Wednesday, April 02, 2008
B is for Berkshires
I've got some insomnia so I figured I'd do my 4/2 post now.
I decided not to go with Bitch :)
So I don't remember if I ever talked about my time in the Berkshires here or not. I know if I had, it was very superficial, so this is definitely more info than that.
Back in 94 I got a job at a school for kids with "special emotional needs" in the Berkshires. My official title was "residential counsellor" but what everyone just called my position was "dorm parent".
So this boarding school was basically a VERY EXPENSIVE dumping ground for messed up highschoolers. The tuition was something around 50k a year. Many of the kids were there on court orders, or hospital transfers. Most of the kids came from families that were loaded though, these were not ghetto kids. They acted out for attention, not for survival. (then again, maybe it was their way of trying to survive their families)
As I mentioned, this was a boarding school, and although I was a dorm parent, I was not the primary one, so I also was given my own apartment on campus. However, I was required to sleep in the dorm 2 nights a week to give the primary the night off. We were on duty 7 days a week, from 7am till I think 10pm, with only one night a week and one weekend a month. It was essentially slave labor. I wouldn't even begin to figure out what my salary would be in hourly wages.
There were 3 levels of dorms for each boys and girls. "Regular Boys/Girls", "New Boys/Girls", and "The Farm". I got stuck on the Girls Farm. These were the lowest functioning girls on campus. They were not allowed contact with any of the other students, they were not allowed to go to class; we had tutors come in for them. They did not eat meals in the dining room, we cooked them in our dorm. It was the most isolating place for not only the kids, but also for me. There was one other dorm parent, and a teacher assigned to us, both were really nice, but it was still a lonely place. We had about 8 or so girls in the Farm, it varied somewhat during my time there. Basically I spent my days with the same 9 people constantly.
It was required for all staff members to be in one on one therapy weekly too because they considered the place so high stress. We also had a support group that met once a week. Those times were the only way I survived my time there.
So here was a typical day-
Get the girls up at 7, and some would do a "spot pick" cleanup while others would make breakfast. Then after breakfast we'd have a group therapy/check in/goal setting for the day. Then the tutors would come in for some lessons. Then lunch. Then another group therapy. Then "work crews". This is when we were slaves for the campus. And lucky me, being stuck in this dorm meant I got to do the work crews too. One of our favorite activities was to wander all over the campus watering flowers and "deadheading" the petunias. Rah. Then dinner. Then another check in/group therapy before bed. Monotonous hell.
Except for the therapies. Those could get interesting. And heartbreaking. All but one of my girls had been molested. One actually by her brother who was also a student there. There was one girl who spent much time dealing on the breakup of her parents marriage because her mother walked in on her father in bed with another man. This girl also claimed at one point that the father's lover raped her, and begged me to take her for an HIV test. Wow.
Well after the semester ended they were mixing up the dorm staff, and the teacher was being replaced by another who was a gay man. During a weekly check in phone call with the mother of this girl I shared that we were getting a new staff member, and that J was having some trouble adjusting because this guy was gay. Mom asked why that would matter and I said it was because of her father. Mom then shared that her father was not gay, that she never caught him with a man, and that J was actually a pathological liar. Wheee!
One night two of the girls decided to run away. Of course it happened to be on a night when I was sleeping there. (It wasn't because they wanted to screw me, per se, it was because the window in the dorm parent that lived there's room was the only window not alarmed, and I was sleeping on the couch) Of course it also meant that because I wasn't in my apartment that they could rob me before they hit the road. I'm still sad that they took one of my favorite sweatshirts.
Right after that incident I decided it was time for me to go. There were so many other horror stories that I can't even begin to share. The place was actually abusing these kids, but brainwashing everyone to think that it was the kid's choice. (If the acted appropriately then they would be allowed to...)
They had a rule "a buck a fuck". That meant that any time you dropped the f-bomb you had to pay a dollar. Well this one girl, A, was acting out large. She was punching the walls and spent about 250 bux in one afternoon. I went to the staff meeting and asked for help. The supervisor told me he'd be buy after the meeting with some zip ties to restrain her. Unfortunately, I'm a smart ass and made the mistake of saying "she could use a gag too, she's going into serious debt". Yeah they took me seriously and gagged her. She was tied up and gagged all evening, they finally took the gag off, but if I remember right she was tied up over night. She was "roomed" which means she wasn't allowed out of her room for meals or showers or basically anything except to pee. They said if she didn't have roommates they would have just given her a bucket and not let her out for that either.
And I was starting to buy into this. God help me. I learned later that the place had been likened to a cult.
So I realized I had to leave.
Years later I saw an article in the Boston Globe that the school was being investigated for multiple charges of child abuse and that several staff members had been arrested.
It has since closed.
I found a group on Myspace that is from the old students and I lurked and read their posts. It's truly heartbreaking.
What blows my mind is how much I saw, and how much I was affected by this job. I never used to be a crier, but after being there, I became a faucet and lose it with the slightest provocation.
I only was there 7 weeks.
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Whoa! This is something I never knew about you. Blows my mind! Breaks my heart too. I wonder where those kids are now and what their life is like?