I was sent to New Horizons which later became Gateway Freedom ranch In 2012. It was for girls aged 9-13, typically all adoptees (though it wasn’t adoptees only, it just shows what kind of people send their kids to place like this. People who pay to be a parent but can’t do the parenting themselves. Only one girl wasn’t an adoptee the entire 2 years I was there)We never had more than 10 girls at a time. I was woken up at 4am by two strangers and my parents telling me I was going with them. We flew all the way from New York to Montana. When I arrived the director of the place, Lisa Marek, told me that although this is a Christian place, becoming a Christian wasn’t the only way to leave. That later turned out to be a lie. For the first two weeks I was there, I was a level 0. Before I go in detail I should describe how the levels differed and how the punishment system worked. Each level took about 3 months, except level 0 to 1 is two weeks. You can be demoted levels.
Our punishment was based on a point system which involved working off points by rolling a dice and doing whatever task is assigned to that dice roll. Each point is one roll and you must work them off before the night is done. If you miss bed time because you had to finish working off your points, that’s another point.
1: Do all the dishes by yourself after dinner, bed time at 7:30 (or 7 if level 0)
2: 75 pushups in less than 7 minutes. Any leftover pushups after this time will be doubled and you have 7 minutes to do them. The cycle continues if you never complete it in time. I once racked up 300 pushups before I got accustomed. There eventually comes a time (when they see fit) that they will stop giving you a time limit and you just finish however many pushups until its done.
3: Grace (because 3 is gods number apparently)
4: My least favorite. 100 burpees in 10 minutes. Same rules apply as pushups for unfinished burpees in the time limit.
5: 200 situps in 10 minutes. Same rules apply. This was my favorite because after rolling a five 6 times in a row one night for the points I got that day, I grew a 6 pack and could do sit ups like none other.
6: 50 Knee highs in 3 minutes. This one later changed to a 3 minute wall sit.
Level 0: This means that you can only talk to your shadow (typically a girl who would be leaving soon and already knows all the rules), you must be within arms span of your shadow, you have to raise your hand to talk to any staff. Other rules for level zeros included not being allowed seasoning for your food, having to eat isolated from everyone else, bed time at 7:30, and you can only get one 5 minute phone call to your parents a week. You sit in the first row of the van. No perfume or body spray. You may not do anything to interact with any other girls but your shadow including looking at them, smiling, waving, laughing at a joke someone other than your shadow says etc. Many times I got in trouble in these 2 weeks for simply looking at someone too long.
Level 1: You can now talk to other people and staff without raising your hand, have body spray (not perfume) and an 8pm bedtime.
Level 2: 8:30PM bedtime. You can have lip gloss and hair styling products such as hairspray now. You can sit in the second row of the van. You can go to lunch with your parents for parents weekend.
Level 3: You can shave now, but it still has to be in the 10 minute time period that is allowed for showers. This 10 minutes started when you touched the bottom step and you had to go all the way upstairs though a hallway around the corner, do your shower business and then make it back to the bottom step all in 10 minutes. Perfume is now allowed. You can sit in the back row of the van but higher levels have seniority. You can leave with your parents when they come to visit for parents weekend. (Typically every 3-4 months for 2 days) You can take a 30 minute bath once a month.
Level 4: You can have a digital camera, wear makeup and are going to start being chosen to go on errands. You are now allowed to go on a short home visit if you ask and get approved. You can get an hour of alone time in the rec room a month.
5: Bed time at 9. Can watch tv for 30 minutes when everyone else who isnt a level 5 has gone to bed. Get to go home when you finish your level work.
Our day was very structured and if we went off of that structure, even if it was not your fault, you would get a point. We wake up at 7, breakfast has to be finished, dishes away and sat down ready for morning bible reading by 7:30. If you were on dish duty that morning all the dishes had to be done by 7:30 too. If you didn’t finish eating or eating and cleaning by then, its a point. Same for lunch and dinner, except for dinner you had an extra half hour to finish dishes. You still need to be finished eating at the right time, though. Sometimes food would not be done on time, not just a few minutes late but 10-20 sometimes, we would still points for not finishing eating and cleaning by the allotted time. We had to clean the whole house every day after school and that had to be finished by a certain time to. I want to say it was about an hour/ hour and a half after we got out). When you’re done cleaning you do your level work until everyone is done cleaning. Then we had a little free time to read and crochet, sometimes we could go outside if a staff wanted to watch us. This would end when dinner is ready, then we have to eat on time and work on level. If you had done enough that day you can have free time to read and crochet.
It seemed like most of the staff there enjoyed setting us off. Group a bunch of 9-13 year old girls together and of course there’s gonna be attitude problems and drama. They would find a way to rack up points for every little thing you do after you’ve already pissed them off. This would obviously send girls into a panic when they are just trying to explain themselves and every time they say a word they are interrupted with, “That’s another point.” It was sick really, how much they enjoyed going out of their way to upset someone. I think it was ultimately to upset them with something little so they can react and rack up the points for you. The way this would happen to me the most was with food. I was a very picky eater as a kid. They would figure out what you hate the most and make sure to give you more of it. They knew I hated tomatoes so they would pile the tomatoes on my salad. I would ask for no dressing on my salad because it made it easier for me to swallow whole and wash it down with water so I wouldn’t taste the tomatoes. They gave me extra and I didn’t ask again. There was no rhyme or reason to who got dressing and who didn’t, but one thing is for certain is if you ask for one or the other, or a specific dressing, you’re gonna get the opposite. Another thing I hated was mustard. One time a house mom, Ashley Jelich who you will see is maybe the sickest fuck to ever work there, saw that I was trying to scrape off mustard on my sandwich with my fingers. She grabbed the thing of mustard and just started squirting it all in my sandwich. She had to have been continuously squeezing for 6-7 seconds. When I took a bite and threw up she told me I could eat it or go run to the horsehead. (a literal wooden horsehead about a mile and a half down the road that we would run to and back every morning) I ran to the horsehead, but she didn’t say “and back” so I didn’t run back. I sat there out of spite. It was a really cold and rainy day, probably about 30degrees. Once someone drove to see where I was, they finally told me the “and back” part, so I did. But I wasn’t going back inside because at this point in my little 13 year old spiteful head I really wanted them to have a hypothermia case on their hands for always treating me like this. I had no shoes on and was in my pajamas so I just had a blast in the rain. After this, I was punished by having to stack wood (normally took about 4 hours) I lost all my clothes except 2 shirts, 2 pants, 3 pairs of underwear, 3 pairs of socks, a sweatshirt and a set of pajamas. I was put on CBO and isolation. CBO, Communication Block Out, is when you cant talk to anyone and you have to raise your hand to talk to any staff. Isolation is when you cant be within 10 feet of any other girls, along with not talking to them, looking at them or even laughing at them. Breaking any rules of CBO or Isolation gets you a point and an extra day added to it. They typically start with a week of CBO/Isolation. I was on it for 3 weeks and didn’t get my clothes back for another 3 months. Ashley Jelich has a blog where she used to brag about punishments and talk about how crazy everyone was there. She has also completely altered the stories to fit them into a narrative of “look at me I led a kid to christ today by abusing them.” I will link her blog, also with sources that show nobody is accredited there. Gateway Freedom was about 10 miles from Ranch for Kids at the time, the same ranch for kids that got shut down 2 years ago for abuse. We went to the same church, the same youth group. I don’t know how they missed Gateway Freedom in the process.
https://forsuchatime414.wordpress.com/
http://www.heal-online.org/gfranch.htm
