"A staff member was right there when you made a phone call," Smith said. "If you said anything negative about the school, they just cut the phone off. Staff members read all of the e-mails before they were sent. If there was anything negative in an e-mail, they didn't send it."
"We knew that she was not getting letters that we sent," said her mother, Alicia Dobiac of Greenville, S.C. "We didn't know about the rest of this. They had told us that they would monitor messages home but that they would not restrict them in any way."
Smith said her days were filled with boredom. The scheduled routine called for a 6 a.m. wake-up, followed by 30 minutes of physical education. Breakfast was at 7 a.m. and classes began at 8 a.m. Lunch was at noon with the afternoons to be spent in seminars and watching educational videos. Dinner was scheduled for 5:30 p.m. with a 9 p.m. bedtime.
Students drank Kool-Aid at every meal, Smith said. Milk or orange juice was rarely offered. Beans and rice were almost daily fare.
"Most people didn't pay any attention to the schedule," Smith said. "Most kids got up when they wanted to. Only a few went to P.E. Classes normally started late and the computers didn't work a lot of the time. There was a month when the computers were down. Staff people helped the students cheat and gave them the answers."
Smith said most students simply skipped the afternoon seminars and did "whatever."
Smith, another girl and two boys escaped from the school for troubled teens on Sept. 16. The escape was not difficult. They simply walked out the front gate while staff personnel were busy trying to calm a fight in one of the boys' dorms. The four teens loaded up with hoarded snack food and water bottles and left.
The next seven days and nights became an agony. She slept in piles of leaves out in the woods near Semmes, Ala., and she ate candy bars and potato chips. Drinking water came from garden hoses.
Finally, covered with bug bites, hungry and rain-soaked, Smith called her parents and asked them to come and get her.
Smith was one of 13 girls and 33 boys at the school. She was sent to Gulf Coast Academy in April after running away from a similar school in South Carolina.
"We had already made the decision to pull her out of here," Dobiac said. "We were concerned because communication was so poor. She was not getting our letters or e-mails. We were not hearing from her. We couldn't get GCA staff people to call us back after leaving messages."
After spending a week in George County, looking for their daughter and observing the operation of the school first hand, Dobiac and her husband, Ed, said they are certain the decision to withdraw their daughter was the right one.
"My opinion has not changed," said Ed Dobiac. "She is not going back. It is even worse than we thought."
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