Family Foundation School Responds To
Congressman Miller's Legislation

As many readers may know, Congressman George Miller (D-CA), who is also chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, has been at the head of a Congressional initiative to regulate private wilderness programs, residential treatment centers, and therapeutic boarding schools. The Committee held hearings both in October of 2007, and again on April 24 of this year. Following the latter round of hearings, the Committee introduced proposed legislation (H.R. 5876) to regulate private treatment facilities. In both rounds of hearings, the Committee presented witnesses that testified about cases of neglect, abuse and/or deaths in these facilities. To our surprise, The Family Foundation School became a named party in this initiative by one of our alumni, Mr. Jon Martin-Crawford, who attended the Family Foundation School from 1995-1997.

We will not dispute his testimony. His experiences are his own and will always remain so, regardless of anything anyone says or does. Rather, we wish to unequivocally state: we deeply regret that anyone who has come through our program feels in any way damaged by their experience. This is because as people of good conscience, we take our work and our mission to help young people overcome self-destructive behaviors very seriously, and we pursue that objective with the best of intentions while exercising our best-thought-out judgment in each and every case.

Yet, as with every mission that involves science, education, medicine or psychology, our development over the 20 years that we have been an accredited school must be considered as a practice: an evolution of methods based on the best-understood principles of the period. In that context, the Family Foundation School of Jon's memory is far removed from the Family Foundation School of today. Indeed, the 11 years that have passed since Mr. Martin-Crawford graduated from the Family Foundation School is a very long time, over which a great deal has changed in the general understanding of childhood development and psychological best practices. This evolutionary understanding has likewise led to sweeping changes within our program.

Our experience with restraint is a perfect case in point. In order to ensure safety from harm by a student experiencing a crisis, whether to faculty, staff or other students, we will of course restrain the student's movements until the crisis has passed. Indeed, it could be reasonably argued that failure on our part to act in such circumstances would potentially lead to greater harm or possible tragedy. During the 1990s we had modeled our restraint practices on the first-aid methods of securing people who were experiencing seizures or convulsions. In other words, by using blankets.

Shortly after Jon's graduation, the New York State Department of Education, the authority overseeing our accreditation, investigated our restraint policy. While they acknowledged our effort to keep children physically safe and noted that we had not physically harmed anyone with this method, they recommended that we switch to a "quiet room" policy. We immediately changed our practices to meet this recommendation. Soon thereafter, Cornell University developed its Therapeutic Crisis Intervention program (TCI). We sent two of our staff to Cornell for the trainers' course. They in turn trained our staff in more modern and effective ways to de-escalate a crisis, including how to perform safe physical restraints in the event that the de-escalation techniques failed to resolve the situation. Since 1999, we've required all Family Foundation School staff to be trained in TCI.

To us, this seems an excellent example of oversight by a governing body that led to better training of our staff. As a result, we have a more humane and more effective set of restraint practices, because a government agency worked with us to improve them.

We share with Congressman Miller the goal of protecting our children. In fact, the Family Foundation School's program meets or exceeds many points of the proposed legislation, both in spirit and practice. This is because for many years, the Family Foundation School has pursued a concerted effort to evolve our approach, to become a rigorous academic program based on a model of love and support. Moreover, we firmly believe that programs that have failed to keep abreast of current knowledge and best-practices, or stubbornly refuse to abandon harsh behaviors and confrontational methods, do indeed need to be regulated. Especially when such programs have a history of avoiding oversight by changing their names, crossing state lines, or even reestablishing themselves in foreign countries - beyond the reach of American jurisdiction.

We feel that in the interest of achieving the best possible results, that primary responsibility for any oversight must remain with the states. It must be noted, though, with all due respect to Congressman Miller, that there is more work to be done. This is especially true if this important legislation is to meet the dual objectives of keeping children safe while allowing responsible, progressive programs to effectively perform their mission. Indeed, we recognize that one of the challenges inherent in forming appropriate legislation to that end is establishing protocols for the collection and the reporting of claims of abuse or neglect. This challenge was also noted in the original Government Accountability Office (GAO) report of last October.

Open access to telephone or email seems an obvious solution. However, the bill's proposed phone policy, while clearly designed to ensure that parents have adequate access to their children and that the children have a way to report practices that are potentially abusive, consists of language that is so broad, it could allow calls to (or from) former drug dealers, gang members, or other predators that have attached themselves to our students, placing them at continued risk. Obviously, such conditions create the potential that these young people might never truly escape the dangerous influences that led them to a therapeutic boarding school in the first place.

More importantly, the proposed legislation is presently aimed at private sector programs only. If we consider the tragic death at the State of Florida's Bay County Sheriff's Office boot camp in 2006, it is clear that state run facilities must also be subject to oversight, especially when it comes to incident reporting and training of appropriate interaction with young persons in need of responsible intervention.

Despite these challenges, if we had proper lines of communication, we could find common ground with the Committee, the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate before this bill becomes law.

It has been said that change is often difficult. In fact, some of the hardest times we ever undertake come with the realization that change is being visited upon us whether we wish it or not. An ethical person or organization will seize the opportunity to shape inevitable changes as they come, and then re-form to meet those changes in a positive, progressive way. Embracing positive change, but also resisting negative change, is essential to bettering an organization. Progressive and healthy organizations constantly re-evaluate their practices to ensure that they are doing the best possible work for the communities that they serve. This is the essence of what we do at the Family Foundation School for our students, and what we strive to represent to our peers.

In that spirit, the readers of Woodbury Reports all have a stake in the pending legislation. We all want teens at risk of falling into lives governed by risky and destructive behaviors to receive safe treatment, develop effective self-governing skills, earn a superior education, and to become vital, contributing members of our society. We therefore encourage you to join us in reaching out to your community of parents and alumni. Ask them to help demonstrate that there is a great deal more good in our industry than the hearings conducted so far have represented. Readers should be encouraged to contact their elected representatives in order that their voices, too, can be heard.

With consensus, we can all be assured of truly representative and effective legislation that assures the safety of the young people in our care, and the accountability standards we strive to achieve as educators, parents, mentors and leaders.