'They tried everything ... to break me': Boarding school students describe harsh treatment

Frankie Clock, a 26-year-old from Mesa, remembers when the founder of Spring Ridge Academy, a boarding school for troubled teenage girls that operated in Yavapai County, instructed her to dance in front of her peers.

“I was told to strip down to my leotard and tights, ‘slow down’ and get ‘seductive,’” Clock recalled the school’s founder, Jean Courtney, telling her in 2015.

Last month, a federal jury in Arizona hit Spring Ridge Academy with over $2.5 million in punitive damages after finding the school liable on multiple counts of fraud.

The suit, filed by Kimberly Sweidy, the mother of a student who attended between 2019 and 2021, accused the school of deceptively marketing itself as a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teens but instead subjected students to cultish rituals without adequate oversight by licensed mental health professionals. The school shut down in 2023.

The school and multiple former employees, including the founder and admissions director, initially were named as defendants. The judge later narrowed the defendants to the school and the former admissions director.

In interviews with The Arizona Republic, former students described a regimen of coercion, isolation and abuse that used shame and fear to force students into compliance.

“They tried everything they could to break me,” said Clock, who suffered from severe PTSD and suicidal thoughts for years after graduating in 2016. “If we tried to advocate for ourselves, we were labeled as having ‘oppositional defiant disorder,’ and things would get worse.”

She said she was forced to stay silent for days as a method of punishment. Long after she left the school, the treatment caused her to fear speaking with anyone, including mental health professionals, about her struggles with thoughts of suicide.

“I was so afraid that I would be locked up or sent away or have to confront my trauma the same way I was forced to,” she said.

The lawsuit represents a rare legal victory against the multibillion-dollar troubled teen industry, according to attorneys familiar with the issue. Though many lawsuits were filed against residential treatment providers in recent history, most that have succeeded involved a fatality.

The industry — encompassing a diverse group of therapeutic boarding schools, residential treatment centers, religious academies, wilderness programs, and drug rehabilitation centers — imposes strict codes of secrecy on students and operates in remote rural locations, often without oversight from state education and child welfare authorities.

Neither the defendants nor their attorneys responded to requests for comment or agreed to an interview prior to publication of this article.

In legal filings this month, attorneys representing Spring Ridge Academy challenged the jury’s June verdict by claiming it was based on insufficient evidence and asked the court to vacate the $2.5 million penalty or order a new trial.

Sweidy, the plaintiff, declined to comment while litigation is ongoing.

Former students describe tactics used by school officials

Former students at Spring Ridge Academy said what they went through at the school made it difficult to consider legal retribution.

“Many survivors remain fearful of retaliation, a fear rooted in their experiences at these facilities, making it hard to confront their abusers,” said Meg Appelgate, the CEO of Unsilenced, a policy and advocacy group raising awareness about the industry.

Arizona has emerged as a center for troubled youth programs, according to data collected by Unsilenced. Though the exact number of such facilities is difficult to verify given the lack of a centralized regulatory body, data collected by the group in 2022 found hundreds of such facilities in operation across the state.

Most of these centers are private organizations that charge thousands of dollars a month. Spring Ridge Academy charged participants $9,000 a month, according to legal documents.

Though Spring Ridge Academy closed due in part to negative attention from the lawsuit and multiple citations from the Arizona Department of Health Services, treatment centers in Arizona continue to flourish.

They’re more common in rural communities where they benefit from close relationships with local law enforcement, according to evidence brought forth in the lawsuit. Growth also has come due to spillover from programs in Utah, where recent state laws sought to clamp down on the sprawling industry.

In the Spring Ridge lawsuit, the jury’s verdict came after an 11-day trial last month during which leaders from the school testified about their methods of recruitment and the controversial workshops and practices; three former students testified at trial, but dozens have made similar claims on social media. The Republic interviewed four former students.

Courtney, the school’s founder, said in court documents that some of the school’s workshops were modeled after Lifespring, a for-profit “human potential” organization that has received wide criticism from former participants that labeled it a cult and pyramid scheme.

Courtney participated and worked for Lifespring running seminars for years before founding Spring Ridge Academy in 1996.

The workshop with seductive dancing that Clock described also included receiving public feedback and scrutiny from peers. If students did not perform adequately, they were chastised and kicked out of the class, Clock recalled.

In another exercise described in legal documents, students were blindfolded, loaded into a van and let off to wander on an unpaved desert road for about an hour. Another activity, scheduled toward the start of a student’s tenure at the school, required them to wrap a towel with masking tape and beat a chair in a darkened room; the exercise was supposed to simulate a release of anger toward one’s parents, former Spring Ridge faculty said during the trial.

Another workshop, modeled directly after Lifespring, asked students to pretend they were on a lifeboat and decide which of their peers deserved to live or die.

Students had to complete these workshops to advance through the program, said Shannon Saul, who attended Spring Ridge from 2013 to 2015. Students began the program on “Phase One” — during which they were subject to restrictions like having to ask permission to leave their rooms — and had to work their way up to the fourth phase, with each successive phase accompanied by additional privileges.

According to a Spring Ridge enrollment document attached to the complaint, the average student stayed in the program for between 14 to 18 months, though former students recalled how that time would extend if they did not sufficiently comply with the program’s requirements.

Read the document: Plaintiff's original complaint

“The trainings were kind of like milestones in order to get to the next level, and eventually your freedom," Saul said. "But the catch is that if you weren't doing it authentic enough, according to (Courtney), she would ask you to leave and then your stay would be extended.”

Pita Quigley, who identifies as gender fluid and attended Spring Ridge from 2014 to 2016, said they were disturbed by the lifeboat workshop. It began as a guided meditation — “you were on a boat sailing very peacefully, and everything’s calm” — when staffers suddenly screamed: The students were told the boat was sinking and each of them had to justify why their life was worth saving over the others.

Quigley also recalled receiving a “beautification” assignment after staff deemed their dress not feminine enough. That included putting on a full face of makeup and borrowing clothing from other students every day for weeks. The assignment was “humiliating,” Quigley said.

Lawsuit claimed school defrauded parents, isolated students

In the complaint, Sweidy claimed Spring Ridge attracted parents “through fraudulent emails, literature and advertisements about their specialty services” like evidence-based family therapy and a college preparatory education.

The school then engaged in a “pattern of isolating students from their parents to aid in concealing their deceit and fraud," Sweidy argued.

New parents were told their children would beg to leave the program, according to a parent manual attached to the complaint.

“At each step, you may hear certain types of comments, complaints, manipulations, and negotiations with the same theme ‘Get me out of here,’” the packet stated. It went on to tell parents that the complaints were manipulation tactics and that they should be “firm” with their child that “she is going to stay the course.” Parents should see Spring Ridge as a minimum 15-month commitment, the packet stated.

"Do not acknowledge concern about any of the horrendous circumstances and events she will undoubtedly describe," the packet told parents.

Saul said parents were sometimes told they would risk their child's life if they pulled them out of the program.

Staff also monitored communication between students and their parents, Saul said. When students reached the second phase, for example, they could have a weekly 20-minute phone call with their parents, during which if staff “heard something they didn’t like, they would hang up the phone,” she said. “They also read all of our letters.”

Students slowly gained access to electronics and the outside world — with restrictions — as they progressed through the four phases of the program, Saul said.

Spring Ridge staff also used punishments to control students — most often prohibiting them from speaking or dropping them a phase. “They put people on book restriction if they thought they read too much, or they would put them on bed restriction if they thought they spent too much time in bed,” Saul said.

Quigley said Spring Ridge taught students how to take abuse, something they had to unlearn after they left.

“My bad habits that got me there, like self-harm and suicidal thoughts … definitely still continued after SRA,” they said.

The Arizona Republic is investigating programs that target troubled teens in Arizona, including residential treatment centers, therapeutic boarding schools, correctional facilities and group homes. Know something? Please reach out to us with tips at hannah.dreyfus@arizonarepublic.comand mparrish@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Spring Ridge Academy students describe harsh treatment after lawsuit