As we learn in the riveting and often infuriating Netflix three-part documentary “The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping,” once you were processed and confined within the girls’ wing of a certain institution, you had to abide by a set of rules that stretched on for pages and pages. Just a sampling:
No talking.
No making eye contact.
No looking out the window.
No winking.
No smiling.
When walking, one must pivot around every corner military-style.
All bathroom visits are to be monitored, with the door to the stall left open and a staffer present.
No touching.
This part wasn’t in the rule book, but punishment for certain violations resulted in verbal and physical abuse, being forced to engage in repetitive exercises for hours on end, and confinement in claustrophobically tight spaces.
It all sounds like something out of a hellish prison for violent felons or a fictional movie such as “The Shawshank Redemption” or “The Last Castle.” But these horrific practices and acts were the routine at the Academy at Ivy Ridge in Ogdensburg, New York, which advertised itself as a disciplinary boarding school but was primarily a lucrative de facto prison. It had a points system designed to keep students there for as long as possible so their parents would keep paying thousands of dollars a month in tuition, a staff that was stunningly unqualified, regularly scheduled “seminars” with techniques straight of the brainwashing playbook, and a “diploma” that was absolutely worthless and not officially recognized by the state of New York.
What makes the documentary series particularly visceral and emotionally involving is the director and off- and on-camera narrator is one Katherine Kubler, who was a student at the Academy at Ivy Ridge for 15 months and returns to the now-shuttered school with other former students, all of whom speak with brave candor and sometimes heart-wrenching detail about the trauma they suffered while spending a year or more within the walls of the institution. (There was a boys’ wing as well, but the two schools were kept apart nearly all of the time.)
Incredibly, some 15 years after the Academy closed, mountains of files and records and disciplinary reports were left scattered about, and the former students also discovered a stack of security camera DVDs that provide visual evidence of adults tackling and restraining students.
Kubler has been investigating the alleged abuses at the program for some 10 years and has made multiple trips to the building. In the opening episode, we see home video of young Katherine (she’s a born storyteller who had a camera with her seemingly all the time), and we hear about Katherine’s behavioral issues and her clashes with her stepmother.
One day, Katherine was handcuffed by two strangers who told her they were taking her to a new school: the Academy at Ivy Ridge. Upon arrival, she was strip searched, made to sleep on mattresses in the hallway with her arms in a certain position, and assigned a “Hope Buddy” who would walk her through all the rules over the next several days.
It would take months and months to accumulate enough points to advance to the next level, and the next, and the next, and finally graduate; the only other way to go home would be if a parent came to get you, but contact between students and parents was limited and monitored. And as we learn in later episodes, the administrators at Ivy Ridge and other programs within the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS) were allegedly working the parents as much as they were manipulating the students.
You ache for these former students as they revisit rooms where they suffered terrible trauma and talk about being deprived of sleep and food, being forced to crawl around the floor, with the windows shut so they would lose all sense of time. Two women re-enact a drill they had to do in which they had to move their hands in a certain way and say, “Palms up, palms together, palms apart” — FOR EIGHT HOURS.
In a particularly chilling segment, Katherine spots a former shift supervisor from Ivy Ridge at a local diner, who agrees to talk to Katherine and says with a disturbing mixture of regret and nonchalance, “After the first year [of working there], I said, ‘This ain’t no boarding school. This is a f---ing prison.’”
The series eventually casts a wider net and turns into an investigation of the for-profit disciplinary boarding school industry, and you’ll hardly be surprised to learn certain individuals became obscenely wealthy from all those tuition checks from all those parents who probably believed they were helping their children and, in many cases, seemed to have not the faintest clue of what was really happening within these institutions.
You will not soon forget “The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping,” and you will feel shock and outrage about what happened to these students — and great admiration for the strong and still healing survivors they are today.
