I was sent to spring ridge academy or SRA in August of 2014 after attending a therapeutic wilderness program. There were a lot of reasons that my parents sent me away, including depression, lots of anger, and no longer caring about school or anything else. What they didn’t know was that I had been sexually assaulted a couple of years before they sent me away, which came out during a time of significant family crisis. Anyways, they had no idea how to cope and were highly encouraged to seek professional treatment for me so that I could heal. Spring Ridge Academy was so far from the healing treatment center that we were told it was and to this day my parents are horrified by how much they were manipulated by the people in charge, namely Jeannie Courtney who founded SRA.
I guess I will start off by stating that Spring Ridge Academy is a cult that also has a prison like system. Like many other cults, SRA had “phases”. There were 4 of them. More terrifyingly, they used constant brainwashing techniques and used gaslighting daily in order to invalidate the claims made by students who had the guts to speak up.
I was there for a total of 11 months from August of 2014 through July of 2015. During my time at SRA, I was forced onto a high dosage of medication for disorders that I did not have. I did not want to be on medication and made that very clear to the psychiatrist that prescribed it. How this woman ever became qualified to practice medicine I will never understand. The first time I met her, she began the conversation by stating “based on what I’ve heard about you, you have these disorders.” She never took the time to give me any type of psychological evaluation. Instead, she prescribed me medication that made me feel completely off. I didn’t feel well physically and didn’t like the way that I felt mentally either. However, they continued to up the dosage, despite my protests.There was no way to get away with not taking whatever pills they wanted us on, because we had to prove to them that we had swallowed them.
At one point during my “stay” at SRA, I was put on something called “intro” as a punishment where I lost the privilege of using my voice for a week. During that week, I spoke to ask a question and it was extended by yet another week of not being able to use my voice. To lose the right to speak up for myself was terrifying and completely dehumanizing. But that’s what these places do. They try to “break you down in order to rebuild you and mold you as the cult member they want you to be.” They used attack therapy or humiliation circles several times a week, sometimes in smaller groups and sometimes in school wide groups. They would have one person at a time stand in the middle of the room and other students had to go around the circle and say essentially what they hated about the person in the middle in order to break them down and humiliate them. You weren’t allowed to leave the circle or say anything during it, you were just forced to take it all in. I can’t even tell you how many adults that worked there witnessed these shame circles and did absolutely nothing to intervene. Jeannie Courtney was by far the worst. I remember countless times seeing her smile in this sickening way during these circles, like she completely got off on the humiliation that we all had to endure because of her. Everything that she did was a power move to prove that she was in control and therefore we weren’t.
We didn’t have phones or internet access and got phone calls once a week with our parents. The phone calls were monitored by people who worked there and one time I started to talk about something that had happened to me (a shame circle) and they ended my phone call and told me that if I shared anything negative again, they would revoke my phone calls with my parents. We were also allowed to write home but the people in charge read every letter we wrote and refused to send it if it mentioned any of the stuff they were doing. My parents were completely kept in the dark. One of my roommates got in a lot of trouble for writing a letter to her mom about what happened there. The school blocked out entire paragraphs of the letter, removing anything that accused them of these clear human rights violations.
After being there for several months, I decided to write a secret letter to my ex boyfriend who I had been dating when I was sent there and who had absolutely no idea what was going on or exactly where I was. My parents had come for a visit and while we were off campus for the day, I slipped the letter into a postal box. When the school found out that I had contacted him, we had a shame circle with lots of the girls as well as staff members. And around 20 girls talked about how horrible of a person I was for breaking the rules. I don’t blame them, they would have faced consequences if they didn’t participate, so I had to listen to how horrible I was for a couple hours straight and how I was crazy and how I had lost their trust for reaching out to a person who wasn’t a part of the program. When I sent the letter to him, I also secretly sent letters for two of my friends to people they knew back home. We then had a schoolwide shame circle where others had to tell me that I had ruined those girls’ lives by helping them contact people outside of the program. I had previously been on phase 2 and part of my consequence for this was that I was dropped to phase one. My grandma and grandpa came to visit me for my 18th birthday when I was at Spring Ridge Academy. They were going to let me stay off campus with them for the weekend but once I was caught sending the letters, I was no longer allowed to leave campus, despite the fact that I was legally an adult. Throughout the several months I was there after turning 18, they made it very clear that I could not leave. And if I left anyways, they said that my parents would hate me forever and that they wouldn’t let me have any of my belongings or shoes or clothes. A short while after that, they wrote a letter to my ex boyfriend, breaking up with him from my perspective. I have no idea if they actually sent it or if he ever got the letter but it felt like a huge violation of the school to make a decision like that on behalf of me, pretending to be me.
Two of my friends and I decided to run away one night. We had a very strict schedule, so we had to time it perfectly and decided to leave after study hall. We had packed our bags with snacks we had saved and a change of clothes and left. The school had a barbed wire fence guarding it, so we hopped the barbed wire fence, cutting up our faces, arms and legs and made a run for it into the desert. We had heard from other students that SRA forces your parents to take you home if you’re missing from the school for over two weeks, so our plan was to disappear and then get sent home. However, we were caught the next day. One of my friends got pulled from the program by her mom, but I wasn’t allowed to talk to my parents after the local Sheriff transported us back to the school. I can’t tell you how many girls I know ran away because they were desperate to escape from an absolute nightmare.
After we got back, we had another shame circle, where the entire school went around and told us how bad we were for leaving. We didn’t do it for fun. We didn’t do it for attention. We did it because we were so unbelievably miserable, held hostage by an organization built on the abuse and humiliation of vulnerable teenage girls. After that, we were put on Silence & Separation, which meant we couldn’t speak a single word to each other or even go anywhere near each other. I was put on Silence and Separation or S&S many different times. The most common was with my best friend and roommate for the reason of talking more to each other than other people. But she was one of the only people in the world that I trusted, so having her taken away from me made an already miserable experience absolutely unbearable. I was also put on S&S multiple times because my friend and I were interested in each other and you weren’t allowed to have even a cute little schoolgirl type of crush. And this was shared (without my permission) with tons of other students, as well as my journals confiscated, which was a horrible experience that made me feel ashamed of my sexuality, which I already wasn’t comfortable with at that time.
The worst part after running away was being put on something called Run Watch, which meant that I had to sleep on the library floor with multiple staff members watching me. It also meant that I wasn’t able to use the toilet or shower in private. This was so unbelievably dehumanizing. And as someone that was sent there in part to heal from sexual trauma this was a horrible thing for me to go through. Showering in front of someone made me feel physically sick to my stomach with discomfort and I would just spend the time crying in the shower. How they needed to keep the door open when I was using a bathroom that had no windows I could possibly escape from makes no sense to me and it felt like a huge abuse of power. I could even see that some of the staff looked heartbroken when asked to do things that violated our basic human rights. But if you were a staff member there who is watching this and you chose to do it anyways, you are in the wrong. And you helped take so much from us, down to basic rights and a sense of personal identity and you should have known better than to allow this to go on and to take part in this kind of treatment. In the Spring when I was there, my Grandpa became very sick and was dying in the hospital, and I was allowed to fly to see him. He died right after I got to the hospital and it was heartbreaking. I was close with my grandpa and it was really hard for me losing him. After his wake and funeral, I decided I was going to refuse to go back to Spring Ridge Academy. After making this decision, I was contacted by SRA and told that I had to return. I was 18 and said that I didn’t have to. But they used excessive manipulation on me in the name of my grandfather. They said that my parents would hate me forever and that I was disappointing my grandpa who had just died “even more than I already had.” My grandpa had never shown any indication that he was disappointed in me and I know that he wanted nothing but the best for me, but it was still deeply unsettling to hear Spring Ridge Academy use his memory against me. They also refused to send my transcript to the public school I was planning on returning to, so I went back for fear of not graduating high school and how much that could hinder the career plans I had for myself. But it wasn’t worth going back and I didn’t get my diploma from SRA even when I had completed my academic requirements that June, because I hadn’t completed all of the phases of the non-academic therapeutic program.
I can’t tell you how heartbreaking it is to see girls that I went to school with and was close with having such a hard time because of what Spring Ridge Academy put us through. This place claims to save the girls who get sent there, but my experience at SRA was more traumatizing than the trauma I was sent there to heal from. I have friends who are on hard drugs, who have overdosed, who have died, who have attempted suicide and who are homeless after leaving the school that I went to. The amount of people that self harmed and tried to take their own lives while I was at school with them, who didn’t struggle with depression or suicidal ideation prior to their time at SRA makes me sick, knowing that these programs in the Troubled Teen Industry not only didn’t help us heal from stuff we had been through, but drove us to making really drastic changes that we can never undo.
My parents were horrified to find out what was going on in this program, but with communication monitored or in some cases entirely restricted, they had no idea how bad it really was. Parents are taught from these programs not to believe their children. I didn’t know how to trust anybody after I was sent there at sixteen for a while, especially adults. I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of shame and confusion when it came to my own identity, because I was stripped of it for nearly a year at Spring Ridge Academy. I knew several people with eating disorders at SRA who were forced to get weighed in a public hallway every single week. I know people who struggled with addiction who have shared that they were forced onto addictive medications. Lots of people who were sent there had suffered from physical, sexual and emotional abuse prior to attending SRA and the program used these traumas against us, forcing those of us who had been sexually assaulted to admit that we led to it happening by forcing us to relive some of the most terrifying things that had happened to us in order to get us to admit our “accountability” in having it happen to us. They also constantly violated HIPAA by announcing things from our medical records to groups of other students.
There were many gay conversion tactics used as well. Students who didn’t conform to the stereotypical feminine qualities were forced to wear dresses and makeup and paraded around campus against their will. Anyone who did not identify as straight was considered a “sexual predator.” There is a teacher who worked at Spring Ridge Academy who has reached out with inappropriate remarks (I have seen pictures of the messages with other students as well). He also reached out to several students, including myself, trying to cover up his inappropriate advances.
I have had multiple former students share that they were locked in a basement for days (and in one case several weeks) as well as students who have shared that they were denied medical care. We were forced to complete trainings that involved extreme humiliation, manipulation and physical exertion in order to complete the phase and move up. The exercise that stands out the most for me, and has come up in several conversations with my fellow SRA survivors is a towel beating exercise. There is a towel that has lots of duct tape around it, where Jeannie pushes students to be angry at their parents while beating up a chair that is being held down by students who had already completed this training for an extended period of time. Many of my fellow survivors collapsed because of extreme physical exertion after being screamed at to go harder. I remember being yelled at personally for a while because I wasn’t crying.We were also forced to do unpaid labor. Jeanie Courtney led multiple shame circles that I was in the center of, where she would laugh at people, use psychological torture techniques and verbally abuse us.
