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While each camp’s programming varies, all rely on elements of “experiential learning” — putting students through an immersive activity, then “debriefing” in group settings. Students are told what they share will be kept confidential, unless they reveal they are in harm’s way or they pose a danger to themselves or others. In those cases, child welfare authorities must be notified.
The retreats all include sessions devoted to developing social justice action plans that students can take back to school. In some regions, including the South Bay, nonprofit groups work yearround with campus clubs and campaigns conceived at camp.
Portions of each day can be lighthearted and joyful, with early morning hikes and group sing-alongs. Some students feel relief at opening up for the first time about issues such as being gay, having a parent in jail, or struggling with depression. Many connect with fellow students they might otherwise never get to know.
Claire Billman, a recent Palo Alto High School graduate, said she appreciated the program she attended in 2015, called Camp Unity, for giving her greater understanding of her African American and Latino classmates. “It opened me up to the idea of privilege that I had always been aware of,” said Billman, who is white. “But it brought a narrative to it and made me physically see it.”
Still, such bonding is often hardearned.
Toward the end of a camp called NCCJ Anytown, a six-day retreat for students in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the meal routine suddenly shifts. White male students are driven to breakfast in golf carts, while all others have to walk. In the cafeteria, white students are seated at tables laid out restaurant-style; others lack even chairs. Latinos or African Americans, among them teens whose parents clean houses for a living, are told to clean up after white students.
Anytown exercises re-enacting segregation and discrimination often last for hours, until students demand they end.
Camp directors say such methods sound harsh out of context, but they are actually empowering; treating students the way society treats them so they are inspired to stand up to discrimination. For some students, the exercises’ message was less clear.
“I felt like if we didn’t clean, we’d get in trouble, and I felt very pressured,” said Christopher Morales, then 15, a former NCCJ Anytown camper. “Depending on what race you were, they treated you on a scale from very kind all the way to as if you weren’t even human.”
After the segregated breakfast, Ameen Colon and other students of Middle Eastern backgrounds were given water guns, clay and electric cords. “I’m pretty sure it was to make a bomb,” Colon, then 16, said. “I think they were trying to give us a message about how people interpret us, that people see us as terrorists. It was pretty upsetting.”
Yet like some other students interviewed, Colon described mixed feelings about his experience. He plans to return as a counselor because he believes in the camp’s goals. “Yes, it was abusive and very unnerving,” he said. “But I think they’re doing it for the greater good.”
Over the decades, the camps’ unusual methods have had limited outside review. There has been no independent research to determine whether the programs are safe or effective, or how students fare emotionally after camp, retreat directors concede. They point instead to overwhelmingly positive surveys of campers, who are asked to rate camp through answers to questions such as: Do you try to understand what other people feel and think? Do you tell the truth? Is it important to make friends with people who have different social identities?
Prudence Carter, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, criticized the camps’ lack of reliable data and focus on personal trauma. “If you don’t have any actual evidence that this is going to empower versus disempower the kids who’ve experienced trauma, if you don’t have mental health professionals there, how do you know you are helping kids?” she said. “Where is the psychological theory and research behind it? If there is none, this is a really risky and seriously problematic intervention.”
The bespectacled, grandfatherly looking Valenzuela, 72, is considered Anytown’s most prolific and veteran facilitator. A lifelong Phoenix resident, he attended his first camp as a volunteer in 1965 soon after graduating high school. He went on to teach race relations in the military and earn a bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University, then set out to spread the Anytown program across the country. Over the years, the exercises at Anytown camps grew to include some borrowed from other organizations, and some Valenzuela says he invented.
He estimates that over four decades he has led at least 500 camps in 15 states. For 18 years he worked at Silicon Valley Faces and its parent organization, before being let go in 2015 because of a combination of complaints and an unwillingness to change and adapt, according to his former employer. Since then he has run camps independently, most recently for high schools in Los Altos and Palo Alto.
Valenzuela’s early inspiration was Jane Elliott, an elementary schoolteacher in Iowa. In 1968 after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, she divided her all-white class into groups with brown eyes and blue eyes, and told the children: “This is a fact. Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.” Her widely publicized experiment made some children “nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in the space of 15 minutes,” she would later report.
Valenzuela can be jolly and congenial. He is quick to tear up and often evokes his grandchildren. But during camp, his persona shifts as he employs what he calls “instigative learning.”
In an exercise designed to elicit empathy for people with physical disabilities, for example, he has some students eat lunch blindfolded or with one arm bound at their sides. He then roams the cafeteria, slapping the “disabled” students on the back of the head and shouting, “You retard!”
“My role is the antagonizer, and so I want to make sure that everybody gets the maximum impact from the disability activity in a very short time,” he said. “I hit the ‘blind’ people in the back of the head so they can feel how it is to be harassed, how it feels to be violated.”
At the Camp Diversity retreat observed by The Chronicle, many campers already knew the challenges. The previous evening, six students had stood before the others in the lodge and described living with their disabilities, including severe arthritis, extreme anxiety and depression leading to suicidal thoughts. A boy with autism said he had not taken his medications for three days since arriving at camp.
In a segregation exercise carried out during lunch, Valenzuela separated students by race and ethnicity and shouted directions. “White group, always go first!” he ordered. “You may leave your plates, your cups, your silverware and glasses at the table because the brown, the Mexican brown group, will clean up — because they’re good at it.”
“Half-breeds!” he hissed at the biracial group. “You’re a bunch of mistakes aren’t you?” White students were dismissed as “privileged and racist supremacists.” Jewish students, tagged with yellow stars, were called “Christ killers.”
“You Jews waiting for the train or what?” Valenzuela shouted at them. “That’s what happened in the Holocaust, nobody cared, nobody did anything.”
He made certain all the students went to restrooms with signs posted on the stalls that read: “Whites Only,” “Colored Only” and “No Mexicans or Dogs Allowed.”
A few students, designated as “loners,” were instructed not to speak to anyone else. During the exercise, as he walked by, Valenzuela slapped them on the back of the head, calling them “frickin’ loner!”
Valenzuela powers through the exercises, even when some students have become emotionally derailed. At one morning meeting, teachers staffing the camp discussed five students of particular concern — one who said she didn’t get much sleep “because she was in so much pain,” and another described as “really uncomfortable and triggered.”
Yet in the debriefing session after the disability activity, Valenzuela continued prodding the campers. “Did any of you start feeling a little depressed? A little anxiety?” he asked. “Think of having this for the rest of your life, not being able to eat and being dependent. A lot of people get depressed, and eventually a lot of them commit suicide. The suicide rate is real high for, especially, teenagers who become disabled.”
In a recent emailed response to questions from The Chronicle, Mountain View Los Altos High School District spokeswoman Cynthia Greaves stated that the district “was unaware” of some of Valenzuela’s actions that were documented by a reporter. She downplayed Valenzuela’s striking of students as “tapping,” as in a “duck-duck-goose” circle exercise. And she termed two students seen collapsing as “sitting abruptly.”
Greaves emphasized that “our school district would not tolerate the harm or threat of harm to a student,” and said the district saw no need for any student to receive “immediate therapeutic services or safety assessment” at the camp. Had there been the need, she said, students would have been “referred back to their parents.”
Experts, however, expressed shock at the video of students being struck by Valenzuela. Stanford University law Professor William Koski said that without informed consent from the students and their parents, “tactics designed to create emotional or even physical discomfort or pain” raise the specter of “legally actionable conduct.” Koski, who has represented hundreds of Bay Area schoolchildren in disability matters, said the legal consequences of hitting minors could be greater “if it results in emotional or physical damage.”
Concerns about Valenzuela are shared by those who have watched him in action. Palo Alto High School history teacher Jack Bungarden said that at a camp he staffed last year, Valenzuela’s “aggressive” approach led to “a steady degradation of language, so at the end of an exercise there was a board full of horrific things. I was just cringing. It was brutal.” Later that night, Bungarden asked his colleagues: “What the hell just happened? Explain to me why this process was necessary.”
Mental health clinicians say that dealing with their clients’ disclosure of trauma is the most delicate aspect of their work. It can be transformative, they said, but even in treatment, opening up too fast or in the wrong setting can be “triggering,” a dangerous state that can lead to greater emotional pain.
Yet at many Anytown camps, teasing out young people’s pain is the goal, in sessions former Silicon Valley Faces director Mitchell described as “poking the bear.” Anytown Las Vegas Director Rico Ocampo describes the method as asking students to be as vulnerable as possible to create a “domino effect.”
“Throughout the camp, we see youth really break down, and sometimes it takes the whole time for them to break down,” said Ocampo, whose camp specifically recruits homeless and foster youth. “We pound it very hard.”
The debriefs done after each exercise, where students share in groups how the exercise made them feel, can also be a risky undertaking, experts say. The federal government’s National Center for PTSD identifies such psychological debriefing in the wake of trauma as “ineffective” at best and, at worst, “possibly harmful.”
At Camp Diversity, gender night — an exercise at most camps nationwide — put the program’s debriefing methods to the test.
“There’s going to be a lot that comes up, so just be prepared to listen and let people cry,” Willie Sims advised his fellow teachers in a morning staff meeting. Sims, a Los Altos High School instructional aide, had attended camp before and helped run the exercises. “No need to be too cautious,” Valenzuela added. “Let them go.”
Valenzuela told the students that the exercise was a way to improve malefemale relations. After being separated, girls and boys were told to write down and rank gender stereotypes to present to each other. Amid gasps, one of the younger boys read their list to the girls, ticking off the tallies for “tramps,” “dogs” and “free maids.” “Three people voted for ‘sluts,’ two people voted for ‘hos,’ eight people voted for ‘meat-beaters,’” he said hesitantly.
Valenzuela offered another suggestion: “No means yes, and yes means harder.”
The exercise would continue for more than three hours. During the debriefing, one girl recounted a sibling’s suicide attempt. Another described being sexually assaulted by a stranger. A boy fell to the floor in heaving sobs. One of the girls fell to the ground next, after Sims instructed them to “please stand if you’ve ever been hit by a man.”
After the exercise ended, at the end of a 15-hour day, teachers scrambled to pair up with distraught students. But in a huddle on the rain-slicked basketball court, Sims reassured his fellow teachers. Go back to the cabins and continue the conversation with students by asking “probing” questions, he said. “You don’t want to leave them hanging with this emotion. This is what happens every time — it’s cool, it’s cool, it’s cool. We got this, trust me.”
Not all those who are assigned or volunteer to staff a camp can reconcile its aims with its methods. Over the years, some Bay Area teachers have been unnerved by the program.
“There’s a sense of ‘trust the process.’ You’re told that there’s this institutional memory and you have to buy into it,” said Mountain View High School English teacher Steve Kahl. “It’s portrayed as being God’s gift to the school community. The kids are trusting us, and the parents are trusting us, and the teachers think there must be some research backing it.”
Kahl, who volunteered for a camp in 2013, said he had serious doubts during training, but colleagues encouraged him to ride it out. They were teachers he felt had deep regard for students and the best of intentions. But even as a veteran educator with graduate school training in counseling, Kahl felt ill-equipped as he led group discussions that “aggravated issues for students that we had no business aggravating.”
“We were potentially dredging up issues for students that we were not prepared to follow up with — and that worried me a lot,” he said. “It struck me as pseudo-therapy for the masses, without anyone having a diagnosis and no one supervising who is clinically authorized to do anything that’s therapeutic.”
Over two decades, about 10,000 local high school students have attended another camp observed by The Chronicle, Camp Everytown. From fiscal years 2016 to 2018, 1,361 students from 31 South Bay high schools have gone through the four-day program, with Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto paying $20,000 for one camp.
The 60 students at the Camp Everytown retreat observed last fall did not come from well-off Los Altos or Palo Alto, but from three charter high schools in some of the region’s most impoverished communities in East Palo Alto and San Jose. It was a fact the teens were reminded of numerous times.
“This for many of you is a once-in-alifetime opportunity,” Tuyen Fiack, Silicon Valley Faces’ current executive director, told them. “The reason you are here is because somebody at your school decided you had leadership potential. Our cost for each of you is $500. How many of you paid? None of you. That’s why we really want you to be present, because it’s a privilege to be here.”