Who's Watching The Kids? - Montana PBS

Sunday, July 05 2009 administrator
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Who's Watching The Kids? There are more than 30 privately run schools for troubled youth operating in the state of Montana. They employ more than 600 people and pump an estimated 4 million into the state income taxes. It's an exploding industry, but strangely, most Montanans have no idea the schools even exist. In this hour-long documentary, MontanaPBS explores a lucrative industry praised for its novel approach to reforming youth, yet shrouded in disturbing allegations of abuse and neglect. (First Aired Thursday, September 14, 2006)

PROGRAM UPDATE:
During the 2007 Montana Legislature, lawmakers passed a bill requiring alternative schools to be licensed and regulated by the Board of Private Alternative Adolescent Residential or Outdoor Programs (PAARP) under the Department of Labor.

 

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CAFETY NOTE: Residential programs in MT are now regulated by the Department of Labor, despite concern over the appropriatness of this oversight agency, as opposed to knowledgiable and far more suitable Department of Public Health and Human Services. In 2007 Senator Trudi Schmidt proposed bill SB 288, that would ensure such basic adequate protection were afforded youth, but this bill was heavily lobbied against by the industry in MT and did not pass. On the record opposing the legislation were Spring Creek Lodge Academy of Thompson Falls and Monarch School of Heron. Only two people verbally testified in opposition to the bill. The first was Gary Spaeth, a lobbyist for the Montana Alternative Adolescent Private Programs (MAAPP). MAAPP Board members include NATSAP members John Mercer, Mission Mountain School, President; Penny James, Explorations, Secretary; and Linda Carpenter, Star Meadows at Hope Ranch, Treasurer. Also on the Board are Representative Paul Clark, and Jacqueline Rutzke, Spring Creek Lodge Academy. The second was John McKenna, President of Monarch School (and a CEDU alumnus). Both expressed concern about the makeup of the Montana Board of Private Alternative Adolescent Residential or Outdoor Programs (PAARP), a five-member board—which includes three industry representatives— under SB 288, which calls for expanding the size of the board from five members to nine and adding a psychologist, a physician, the superintendent of public instruction and the director of the Department of Public Health and Human Services. According to McKenna, having a lopsided number of board members who don’t represent the industry could stifle innovation at the expense of the teens in the programs.

For more information please click on articles below:

Keeping an eye on the kids (MT)

Ready for Their License (MT)

 

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Multimedia

CEDU Documentary

Director: Liam Scheff
Surviving Cedu,” tells the story of a half-dozen teenagers who were each sent to the Cedu School, variously described to them as a standard boarding school, a wilderness adventure school, or a therapeutic learning environment in the Western mountains of the United States. But the experience of the school was something entirely different. Students quickly found themselves in a new, strange, uncomfortable and often frightening world of intense group relationships and heightened, invasive and violent group therapies. Relationships at the school between students - and staff - seemed to have little formal structure or sense of normal boundary - and a student’s life was always under threat of intense and unpredictable disciplining and punishment.