Parents call 'tough love' center abusive

Trouble follows program to help wayward teens

Spring Creek Lodge Academy, home to thousands of wayward children since 1996, calls itself “a safe haven for change.” Many parents swear with near-religious devotion that the program, one of the nation's largest, has saved their sons and daughters. Others have come to curse it.

The program is affiliated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, or WWASPS, a multimillion-dollar business in the industry of “tough love” programs and "specialty boarding schools" that have flourished, often unregulated, for two decades.

WWASPS affiliates in Mexico, Costa Rica, Western Samoa and the Czech Republic have closed under accusations of cruelty since 1996. The affiliate in Costa Rica collapsed in May when students revolted. A review of seven of the company's largest affiliates in the United States, where it remains the fastest-growing program of its kind, found accusations of misconduct or wrongdoing at four of them. In Utah and South Carolina, state officials have cited the programs and their staffs for violations including child abuse and overcrowding, and they have challenged their right to operate. At the company's largest affiliate, Spring Creek, the program and its staff have been accused of sexual abuse, physical violence and psychological duress.

WWASPS, whose programs house about 2,400 youths in all, some as young as 10, has fought and denied all charges. The founder, Robert Lichfield, 49, called the allegations part of a difficult business. “When you have troubled kids and troubled parents — any school or program that works with troubled kids has complaints,” Lichfield said. “We're no different.” He attributed the growth of WWASPS to “the breakdown of the family. When the family is not functioning,“ he said, “society suffers.”

WWASPS has flourished and profited by tapping a deep well of woe in American families, interviews and correspondence with more than 200 parents, children, staff members and program officials made clear. Parents said they turned to the programs in exasperation, or exhaustion, seeking salvation, or in some cases exile, for their sons and daughters. Many say WWASPS was their only alternative after schools, public health systems, counseling and the courts failed them.

Spring Creek's associate director, Chaffin Pullan, 32, said, “We're crazy enough to say, 'Hey, we'll take your child, and we'll work on their values.'”

But at Spring Creek, as at several other affiliates, some of that work takes place under conditions and circumstances that some children and parents call physically and psychologically brutal. Where state regulators have challenged affiliates, government officials often spend years trying to place controls on the programs or sanction them for defiance of licensing rules. South Carolina officials, for example, after four years of fighting, have barred Narvin Lichfield, the brother of the WWASPS founder, from Carolina Springs Academy, the program that Narvin Lichfield owns in the tiny town of Due West.

In Utah, officials are wrestling with Majestic Ranch, which takes children as young as 10, and where a program director was recently charged with child abuse, as well as with a new program at the flagship affiliate, Cross Creek, for clients older than 18. Neither program has obtained the required operating license, state officials said.

Robert Lichfield, who once said he believed that only Satan stood in the way of the programs' goals, said state authorities were merely reacting to pressure from parents or reporters, adding, “If I was in their position, I would be doing the same thing.”

In Montana, where 50 other programs for troubled teenagers have opened in addition to Spring Creek, the state does not regulate private schools, state officials say. “We have a tremendous number — an inordinate amount — of these programs in western Montana,” said Paul Clark, a Montana state legislator who represents the Thompson Falls area and also runs a program for about a dozen wayward teenagers. But the state lacks the capacity or the expertise to regulate them, Clark said. “We'll get action after there's a crisis.”

Many children from the affiliate that collapsed in Costa Rica wound up at Spring Creek, where the enrollment has doubled to about 500 since 2000, and whose parents pay roughly $40,000 a year and up. That growth has created a demand for trained teachers and counselors, staff members say. The program is the largest employer in this corner of Montana, where jobs are scarce and wages low. As the school has grown, so have charges of abuse.

A log cabin with tiny isolation rooms, called the Hobbit, stands on the edge of Spring Creek's compound in the woods. Some teenagers, like Alex Ziperovich, 16, say they have spent months in the Hobbit, eating meals of beans and bananas. “He came out 35 pounds lighter, acting like a zombie,” said his mother, Michele Ziperovich, a Seattle lawyer. “When he came back, he was worse, far worse.”

In March, a 20-year-old staff member was charged by the county prosecutor with sexually assaulting two boys in the Hobbit, one 14 and the other 17. He denies the charges.

In June, one girl was beaten by students with a shower-curtain rod; in September 2002, a student bent on escape beat a guard with a vacuum-cleaner pipe and shattered his cheekbone, Pullan and several present and former staff members said. The September assault followed a similar attack three weeks earlier; Thompson Falls residents say escape attempts are rising.

Pullan, Spring Creek's assistant director, said the center was curtailing use of the isolation rooms. He called the recent violence against staff members unusual and “horrific.” He is convinced that Spring Creek is helping the vast majority of its children. Some parents of children damaged by drugs, drinking, depression or divorce said that WWASPS programs were their sole alternative.

“We refer to it, my husband and I, as the program of last resort,” Debbie Wood said. She and her husband moved from Seattle to Thompson Falls in March to be near their son, Sam, now 17, at Spring Creek. “I don't know of another program that would fill our needs the way WWASPS has,” Wood said.

A crucial part of the company's effort to shape its success is a requisite series of emotional-growth seminars for parents. “The seminars are the most important thing we have experienced as a family,” said Rosemary Hinch, a teacher in Phoenix. “It was painful. It was hard,” Hinch said. “They teach you to take a really good look at yourself.”

But the seminars convinced Michele Ziperovich to pull her son Alex out. “It was 300 adults screaming and beating on chairs, three days of no sleep, and after that, you'll buy into whatever they say,” Ziperovich said.

By Tim Weiner
15 September 2003

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2003/09/12/MN293329.DTL

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