The one in my old town in rural Illinois - let’s just put it this way. I knew several people who had worked at that warehouse (I mean school) and one thing never changed: They believed that one condition of admission to this school was mandatory sterilization, and that the school should have a urologist and a gynecologist on contract to do exactly this. :eek: Girls who arrived pregnant must surrender the babies for adoption if they carry them to term. For a while, this school relocated to an old elementary school in a middle-class neighborhood, and the people who lived there petitioned successfully to get it out of there, mainly because of all the drug dealers who openly hung around there all day, every day. This school, BTW, did not take attendance or do lesson plans.
And they weren’t just kids from low-income families. Two of the most dangerous students they ever had there were the son and daughter of a prominent child psychiatrist and his prison chaplain wife. The other alt-school kids didn’t want their kids associating with them, either. Talk about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes, KWIM? IDK what happened to the daughter, but the son was rejected by the military at a time when they were taking anyone who could fog a mirror.
I told this story to a woman who has done some teaching at the alt-school here, and she said that the attendance and behavior rules at THIS school are stricter than the ones at the regular school!
My sister lives in Houston. The city school district there has a policy that you can apply to have your children admitted to a school outside of your geographic district if you wish. One aspect of this program is that some schools create specialty programs for students throughout the city: a school, for example, might have a top-notch music program or science program or language program.
One time I was driving my sister around so she could check out possible schools for her kids and see if she wanted to apply for them. And she found that one of the schools she checked out had an unusual specialty: an enhanced disciplinary program for “difficult” students. This was were the students who were problems at all the other schools in the city were sent. (My sister did not apply to have her kids admitted there.)
I grew up near Provo Canyon Boys’ School, where my stepmother wanted to send me at age 14, but my father and psychologist vetoed that.
There was also the Utah Boys’ Ranch.
At age 14 I was placed in foster care (with aforementioned psychologist) and attended an alternative school associated with the county mental health clinic. I went to school with boys who had spent time at PCBS and the Boys’ Ranch and girls from a similar facility. I had emotional problems, but some of these kids were really messed up, and had committed felonies. Two boys stole cash from their stepfather and bought plane tickets to Hawaii. It was OK, because they left a note for their mom. They were apprehended in Honolulu when they debarked the plane and flew back with a US marshall. That said, they were all very warm and we formed a sort of surrogate family, the “Island of misfit toys”, as it were. Needless to say we all came from messed up families.
The boys who had been there told me that the boys ranch was the worst place you never wanted to go; they used solitary confinement and physical labor as punishment.
Interesting fact: The South Dakota one for girls is inside Custer State Park, off the main roads and NOT listed on the map. There really isn’t a lot of public information on it easily available. Guess they don’t like visitors or sightseers.
But yeah, in the middle of a 71,000 acre park, a couple of miles from a main road, surrounded by Buffalo, wolves, coyote, rattlesnakes…
They did. It was just north of Uxbridge, Ontario (about 45 minutes northeast of Toronto), and it was called the St. John’s Training School for Boys. I lived near Uxbridge for a while, and drove past St. John’s many times. It is closed now.
The name of the school was deceptive–it sounds like a fairly innocuous name, and more like a vocational school than a reformatory. But in fact…
The above quote comes from this site, and if you want to see photos of a reform school, check the link out. The experiences of former inmates appear in the comments section. I never had any reason to enter the site, but I can attest to the fences and security, which were visible from the road.
The one described above is for-profit, but until a few years ago there was a non-residential disciplinary school, run by the Philadelphia district, about two miles from here.
As for the residential kind, Louis Armstrong learned music at one in New Orleans. As described in this biography, the place was quite good (and, because of that, quite unusual).
Yep, that was the name.
Interesting stories… However, from my and others’ experience with private Catholic Schools in the 60s, the priests, nuns and brothers were quite willing to use corporal punishment well after it was scaled back and eliminated from public schools. I remember more than once getting the strap for talking in the hallway in Grade 5 - a foot long chunk of rubber on the palm that stung like hell, or sometimes a yardstick to the butt or the palm or underside of the hand… and our parents paid for that privilege. Although, to be fair, I don’t recall any serious miscarriages of justice. The times I got punched by a Christian brother, once in Grade 7 for kicking an door into another kid’s face ad once in Grade 9 for yelling an insult unaware the adult around the corner could hear me… I probably deserved something at least. The idiot who lit a cigarette in the auditorium twenty feet away from the ex-boxer was lucky all he got was about 10 blows to the head as he was driven out the door… (You know, those Blues Brothers stereotypes of fear of nuns have a basis in reality)
So try to imagine the treatment juvenile delinquents got in those days. One post there mentions a sawed-off goalie hockey stick.
Check out Julia Scheeres’ memoir Jesus Land for a good description of a Christian reform school run along strict Baptist lines. Only about the second half of the book is set in the school, but the whole book is worth reading. I actually had confused it with something else when I borrowed it, but it turned out to be a very good read anyway.
I think all of this stuff still exists, just with different names.
In the school system here for example there is a special high school that kids go to when they basically can’t be in the regular public school system. These are the kids who have typically been suspended or expelled multiple times during their school lives and basically are not controllable with normal measures taken in normal schools. I know the kids at the local “alternative” High School are much more tightly regulated and watched by staff throughout the day because they tend to be more violent/disruptive, but it’s still just their school. They leave at the end of the day and do not live there, and their ending up there was a result of repeat violations of the public school disciplinary code and not due to any involvement in the juvenile court system.
Juvenile residential centers on the other hand are where some kids go as a result of some legal infraction that results in a hearing in a juvenile/family court.
Then there are tons of private options where parents can choose to send kids they can’t manage themselves. That’s what the traditional “military school” threat referred to and there’s also lots of camp type “reform” programs you can send your kids to; I don’t know much about them but they most often appear on my radar due to news articles about physical/sexual abuse of the students by staff.
Even just an ordinary elementary school seems extremely regimented compared to what adults typically have to put up with in professional or office type work settings. You’re told when to sit, when to stand, when to walk, and when to talk. When the class went somewhere, we walked in organized files, IIRC two abreast, although not in lockstep. I still remember the sound of 25 kids’ footfalls on the asphalt with no talking or other sounds. When I was a kid in ES there was an ongoing attainder to the affect that we were all littering slobs and therefore we’d lost the privilege of choosing up our own games at recess and lunch. Each class had to play its assigned game, and you needed permission to bow out. Then as now, you only got to spend one hour a week in the library, with your class. You could ask to spend your lunch period there, but the answer would usually be no. Today the library’s only open a couple of hours in the afternoon, and the kids have to wear uniforms. They also now wear uniforms at my former middle school.
Several of the girls I knew at the nuns’ schools at the time later appreciated the uniforms. (Not for the role-play value). They mentioned that by high school the girls in public school were well into the clothes-and-makeup competition. Having a uniform made a much more level playing field, although the temptation to raise the hemline was apparently always there.
Actual discipline varied from school to school and teacher to teacher. It didn’t take reform school for the teacher to be a sadistic bastard, a control freak, or just short-tempered and fed up with the little bastards. However, most of my teachers weren’t.
You can’t “Google?” Or have never seen a Jackie Coogin movie?
Yes, there were Reform Schools. They’re called “juvie” now (juvenile detention centers) and you can still be put in one if you don’t eat your spinach and somebody calls the Clean Plate Club cops.
(I’m making light of a dark situation. They were often the “drunk tank” of cast off kids.)
JDH was short for juvenile delinquent home. Jail for young offenders and general troublemakers. (You didn’t need to commit a true crime, just running away from home and skipping school might get you sent to JDH.)
Some attempt at education would be made at JDH. Lots of shop classes and little bit of English, Math, etc.
I just checked and it’s official name includes juvenile detention home, and is still called JDH for short. I’m no longer sure what the “D” originally stood for.
One interesting aspect of the school at the facility I was housed in was that the usual gender restrictions for shop classes and home ec classes were removed. In the regular schools I had been barred from shop classes and forced to take cooking and sewing, but in reform class I took wood shop and the boys could take home ec.
The remainder of the classes were standard fare like social studies, art, math and English, but almost all the kids were in remedial classes. Out of approximately 250 inmates, 4 of us were not in remedial English, and I tutored math students despite having no education beyond 7th grade, because they had no math teacher certified to teach at my “advanced” level, pre-algebra :eek:.
No there are actual schools for poorly performing students separate from juvenile hall. The one near me is called ALC, affectionately named “asshole’s last chance.”
Here we have North Tampa Alternative (highlights are mine).
Vision:
North Tampa Alternative School will strive to develop student’s behavior and skills to ensure success both academically and behaviorally in a traditional academic environment.
Mission:
North Tampa Alternative School will promote an academic learning model for all students, improving both their academic and behavioral performance through a positive and academically sound school climate.
It’s not a live-in facility. They have regular class hours. From the street view you can see it’s essentially a bunch of air conditioned trailers surrounded by a fence. This is essentially where kids go that have been expelled from other schools.
Of course, Florida used to have more “traditional” reform schools:
I was at a ‘last stop before prison’ facility in the late eighties.
In the ninth grade, I hit a deep depression. Among other things, I stopped going to school. Eventually, I got stuck in Devereux. There were no sadistic staff members. The staff genuinely wanted to help. It’s just that most of them stank at helping.
It was a co ed facility. The official policy was that no signs of affection other than hand holding were allowed between couples.
Sex was rampant. I had more sex there than in any other high school I attended.
Despite strict rules and countermeasures, some students were able to get a variety of illegal substances into the place and form a drug selling gang.
I’ve reconnected over the net with some other former inmates. I learned from them that rape was also common occurrence.
