the highest level I achieved.
The abuse and neglect happened in many different ways. Many of the girls in there were sexually abused by staff members. (I, thankfully, was not). Many people were physically abused. Pretty much all of us suffered emotional and mental abuse. They wanted you to have trauma in your life and talk about it. If you didn’t, you were punished for it. Many of us had to make up things about our lives just to get through the discussions because we would be called liars if we didn’t have some crazy emotional story to tell.
To go to the bathroom, be it during the day or the middle of the night, you had to have a staff member and another student, your “buddy”, come with you to watch you. My first week here, I was made to sleep on the floor out in the hallway with night staff watching me because they put me on “suicide watch”. I was never suicidal, so this is just one indication of many that something was wrong with this place. To my knowledge, all new students were made to do this. Why would you have new students on suicide watch for their first week if there was nothing wrong here?
We also had to go through seminars in order to progress through the programs. If you had walked into any of these seminars, you would probably be horrified. Some of what we were made to do almost seemed cult like. We had to bang on floors and scream with rolled and taped up towels. There was one activity in which we were given a scenario of a sinking boat. Everyone stood in a circle and one by one, we had to go around and choose 3 people to save. So as you walked in the circle, you had to point to every person, one by one, and either say “you live” or “you die”. Imagine how it must have felt for a 13 year old child to hear “you die” over and over by multiple people. People that they even considered to be friends. Another activity had us remove our name tags and have to walk around and say each persons name. If you didn’t remember their name, you would have to say something along the lines of “You aren’t important enough for me to remember your name”. It was like a sick and twisted mind game. We had to sit in groups and talk about our traumas. I remember a girl talking about being molested as a child, and the staff member telling her she needed to “take accountability” for it. This was the normal “blame the victim” mentality that was had in the program. My first time in these groups, I talked about the things I thought stuck out to me that I felt bad about. Apparently, my stories weren’t real or traumatic enough for the staff, so I was kicked out of the seminar and made to re do it all over again at a different date. This time, I knew I had to over exaggerate things and make up situations just to get through. Little did I know that these stories would be told to my parents as well, who now believed things about me that were never true, and of course I wasn’t allowed to tell them otherwise. It was impossible to be believed even when you did somehow get a chance to say something. I remember that I didn’t get my period for the first 6 months I was there because of how much stress my body was under. I was given a pregnancy test, even though it was impossible for me to have been pregnant, and even though it was negative, my parents were still made to believe that I could be pregnant. I couldn’t even defend myself and try to say that I wasn’t sexually active, because the program said I must have been. Just so that my behaviors seemed worse to them and would justify them telling my parents that I had a need to be there longer.
Parents also had to go through seminars, but they could choose to leave if they wanted to. When I spoke to my dad about it recently, I found out that at his seminar, the group was hell bent on making parents say they would keep their kids in the program for as long as possible. When my dad said he planned on taking me home after my year was up, he was attacked by everyone for not being 100% committed to the program. They did everything they could to try and keep us there, so I’m thankful that my parents at least kept their promise to me and pulled me out after the year was over.
There were many staff members here who truly loved being as evil as they possibly could be. They were the ones to shove you down just because you made a look they didn’t like. They were the ones who would give you corrections for forgetting your water bottle somewhere, or maybe just not walking the way they liked. They were the ones that would watch you be sick as hell and purposely refuse to let you see the nurse because you were “manipulating” them. You just couldn’t catch a break with them no matter how good you were being. Some of the rule violations were so vague that you could be punished for nothing at all, just because staff said so. There were also staff that were better and tried to show us in small ways that they cared. One would wake us up with songs. There was one staff member who even updated me on how one of my friends was doing on the boys side, which was definitely a huge no no. Those staff members made at least a fraction of time there more bearable. But even the good ones never did anything to help get us out. They went home at night knowing what was being done to us and did nothing about it. But staff members weren’t the only ones that were involved in absurd punishments. The program was designed to pit students against each other as well. We were all expected to call one another out on everything and anything we saw fit. You couldn’t just skate by this place by following the rules. You also had to stand out and give out corrections to your peers. I remember the first time I tried to “vote up” to level 3. Any level after level 2, you had to be voted up to by being approved by multiple peers and staff members. I was told that I wasn’t going to level up because I was too quiet. I followed all of the rules and was completely unproblematic, but I didn’t issue enough corrections or call people out for doing things they shouldn’t do. So I had no choice but to start being more “seen” and I basically made a deal with a few girls I knew that we would be okay with giving each other minor corrections, just so that it would look like we were working the program but not have to be cruel to each other. Other girls were very programmed and brainwashed, and felt like they had no other choice. You do what you have to do to survive. Because if you weren’t moving up in levels, it would immediately be spun to your parents that you weren’t working the program, and then you would be stuck in there even longer because they would believe you weren’t ready to come home yet.
During my time in the program, I witnessed so many instances of mental breakdowns and nothing being done to help. I witnessed a girl chug a bottle of bleach. I witnessed a girl in her room screaming at the top of her lungs about the devil coming for her. I heard horrifying screams coming from behind locked doors every single day. It was truly gut wrenching, and even worse that at some point, you become so desensitized to it because you know there is absolutely nothing you can do.
I just want to add in my story, that I am no longer angry with my parents for sending me here. I will never forget the feeling of being abandoned and betrayed, the feeling of telling the truth but not being believed, the feeling of being neglected every day and having nobody to tell and no way out, but I have forgiven my parents a long time ago. They were also manipulated and made to believe this place was something it wasn’t. They were desperate to do something, and thought they were doing the right thing. Though the trauma will stay with me forever, I made the choice to not punish my parents for it, because they have long made up for that decision and helped me become the person I am today.
I have a good life now and I’m proud of the person I have become. I moved on from this experience many years ago, but realized that in some ways, I will always be susceptible to triggers from it. Trauma never fully goes away, but I am learning once again to cope with it and heal so that it can never again make me feel trapped, or control my life.
While this school closed down years ago, there are still many programs like this that still exist. To any parents reading this, if you find yourself in a situation where you are struggling with your children and want to help them, please be sure to do as much research as possible before making any decisions. Don’t ever let your child feel abandoned by you, because the times that they are struggling are the times they need you the most. “