Word: bachelor
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...state of shock," says Sharon Ferguson, whose complaints about her son's treatment at Mount Bachelor in the 1990s helped spur the earlier investigation. "I can't believe that school is still open and the same things are being said and the same people are running...
...former student, Melissa Maisa, now 32, married and a mother of two young children in San Diego, had a similar response when informed of the present investigation. Maisa attended Mount Bachelor between 1992 and 1994 under largely the same management that runs the school today, and graduated the school with honors. She was sent there in part because of promiscuous behavior as a teen, which Maisa associates with being a victim of child sexual abuse and date rape. "Mount Bachelor made me feel even more dirty and more shameful than either one of those experiences ever did. I just want...
Susan Owren, a part-time driver for Mount Bachelor, has heard similar stories from dozens of students. Owren spends several hours several days a week shuttling the school's students to doctor's appointments in town; during the rides, she says, students open up to her. She says she's seen teens being made to run in the snow without adequate footwear and to move rocks back and forth, apparently as discipline. "Every single kid has told me something horrifying," she says, adding that students who spoke with her independently corroborated one another. In mid-March, Owren went...
...techniques that Mount Bachelor allegedly uses, while unconventional, are not new. They are similar to the tenets of the once popular "human potential movement" of the 1960s and '70s, which purported to change people's lives through intense emotional experiences. The movement grew out of the practices of Synanon and other California experiments in utopian living, which later helped spawn so-called large group awareness training programs, such as LifeSpring...
...Mount Bachelor's Lifesteps seminars appear to share these tactics and philosophy. Several of its top employees formerly worked at a now defunct chain of troubled-teen programs known as CEDU, which was founded by former Synanon members. "The process of breaking kids down is very much integrated into the therapeutic milieu," says Kat Whitehead, executive director of the Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth, an expert on such abuse, who has testified before Congress on the topic. "Unfortunately, that seems to be very common, at least in the private facilities...