Former students describe Spring Ridge Academy as ‘treated like criminals’

In June, a jury awarded the mother of a former Spring Ridge Academy student $2,500,000, finding that the institution defrauded consumers by misrepresenting the program’s practices.

Former residents spoke to FOX 10 about experiences they called offensive and the broader industry for troubled teens.

In the quiet Yavapai County town of Mayer, Arizona, where fewer than 2,000 people live behind locked gates, empty buildings and segregation, there are memories that still haunt Andi Tuchten.

“I’m right out the gate,” he says on a Facetime call with his dad.

“Gate of what?” says her father Max.

“From Spring Ridge.”

Andi’s parents sent her there over 20 years ago when she was a teenager.

Now Andi’s dad believes he was taken advantage of in a desperate moment as he tried to keep his child alive and out of jail.

“It was hard,” Max said of the decision to send her there. “What was right, knowing what you know today?”

When she was 15, Andi struggled with drugs and alcohol. She admits that she rebelled against her parents, but she never thought she would end up at Spring Ridge Academy.

“I wasn’t mad at them. Rather, I asked: ‘What have I done? Why are you sending me away?’” she said.

“They searched me when I got here. I had to go into the room with the staff, go down to my socks and make sure I didn’t bring anything in. I just went along with it because it wasn’t true. I know what else to do. I was afraid.

Spring Ridge Academy is suing the school for fraud, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress

SRA was a boarding school for girls ages 13 to 17, licensed by the state as a behavioral health facility.

This is Profile on Linkedin for Jean Courtney, founder of SRA.

Andi said that her time at the academy made her feel numb and depressed every day.

Former residents like Andi are now coming forward after a federal civil lawsuit involving Spring Ridge Academy ended in June.

Kimberly Sweidy, the mother of a former student, sued Spring Ridge and won, accusing the school of fraud, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The jury awarded Sweidy $2.5 million.

Former SRA admissions director Kate Deily was also charged in the case and found liable for $25,000 in consumer fraud.

“We were treated like criminals”

“You’re going to get bullied by the adults who are responsible for you,” said former student Frankie Clock.

“We were treated like criminals.”

Shannon Saul is another former student and SRA resident.

“When I was first sent away, I probably cried for a week straight and I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone at first, so you knew me and my thoughts and a lot of insecurities,” Saul said. .

“You couldn’t go to the bathroom until they told you. You couldn’t drink water until they said so. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t know if it’s day or night because they tape up the windows. “

According to the lawsuit, tuition costs up to $9,000 per month, and Spring Ridge Academy advertised its program on its website and in brochures as “sophisticated care” for teenagers.

Court documents show that workers also forced underage girls to work for free.

“The idea is to break you down so you can start to heal,” Saul said. “But of course a lot can go wrong there too.”

The SRA used seminars, which both parents and students had to attend, and identified four stages: Discovery, focus, responsibility AND Keys to success – in which teens had to demonstrate competency to graduate from Spring Ridge.

Court documents say a form of highly confrontational psychotherapy called “attack therapy” was normal practice at the academy. In attack therapy, the patient is verbally abused and humiliated by the therapist or other group members.

Sweidy’s lawyers cite fear of being thrown out of the workshops as the reason why the children tolerated the humiliation.

“If you don’t want to think of it as a cult, you know, I would just say it was very coercive and controlled, in every aspect of our lives,” Saul said.

The lawsuit says Sweidy’s daughter – referred to as “Jane Doe” in the case – recalled workshops involving vigorously beating a chair with a rolled-up towel wrapped in duct tape to vent her anger on her parents.

“They make you talk to this empty chair as if it was your abuser, and end up shouting at the chair repeatedly,” Sweidy said.

Alleged survivors of Spring Ridge say they also had to dress up in costumes and dance for peers and staff.

“I had to wear a Dorothy dress, tights and a leotard underneath. And then I had to act like Dorothy for the whole song,” Andi said.

Shannon described another humiliating example she experienced.

“In my case, they told me to put on a leotard and dance like a ballerina because I had a lot of body problems,” she said.

“And if you weren’t authentic or seductive enough, Jeannie would ask you to leave, and then you’d have to wait a few months later for another training and your stay would be extended.”

There is also something called “service” – a specific workshop including massages.

“They would like us to come in and do this for our parents who are going through parenting activities. So we rubbed our parents’ feet and arms to help them,” Clock said.

What happened during the trial at Spring Ridge Academy?

FOX 10 obtained transcripts from the Spring Ridge Academy trial. Testimony on the stand included founder Jean Courtney, who confirmed the exercise.

“They were delighted. They massaged each other’s backs, massaged their hands and at that time it was called anonymous service. “The girls loved doing it on behalf of their parents, and sometimes other girls would get involved,” she said during the trial.

According to the transcript, Courtney also confirmed that employees also massaged the girls.

“You’re still blindfolded at this point. They start massaging your shoulders. You have no idea who is doing this to you. You have no idea what’s going on. In the end, it turns out that it was like everyone who worked in the action,” Clock said.

Courtney also told the court that she sometimes received massages.

At trial, she testified that she had no training in psychology and was not a licensed therapist.

Courtney scheduled an interview for this story but canceled those plans.

The interview, which was scheduled to last about 15 minutes on Zoom, was scheduled by her spokesperson, who canceled the meeting and sent us a statement instead.

Lawyers for Spring Ridge Academy and Kate Deily did not respond to requests for comment.

The plaintiff appealed to add seven more people to the defendant list, including Jean Courtney.

Bigger problems in the industry for troubled teens

The troubled teen industry provides facilities for “troubled youth,” which is a multi-billion dollar business in the United States.

Meg Applegate is the co-founder and CEO of Unsilenced, a non-profit organization that helps victims of institutional child abuse.

“The problem with the teen industry is a network of powerful and punitive community service centers spread across almost every state to which 120,000 to 200,000 young people are committed each year,” Applegate says.

Facilities include boot camps, desert therapy, boarding schools, residential treatment centers, and conversion therapy.

Celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton reportedly suffered mental and physical abuse as a teenager at a Utah boarding school, and in a public service announcement she repeated how much money the company makes.

“And just knowing that the same thing is still happening in these places and that it has turned into a $23 billion a year industry. What our taxpayers pay is just painful,” he says.

“Children walk away calling themselves survivors, and no other healthcare system in the world could have achieved this without more stringent regulation and oversight,” Applegate says.

A paper trail of trauma at Spring Ridge Academy

For those who lived at Spring Ridge, they were left with a paper trail of trauma.

FOX 10 reviewed several Yavapai County Sheriff’s reports and surveys conducted by the state health department that document cases of suicide attempts or thoughts.

According to 2021 DHS findings, a biopsychosocial assessment found that one of the girls said, “It’s just thoughts. Sometimes I have a plan or intention, but none at the moment. Sometimes I act on that plan.”

Journal entries shared with FOX 10 describe loneliness, depression and homesickness.

“I wrote one letter to my mom and the last line was, ‘Please help me, Mommy,’ and that really hit me because I just remember the helplessness I felt,” Shannon explains.

Now that time has passed, Andi’s father, Max, feels exploited in a time of desperation, and his main goal is to keep his child out of prison.

“Once again we felt like we were in the right place, with the right people encouraging us, but it turned out that wasn’t the case,” he said.

But Andi and her father know they are not alone.

“We weren’t the only ones who went through something like this. There are other survivors and people,” says Andi.