Word: desisto
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...casual visitor, it looks like a typical boarding school for the overprivileged-300 acres in Stockbridge, Mass., a mansion, dorms, art studios, a gym, music rehearsal rooms and a barn, and 150 teen-agers so bright-faced and chipper that local residents say they can identify them by the "DeSisto glow...
...fact, DeSisto at Stockbridge is a haven for the walking wounded. Some of the students have been beaten and abused much of their lives. At least half of them were drug users by age twelve. Others had been given up on as hopeless schizophrenics, and some of the girls-and boys -were rape victims and prostitutes...
...Though DeSisto may sound like a work camp dreamed up by Dickens and Freud, it has successfully straightened out disturbed youngsters who had failed to respond to treatment elsewhere. One boy, who is due to graduate next spring, had previously been expelled from a state mental hospital as uncontrollable. A recent graduate, now working on the school staff while he waits to enter college, had a long theft-and-burglary record. Until the school turned him around, he had an unusual career goal: to be a bank robber...
...school is the brainchild of Mike DeSisto, 40, a bearded and pudgy teacher turned therapist. For eleven years, DeSisto was the salaried director of Lake Grove, a Long Island school where he developed his therapeutic program. Fired after he was accused by the Lake Grove trustees of trying to break up the school, the strong-willed DeSisto announced plans to found his own school; and most of the faculty and student body quit to go with him. Parents of the kids were loyal too. DeSisto bought the Stockbridge property with tuition money they paid in advance...
...DeSisto's basic ideas is not unique to Gestalt psychology: that all youngsters, not just troubled ones, need structure and responsibility to get through adolescence. Says he: "You can't change anybody. All you can do is set up a supportive, warm, natural environment and then a natural process takes over." But all is not sweetness and light. At endless and merciless dorm meetings, rationalizations and excuses are brusquely dismissed as "bullshit," perhaps the most commonly used word on campus...