Escuela Caribe and Crosswinds/ Caribbean Mountain Academy Updates

This past Wednesday, Kidnapped for Christ filmmaker Kate Logan, Jesus Land author Julia Scheeres, journalist Kathryn Joyce (who wrote the Roloff/Hepzibah House expose for Mother Jones), and others appeared on the Ann Walker Show (September 12 edition).  They discussed the history of New Horizons Youth Ministries and similar fundamentalist reform schools, their abuses, the lack of regulation of such programs, and the stigma that hampers survivor allegations of abuse from being taken seriously.  
Joyce noted that many of the female survivors of the Roloff programs often "ricochet into addiction" in order to deal with the trauma.  Scheeres provided anecdotes from discussion between many NHYM alumni, who acknowledge struggling with failed relationships and/or addiction.  A high percentage of us have died early or committed suicide, which, whenever I force myself to remember, always reminds me of that Jim Carroll song, People Who Died.
Walker briefly noted the connections of the Romneys (George and Mitt) to the troubled teen industry.  Mitt Romney has received financial backing from numerous Utah troubled teen programs.* His father, George Romney, was a supporter of the Floyd Starr Commonwealth Home.  Pastor Gordon Blossom, who founded Escuela Caribe, the school where myself, Scheeres, and hundreds of other alumni were abused, was a Floyd graduate . EC alumni from the seventies have told me stories of how Blossom would tell them that even though they were being beaten and locked up in the Quiet Room, etc., they didn't have it bad---Blossom's hands were permanently deformed from having them beaten by a leather belt at Floyd.
What constitutes abuse is all context I suppose. Which leads me into update two. 
Mark Terrell, CEO of Crosswinds/ Caribbean Mountain Academy, the organization that purchased New Horizons Youth Ministries, recently held a webinar where we alumni were allowed to send in questions.  Ever awesome alum Tim S. compiled a list. 
We appreciate Crosswinds holding a forum to answer our questions.  We appreciate that they understand that our mission is to help them help kids.  We don't want kids to be damaged the way we were by Escuela Caribe, which is why we are so focused on the CMA campus.
However, we are troubled by their decision to continue to employ former Escuela Caribe staff. At least five of the eight staff employed by Crosswinds are former Escuela Caribe employees.  Many were there in 2006 when Kate Logan filmed the original footage for Kidnapped for Christ, when (among other abuses) teenagers were receiving swats and were being sent to the Quiet Room. They were also anti-gay.
I visited the same year (separately)- I met a girl who suffered from an anxiety disorder (before she went to the program), who was "on silence" to everyone but staff, who was given swats frequently.  Her parents were paying $6000/month for this "treatment."  (They pulled her- but not before they spent their retirement trying to help their daughter).
Many alumni and I find the presence of these former individuals as current staff members unacceptable. We believe that by witnessing abusive behavior over a period of years, their norm for what entails abusive behavior is WAY out of whack...they have mental blinders to what would actually be abuse.  Even if these individuals did not commit abuse, through their silence they were complicit in the abuse of numerous children, and therefore are not trustworthy to counsel the teens who are currently there.
Understand, I offer this opinion with utmost respect.  Like many of my fellow alumni, I appreciate the strides Crosswinds currently is taking to improve their program.

*Robert Lichfield, Mitt Romney's co-chair for fundraising in Utah, founded the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, a coalition of twenty plus programs wracked with allegations of extreme physical and sexual abuse---interestingly, Lichfield was employed by Provo Canyon [a WWASP school] around the same time as the 1979 Congressional Hearings into the Abuse and Neglect of Children in Institutions; Escuela Caribe was also cited in the same report.

Why NHYM Alumni Are Concerned about Crosswinds

In 2011, Escuela Caribe and its parent company New Horizons Youth Ministries shut down. The property was donated to Crosswinds, a subsidiary of Lifeline Youth Ministries.  At first we celebrated. However, now we alumni are concerned.
Caribbean Mountain Academy, a division of Crosswinds, is predominantly staffed by former New Horizons Youth Ministries/ Escuela Caribe employees.  These are employees that were employed by an organization that professed that children must be broken in order to be fixed. They worked during a time when students, teenagers, were given swats and being sent to the Quiet Room (often for days) for minor violations, when students were being "slammed" against the wall for minor infractions, even when the story of waterboarding recounted by "Emily" occurred sometime around 2009. (For further reference, read this student's account of abuse in 2008, when many of these staff were employed).
Another troubling aspect is that this summer Crosswinds uploaded a parents' guidebook (since removed from their website).  The students are on a level system similar to the one utilized by Escuela Caribe. It does not say how their placement on levels is determined.  (In the past it was via a point sheet).Zero Level, which we all considered an abomination, is no longer mentioned in the guidebook.  However, it seems to have been replaced with Level One.  
This summer, Jesus Land author Julia Scheeres created a petition to protect students at Caribbean Mountain Academy.  A series of requests to protect basic human rights was outlined.  Nearly 600 individuals have signed, including Caribbean Mountain Academy/ Crosswinds CEO Mark Terrell.  
Terrell added comments.  Many are problematic. The two things that worry us most is that he carefully qualified his answers on employing former staff and on uncensored communication between students and families. 
In order for students to be protected, they need uncensored communication with their families.  They need a hotline to report abuse, and an outside agency that monitors the facility to ensure that abuse is not occurring.  For students to be safe, they shouldn't be in the Dominican Republic at all, cut off from their families.
We believe all former staff should be dismissed.  Two of the current staff members have written a post for the Crosswinds facebook page defending why they should still be employed. Even if they did not commit abuse, they still were there while it was occurring.  In the United States, teachers or counselors who do not report abuse happening to children lose their jobs.  Why should the rules be different in a therapeutic program?

New Horizons Youth Ministries Expelled from Haiti in 1974

New Horizons Youth Ministries' first overseas academy, Caribe-Vista Youth Safari, was established in Haiti. 

In 1974, they moved to the Dominican Republic. They changed their name to Caribe-Vista. (Five years later, after a 1979 Congressional Report alleging abuse, it would become Escuela Caribe...today it is known as Caribbean Mountain Academy).Various rumors were given for the program’s move, usually casting blame upon the students:  some kid had burned down native huts in Haiti.  A girl had run away and been forced into prostitution.

However, an article from 1974, tells the truth.

The program was cited by Michigan officials for being unlicensed and not offering proper care.  They were particularly concerned with Blossom’s advocacy of corporal punishment resulting in excessive bruises and bleeding.  He also was sending court-ordered students to Haiti who were supposed to be housed at Michigan’s Honey Creek Christian Homes.

The Haitian officials deported Blossom’s organization on drug charges and for not keeping their visas and other documents current.  If the Duvalier regime expels you, you must be really corrupt.

Caribbean Youth Camp Attacked As Unfit by Paper

Detroit (AP) A Caribbean camp housing 18 Michigan youths is unlicensed and may not offer proper care, according to a Detroit newspaper. Half of the youths at the camp were sent there by state probate judges and five of those six judges have ordered their charges returned to the states pending an investigation of the Caribe Vista Youth Safari. The nine other Michigan youths were placed in the camp by their parents.

The sixth judge said he planned to make a decision today after reading a state Supreme Court memo which questioned whether the courts could legally make the placements and which said use of state funds for the care of youths at the facility “may be improper”.

The youths and their director Rev Gordon Blossom, a Baptist minister from Grand Rapids, were deported from Haiti to the Dominican Republic because of drug charges and because Haitian officials said they failed to keep visas and other documents current, the Detroit Free Press said.

They have since been lodged at two sites on the island, and will be moving to a third camp soon, the paper said.

Judges ordered the youths placed in the camp, believing the 53-year old minister was running a legitimate operation based on what he called “culture shock.”

Blossom believes the disorientation resulting from living in a different country with a strange language, monetary system, life-style and social-political problems will make it easier for the campers to overcome influences that get them into trouble in the first place, the paper said.

Blossom runs a licensed Michigan camp called Honey Creek Christian Homes in Lowell, Michigan. He told judges that their wards would be sent to Honey Creek, then to the Caribbean.

However, the paper said it learned the youths were flown directly to Haiti. Part of the stir that has prompted some judges to order their wards back to Michigan stems from Blossom’s questionable maneuvering and advocacy of corporal punishment. They said they were worried by Blossom’s failure to keep them up to date on what was happening with his charges.

“Kids need a swat on the butt when they mouth off,” Blossom was quoted as saying. However, the Free Press said it learned excessive bruises and bleeding sometimes resulted. Physical punishment has been discontinued, however, and group therapy substituted, the paper said.*

Although some of the judges have deplored Blossom’s operation, he argued in his defense: “If authorities….. are unaware of the sexual abuse, social stigma, destructive influences, and psychological assaults experienced by children in the reform schools, detention centers and mental hospitals to which our kids otherwise would have been sent, we have just cause for their replacement.

“If, while knowing these things, they continue to stifle programs calculated to avoid these traumas, they justly indict themselves in the minds of all knowledgeable persons.”

from the The Daily Globe, Ironwood, Michigan, August 19, 1974, p.6.

*Physical punishment was resumed once NHYM moved to the Dominican Republic.  It was documented in a 1979 Congressional Hearing. 

1988 Escuela Caribe Promotional Video

Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land and A Thousand Lives, uploaded this 1988 Escuela Caribe* promotional video. I attended E.C. from 1990-91.  I knew many of the staff and a few of the students in this film.


In it, founder Gordon Blossom speaks of "youngsters who come from nice neighborhoods and good families" who are negatively impacted by the dangers of the "secularized culture in America...with its materialistic and humanistic values" and public schools. (According to the American Psychiatric Association, four out of five kids in for-profit teen treatment facilities are white and middle class).


Blossom speaks of how being in the Dominican Republic "psychologically disorients kids" enabling the staff to "plant new perspectives."  What he means is that students were brainwashed, a process hastened by separating them from their family, using abuse.


Phil Redwine, who was director when I was there, says "the most important part of my being here is not how I run the school, but how I love the kids."


"If a youngster completes all three phases of our training program, that youngster is going to be tremendously enriched, and so will all of us," Blossom concludes.




*Recently, Escuela Caribe was reported to be closed.  However, it has now reopened as Caribbean Mountain Academy.  It employs many of the same staff.