I’m kind of offended that this whole documentary was made and nobody reached out to me for my story, I was part of the last class at academy at ivy ridge, I was there for 15 months when the school got shut down for “unlivable living situation” and sent to our sister school in South Carolina where the abuse was 1,000 times worse than academy at ivy ridge. My first day at academy at ivy ridge I was tackled to the ground by 6 of the staff faculty including men and women, I spit in the school directors face and was sent to intervention for 4 days where I had to write an accountable 1,000 word essay and was denied food and water and heat. It took 4 days for me to finally stop writing sarcastic comments and actually write something that finally got me out of intervention. It took almost a year for me to accumulate any type of points and I finally made level 4 the week that the school shut down. My first 6 months there we were on a category 4 silence so we weren’t allowed to talk at all unless giving corrections. The heat was never on it was always freezing. We had to undress shower and redress and be in line with our hair brushed and pulled back within 7 minutes, there were no mirrors and no doors on the stalls you literally shit sitting next to another person. Let me tell you the academy at ivy ridge totally prepared me for when I went to jail later on in life because jail was a piece of cake compared to academy at ivy ridge. Don’t even get me started on the conferences, I wouldn’t participate because it was insane, I got a category 4 refusal for it. You couldn’t say anything bad about the school in your letters home or else they just wouldn’t send the letter and then you would get in trouble for trying to tell your parents what was actually going on. My name is Jacquelin O’Connor Fernandez and I was housed at academy at ivy ridge from age 16 and a half to when the school closed about two months before my 18th birthday. When I arrived at our sister school in South Carolina there was a girl there that was kept in a room handcuffed to the bunk beds and wearing a muzzle for 3 days without any food or water. The school wasn’t as strict in it’s everyday living but the punishments were way more severe than at academy at ivy ridge. My phone number is [PHONE REDACTED] and my email is [EMAIL REDACTED]
