Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land and A Thousand Lives, uploaded this 1988 Escuela Caribe* promotional video. I attended E.C. from 1990-91. I knew many of the staff and a few of the students in this film.
In it, founder Gordon Blossom speaks of “youngsters who come from nice neighborhoods and good families” who are negatively impacted by the dangers of the “secularized culture in America…with its materialistic and humanistic values” and public schools. (According to the American Psychiatric Association, four out of five kids in for-profit teen treatment facilities are white and middle class).
Blossom speaks of how being in the Dominican Republic “psychologically disorients kids” enabling the staff to “plant new perspectives.” What he means is that students were brainwashed, a process hastened by separating them from their family, using abuse.
Phil Redwine, who was director when I was there, says “the most important part of my being here is not how I run the school, but how I love the kids.”
“If a youngster completes all three phases of our training program, that youngster is going to be tremendously enriched, and so will all of us,” Blossom concludes.
*Recently, Escuela Caribe was reported to be closed. However, it has now reopened as Caribbean Mountain Academy. It employs many of the same staff.
