Too-tough love?

forbes.com

AT 3:46 ON THE MORNING of Nov. 30, 1996, Stanley Goold III, a 16-year-old high schooler from Middletown, Calif., recalls being shaken awake. Over his bed stood three hulking strangers. One of them tossed him his clothes. "Get dressed," he ordered the boy.

Still groggy, Stanley was hustled into a waiting rental car -- but not before his mother, Jane Goold, handed him a small bag packed with a few articles of clothing. Stanley says that she never even told him where he was going -- to a "program" to help fight his alleged marijuana and alcohol habits. (Stanley always denied he had a problem and says he took two drug tests that were negative.) Two men sandwiched him into the backseat, and the car sped off.

The next evening, Stanley says, he arrived at Brightway Adolescent Hospital, a private psychiatric hospital in St. George, Utah, where he was told to take a shower and put on a hospital gown. He asked to call his dad -- who had divorced his mother years ago and knew nothing of her plans to send Stanley away for treatment -- and was turned down. Stanley spent the week being evaluated by a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as normal, with above-average intelligence, but "underresourced" -- a condition never explained to him, but apparently serious enough for him to be sent to a drying-out camp for a year.

A week later, he says, he was put on a plane to Western Samoa, site of the school called Paradise Cove, where he was forced to sleep on a small mat in a crowded room. "It was worse than being in prison, because we didn't know when we were going to leave," says Stanley, who claims he still suffers from nightmares. His father discovered Stanley's whereabouts only after his son failed to show up for a scheduled visit.

That prompted him to go to court. Nine months later he got physical custody of Stanley and took him out of Paradise Cove. Today he's an 18- year-old freshman at Ohlone College in Fremont, Calif., where he lives at home with his dad.

Stanley Goold was one of about 950 teenagers who have been enrolled at Paradise Cove or one of its six sister schools in the U.S., Jamaica, Mexico and Western Samoa -- loosely directed by a LaVerkin, Utah-based group known as the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP), which markets the schools under the name Teen Help.

According to ads in Sunset magazine, as well as its Web site (www.vpp.com/teenhelp), Teen Help offers "schools, camps, other alternatives" -- intensive rehab programs -- to help 13-to-18-year-olds with psychological or substance abuse problems.

Parents pay up to $54,000 a year for treatment and services. It is estimated that WWASP and affiliated companies pull in $30 million-plus in annual revenues.

Okay, lots of troubled teenagers aren't going to respond to gentle suggestion, especially from their parents. But some of WWASP's camps may push tough love too far.

Last November its Morava Academy closed down after Czech police charged its U.S. managers with child torture; those criminal charges are pending.

They were the same managers who were arrested, did time and fled Mexico when Sunrise Beach, a school for girls in Punta Sam, was shut down in May 1996 after employees complained to the media about prisonlike conditions inside the facility.

Karr Farnsworth, president of WWASP, defends the camps as highly structured boarding schools. The programs, he says, offer a mix of school, self-study and self-improvement seminars, along with therapy to change attitude problems.

Students usually live in dormlike rooms and stay for 12 to 18 months.

"These kids are not being sent to Rikers Island," Farnsworth insists.

"Students get their lives in order and go home as productive citizens."

He recently surveyed hundreds of parents and claims that all but a few said they'd made a good choice enrolling their kids in the program, and would recommend it to others.

FORBES talked to two sets of parents who were very happy with the program and said their children came back minus their drug habits and bad attitudes. Daniel Koller, Jane Goold's attorney, says he spent $60,000 on therapy for his son Daniel before sending him to Paradise Cove. "He was doing crystal meth; that was his drug of choice," says Koller. Now, he claims, "he's a fantastic new human being, a real loving guy," currently enrolled in the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo.

These days Stanley Goold doesn't feel rehabilitated. He has enlisted Thomas Burton, a Pleasanton, Calif. attorney, to sue the operators of Paradise Cove. Burton has filed two cases against WWASP schools in federal court and is preparing cases on behalf of eight additional clients. Burton compares Paradise Cove to "a private prison," and alleges it is a place where "adolescents are impounded, tortured, berated, brainwashed and otherwise abused."

WWASP officials -- the ones who returned phone calls -- steadfastly deny all this. But the evidence strongly suggests that teenagers in the program -- whose parents have signed away their rights -- live under the constant threat of physical punishment and receive little therapy.

Stanley Goold says he never received any counseling during his 11- month stay. But he vividly remembers the physical treatment. "I saw a few kids punched, kicked and thrown, but not nearly as many as I heard about," he recalls. For small infractions -- chewing food with an open mouth, talking back to the staff, failing a test -- Stanley himself landed in the "dungeon" a half-dozen times for a day or two. There he'd be forced to sit cross-legged on a cement floor for 12 hours a day, listening to tapes about the lives of Socrates, Beethoven and Genghis Khan. Students who tried to flee the dungeon, says Stanley, would be locked up in a tiny cell for weeks at a time. "Sometimes they'd put duct tape over the kid's mouth, hog-tie him or put on handcuffs," he says.

Farnsworth says, "We do not permit physical abuse." If some kids were to get out of control, he says, "they would be temporarily restrained by a member of our staff until they calm down and promise to cooperate."

It's difficult to establish a pattern of problems at the schools, partly because they operate independently of each other, as do the handful of other companies that provide services to WWASP. "The corporate structure is extremely complex and convoluted -- deliberately so," charges attorney Burton. That way, he says, the right hand can claim it has no idea what the left is doing.

In addition to the seven "residential facilities," WWASP does business with firms in or around nearby St. George, Utah. There's Teen Help, the marketing arm that directs parents to various camps and which, according to Farnsworth, also provides referrals to "escort services" of the type that whisked away Stanley Goold. Dixie Contract Services helps the schools hire firms, such as R&B Billing, to do back-office work.

Brightway Adolescent Hospital closed down in March 1998 for financial reasons, the company insists -- but not before the Utah Department of Health launched an investigation into its alleged practice of admitting children without the consent of both parents.

Then there's Resource Realizations, which provides the camps with seminars and training materials.

Farnsworth insists all the companies are independent of each other.

If so, there are some strange coincidences.

J. Ralph Atkin, the founder of SkyWest airlines and former codirector of business and economic development for the State of Utah, has been an attorney for Teen Help and a registered agent for R&B Billing and Dixie Contract.

According to the Utah Department of Commerce, he is a trustee of WWASP. Atkin denies this, saying that state records aren't up to date. "I don't have anything in common with the business operation," he insists.

He does concede that he co-owned Morava Academy, the WWASP school that was closed down last fall by Czech authorities.

Another figure who keeps popping up is Narvin Lichfield, whose brother Robert founded Cross Creek Manor in 1988, the oldest school in the WWASP network, established Paradise Cove and ran Teen Help before his retirement a few years ago.

Narvin Lichfield owns Carolina Springs Academy, a WWASP school in Abbeville, S.C. He is the president and the director of St. George-based Adolescent Services Incorporated (ASI), which, like Teen Help, is a marketing company for the schools.

He is on the board of At Risk Teen Foundation, which raises money to help parents defray the costs of WWASP schools offered through ASI, including Carolina Springs.

The Internal Revenue Service is reviewing At Risk's application for status as a tax-exempt charity. Lichfield insists it's all perfectly kosher. "The foundation will be giving grants to the parents, not to the schools," he says.

Still, the suits are moving forward. Most legal action to date has been directed against parents. Last year a superior court judge in Oakland, Calif. dismissed a suit brought by the Alameda County deputy district attorney on behalf of then-16-year-old David Van Blarigan against his parents for sending him against his will to a WWASP school in Tranquility Bay in Jamaica.

And in January Children's Services in Ohio's Franklin County halted an investigation of a Columbus couple who had dispatched their 17-year- old son to Tranquility Bay. The boy was allegedly handled roughly on the trip to Jamaica. The parents agreed to settle out of court.

Parents of deeply troubled adolescents face a terrible dilemma. A mild response to the problem may get no results; an extreme one, like what WWASP seems to be offering, may turn out to be overkill.