THE DIAMOND RANCH ACADEMY NIGHTMARE In early 2022, my daughter was placed at Diamond Ranch Academy by a high-end, well respected educational consultant in the San Francisco Bay area. The consultant and my daughter’s psychiatrist scared me into thinking she would become a meth addict on the street if I didn’t send her immediately to residential care. My daughter’s experience at Diamond Ranch Academy was traumatic. She had never been self-harming or suicidal, but most of the girls in her group at DRA were highly disturbed, self-harming and destructive. On the first day she was there, one of her roommates got angry and punched the wall so hard it dented the wall and wounded her hand. Another roommate threatened to kill all the others. Some of the girls were experiencing active psychosis; my daughter was asked by one roommate if she could hear the whispering in the corner of the room. The girls used everything available to them for self-harm: school erasers, straightening irons, notebook spirals. The prior year, one of the girls had jumped out of a window; the girls had saved shards of glass from the broken window and were still using them for self-harm. Most of the girls there had tried to kill themselves in the past; some were actively suicidal. When an attempt was made, the girls were put “on watch”, shamed by forcing them to wear a suicide suit of yellow t-shirts and black pants. Girls also had to wear the suit if they misbehaved. At one time, in my daughter’s “family” of 13 girls, four were on watch, but those on watch varied every few days throughout the group. My daughter observed a lot of cutting and extremely rude behavior. At one point, three girls in my daughter’s family vandalized the possessions of their 4th roommate. When the roommate was gone on a family visit, the three roommates shredded the victim’s clothes, burned her photos, and smeared shampoo on the rest of her possessions. The three then had to wear the suicide suits, the victim was moved to another room, and my daughter was moved into the room with the three suicide-suited girls. My daughter was not physically or emotionally safe at that school. She woke up screaming every night with nightmares. Medical care was minimal. When my daughter scraped her leg and asked for a bandaid, she was told that she could only get one during one specific hour of the day, and that didn’t happen to be the right hour. Self-harm injuries also received little care. The school was understaffed for the level of psychiatric care needed. There were no psychiatrists on staff, only a psych nurse whose job was to deliver the medication prescribed by outside psychiatrists. The only staff at the school on nights, weekends and holidays were minimum wage employees with no education, training or experience in handling violent adolescents. Staff often yelled at the kids, threatening to send them to a higher level of care unless they behaved. In less than a one-month period, my daughter saw a lot of staff turnover. The therapy provided at the school did not follow the standard practice of psychology. Although the school is advertised as a secular school, group therapy consisted of discussing thinly-veiled Mormon principles. One of the personality classifications taught was written by a Mormon psychologist and self-proclaimed “corporate interventionist” who had received divine inspiration to write his lucrative book series. My daughter’s assigned therapist received her psychology degree online from a religious university, she was not fully licensed by the state, and she had worked previously in the locations of other TBSs that had been closed due to abuse allegations. The food provided was prepared by other students and lacked basic nutrition and adequate quantity. My daughter signed up for vegetarian meals due to the questionable meat served, but these meals were sometimes just a small bowl of rice with a few mushrooms on top for dinner, or chicken cut into rectangles that was passed off as tofu. The school’s academics consisted of handing the kids workbooks in a noisy classroom for six hours a day, and expecting them to complete the assignments independently. There was no live instruction in the core classes, or even video instruction. My daughter asked for help with the workbook material several times, but there were no teachers or aides available to help her. My daughter was never allowed to speak to me by phone privately to tell me what was happening at the school. The two phone calls I had with her were both on speaker phone, with at least four school administrators sitting around her, unannounced to me. Email communications were closely censored. I got enough details from these calls and emails, though, to figure out the con. I spoke to the Admissions Director, the Parent Coordinator, and my daughter’s therapist about my concerns with the school. They said that my daughter was trying to manipulate me, she was exaggerating the situation there, the other students there had only “mild to moderate” issues, and the staff was vigilant and well-trained to handle any issues. Her therapist told me that her nightmares were completely normal, and that it would take three or four months to adapt to the school environment. I took my daughter home from DRA about a month after she arrived. The school hadn’t told her I was coming; all of her belongings had been thrown into two large black trash bags behind the front desk. She had lost 7 pounds, lots of hair, and her face was as white as a sheet. She still has digestive problems and hair loss, but her nightmares are slowly going away. I haven’t regretted my decision to take her home. She had written in a journal about her experiences at DRA so she could tell me about them later. When I picked her up, she looked through her notebook three times to find the story and read it to me, only to find that those pages had been ripped out by the school staff and thrown away. So… did the whole DRA experience actually happen? The brainwashing, gaslighting, and journal-cleansing at DRA indicated that the whole thing may just have been a bad nightmare, but then…oh, yeah, there’s that $ 35,000 missing from my savings account.
