Huntsville AL school head has power to send problem kids to wilderness camp/mental hospital...

[madfloridian]

and boarding school/detention center. Apparently he has been given such a power by his district. It is really a strange thing to read. It is hard to believe.

Huntsville City Schools and The Pinnacle School, Teepees and Racism

It’s June 22, 2012, and that means as of today Huntsville taxpayers have spent $130,500 ($750 a day) to reserve 5 teepees at the Pinnacle Schools’ Elk River Treatment Programs as part of its $778,000 contract with the private school.

Yes, it’s summer but the Pinnacle contract is for the calendar year. Somehow, under some authority I can’t begin to imagine, Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Col. Casey Wardynski has the power to send problem kids selected solely by himself to this wilderness camp/mental hospital/boarding school/detention center.

I suppose the Board believes that however he is managing this must be legal, perhaps using the same reasoning that Board member Jennie Robinson applied when queried about State mandates for Special Education: HCS must be “meeting the requirements of the IEPs because the system isn’t being sued.“

Do the taxpayers know their money is being used to send problem students to a private facility like a hospital? I wonder.

There is reference to the Carlisle Indian School last century.

Same old thing in brand new drag.

Civilizing the savages: these behavior modification wilderness programs are like a weird inversion of the turn of the century Bureau of Indian Affairs’ boarding schools, with the most widely known troubling case being the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania (1879-1918). Through means like withholding a tribe’s rations and against their families’ wishes (in the case of Hopi, men went to Alcatraz prison rather than surrender kids), Indian children were transported thousands of miles away from home (as far as Alaska) to be “educated.” It was finally closed by an act of Congress following hearings and investigations into all manner of abusive behavior.

There is more:

Wardynski and His Teepees

Note how much money the Huntsville Schools are paying Pinnacle, a private company. This is Arne's reform? Does Obama know? Do the taxpayers care?

It’s too late, the contract has been signed, and nothing I say is going to change anything.

There is one thing it is still possible to do, however, and that is for Wardynski to stop consistently linking the Pinnacle Schools contract with the threat of living in a teepee in his public statements. By doing so he is harming another group of students this contract is supposed to serve: those who previously were enrolled in the HCS’s homebound program. These kids are recovering from serious injury or illness, and while they are capable of making up missed work and keeping up with classwork, they are not yet able to attend school 7 hours a day, 5 days a week.

..."The HCS is paying Pinnacle $750 a day, every day, seven days a week for five “beds” in the teepees at the residential Elk River Academy and Treatment Programs.($159,688 for . . . January 1, 2012 – July 31, 2012), used or not. This is money I would be happy to see wasted, so to speak.

Here's the part that really makes me wonder how in the world Wardynski was given this much power. Read this about Pinnacle. It's scary stuff. Taxpayers in Huntsville need to speak out.

Pinnacle Schools’ Elk River Academy and Treatment Programs accept kids who arrive via transport companies, for example, Safe Passage. Parents hire these firms to send in muscle men in the middle of the night to remove their child from their home and cart them off to a secured, private facility. Once at the facility, the kids are cut off from the world. They don’t even get the proverbial one phone call an arrested adult is entitled to. At Elk River, after a while, they get one phone call home each week.