A therapeutic boarding school is a residential educational institution that combines academic instruction with therapeutic services for adolescents experiencing emotional, behavioral, or mental health challenges. These schools emerged in North America in the late 1960s and since the 1990s are often associated with the broader troubled teen industry. Students from other countries are sometimes sent to the United States due to the proliferation of such schools there.
Some programs have been faced with lawsuits and allegations of abuse and neglect, including the deaths of students due to excessive physical restraint.
Description These programs often rely on teen escort companies to bring teenagers to their campus against their will, and may employ guards to ensure they cannot escape for the duration of stays lasting for up to 4 years. As private facilities they are largely unregulated, with staff who are less likely to be certified than those at schools or hospitals. In 2009, the Government Accountability Office reviewed thousands of reports of abuse filed against such schools from 1994 to 2006, and studied 10 cases where the deaths of students in such residential programs were alleged to be the result of ineffective practices, untrained staff, and practices of physical restraint. In 2021, the American Bar Association summarized that "despite numerous allegations of serious abuse that date back decades, [such facilities] continue to operate in a largely unregulated way."
History Therapeutic boarding schools developed in the late 1960s alongside therapeutic communities and behavior modification programs. Early examples included CEDU (bankrupted in 2005 after repeated accusations of abuse and manslaughter and the unsolved disappearance of three students), DeSisto School (closed in 2004 following multiple accusations of fraud, child neglect, child sexual abuse, and one case of manslaughter), and Élan School (closed in 2011 after public outcry, infamous for a boxing ring where students were forced to fight one another, leading to at least one death).
Over time, the model became part of what is often referred to as the "troubled teen industry", a network of private residential programs for adolescents that held them captive or transferred them between programs until they "graduated".
Program model
Isolation and restraints Many schools employ isolation as a punishment for not adhering to the program. Some of this practice can be traced back to Synanon, a drug rehabilitation center that became a cult with lasting influence on this industry. Some programs also include physical restraints and corporal punishment, ranging from being tied up to being beaten by staff or other students.
In popular culture
Books
Gone to the Crazies by Alison Weaver No Direction Home by Greg Cayea Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin What it Takes to Pull Me Through by David L. Marcus
Films and Television
Children of Darkness (1983) Higher Ground (2000 miniseries) Cons, Cults and Kidnapping (2024 miniseries)
See also
Behavior modification facility Residential treatment center Therapeutic community Troubled teen industry List of therapeutic boarding schools
References
Bibliography