Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
EX-STUDENTS SAY STAFFERS ABUSED THEM
Three men shook Bill Boyles awake in the dead of night in October 1997.
“Get dressed,” they yelled. “We’re taking you to school.”
The men towered over Boyles, then 14, as he nervously threw on some clothes.
“I’m sorry,” his parents told him as they stood in the doorway, reduced to tears. “I’m so sorry.”
It had been about a month since he dropped out of high school in Orlando Florida, and was sure in that moment his parents had called the police.
But a week later, he stepped off a plane in Samoa, an island in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. His parents had sent him to Paradise Cove, a part of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools.
“Samoa is the perfect place for teens to sort out their lives and make a new beginning,” claimed a 1997 World Wide brochure given to Boyles’ parents. “The setting is beautiful, peaceful, and conducive to change. In this new cultural setting, the teens are immediately pulled out of their comfort zone and immersed in a new way of life that is very appropriate.”
But the brochure did not match his experience.
“The way that they treated us was terrible,” said Boyles, now 36 and married to another former World Wide student. “I don’t think you’d get away with treating prisoners like that here in the United States.”
During his 30-month stay at Paradise Cove and later at Casa by the Sea in Mexico, another World Wide facility, he recalled seeing staffers pin down students, eating food that made him sick and students being placed in “isolation rooms” for hours at a time as punishment.
“The first thing they tell you is, ‘You’re a (screw)-up, you’re ruining your parents’ lives, you’re ruining your family,’” Boyles said of staffers. “‘Your parents don’t want you as part of the family anymore. That’s why they sent you here.’”
Roughly 20 years later, Tanner Reynolds took in the vastness of the open desert surrounding Northwest Academy as he stepped out of the juvenile probation officer’s car in November.
The 13-year-old is from small-town Pahrump, but even this was surprising to him.
His anger issues and attitude landed him at the boarding school. His mother, Angela McDonald, said she hoped Northwest Academy’s program — which claimed to be therapeutic — would steer Tanner away from any real trouble before it could happen.
Instead, Tanner felt he was thrown into a culture of abuse by staff members that fueled his anger.
“You’re here because your parents don’t love you,” he recalled some staff members saying, taunting students. “The reason you’re here is because your parents don’t want you.”
And sometimes, he said, it would work. He would lash out and then get into trouble, which meant at times getting slammed to the ground and, as Boyles also recalled, pinned down by staffers.
Though World Wide is defunct, some of its practices are similar to those found in Northwest Academy decades later.
“That would be 19 years now that I’ve been out of the program,” said Boyles, who now lives in Alabama. “And nothing’s changed, apparently.”