Nine sue Mount Bachelor Academy

Published 5:00 am Thursday, July 7, 2011

Nine former students have sued Mount Bachelor Academy and its parent companies, alleging they were subjected to systematic physical and psychological abuse while under the school’s care.

The complaint, filed Wednesday in Multnomah County Circuit Court and asking for $14.25 million, was filed by former students who in the 1990s attended the school for troubled teens. Mount Bachelor Academy, located 26 miles east of Prineville, shut down in 2009 after a state investigation found evidence of emotional abuse and sexual role-playing in the school’s curriculum.

Kelly Clark, who represents the nine former students, said they have come to realize as they’ve aged that what happened to them wasn’t therapy.

“Especially for kids who went through this kind of a program, I think it takes a long time to figure out what’s normal for them,” he said. “This was really crazy-making. It wasn’t just neglectful and abusive. It’s like, ‘What’s normal? Am I crazy?’ ”

Clark said several of the plaintiffs are part of a movement to get rid of “tough love” schools like Mount Bachelor Academy.

“There’s a difference between tough love and abuse,” he said.

The lawsuit targets not only Mount Bachelor Educational Center but also Aspen Education Group, a defunct company that once owned the academy, and CRC Health Oregon and CRC Health Group, two companies that were owners or “controlling entities” of Aspen and Mount Bachelor Academy and continue to operate schools around the country.

The lawsuit alleges some of the counselors had only high school educations and weren’t trained in psychology, psychiatry or child development.

In an attempt to fix the teens’ behavior problems, the lawsuit alleges, counselors subjected them to various abuses, including physical punishments like extreme cold, sound torture, forced marches and physical attacks.

There was also emotional abuse, according to the lawsuit, including sexual role-playing, verbal attacks by staff and other students, and forced isolation from others in the school.

The lawsuit alleges one student had to build a road, breaking rocks with a pickax until her hands blistered. Another was forced to run up a steep grade over and over.

Many of the alleged abuses occurred during a series of therapeutic workshops called “Lifesteps.” Previous published reports describe the workshops as designed to help students go back through stages on the way to adulthood that they may have missed because of a trauma. Step four, called “venture,” often featured role-play.

One male student, according to the complaint, had to dress in “bikini underwear and repeatedly dance in front of the encounter group and staff as a male exotic dancer.”

Another former student alleges in the complaint she was called “whore” and “slut,” then forced to share with a large group the experience of being sexually abused by her father and told it was her fault.

Other alleged abuses include the denial of students’ medication and, in one case, a sexual relationship between a counselor and a minor student.

Attorney Greg Chaimov, of Davis Wright Tremaine LLC, will defend Mount Bachelor Academy and its subsidiaries. In a written statement, Chaimov said the school had resolved the dispute with the Oregon Department of Human Services in 2010.

“Abundant evidence was collected that showed the allegations of abuse made to the Department were unfounded. DHS initially took action based on students’ allegations, but withdrew its orders, including the suspension of Mount Bachelor Academy’s license, after further information became available,” he wrote. “Given the favorable terms of the settlement agreement, we agreed to dismiss our various legal proceedings against the state. We also independently decided to leave Mount Bachelor Academy closed due to the fact that the sudden and erroneous closure of the campus effectively shut the program down the year prior.”

He also pointed to the more than 1,000 students helped by the academy.

“MBA was a program specifically designed for troubled students who had failed to progress in other settings. It was designed to help kids confront the worst of their behaviors and take ownership of them, whether that be substance abuse, sexual acting out or other issues,” Chaimov wrote. “This approach proved successful at producing positive, life-changing — and, in some cases, life-saving — results.”

Chaimov also wrote the former students in the lawsuit attended the school before it was purchased by a “nationally recognized network of therapeutic schools and programs.”

Clark, whose Portland law firm O’Donnell Clark and Crew has brought child abuse cases against the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America, said the most difficult part of the case is that the events took place as part of a sanctioned curriculum in a school for troubled teens.

“I’m sure some readers will shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Toughen up,’ ” Clark said. “But I would say some of these people are more profoundly troubled than kids who faced child sex abuse. When you’re abused by a priest, even though it’s confusing there’s a big part that always grows up knowing that’s not right. Here it was the ambiguity.”