Why You Need To Watch “The Program”
A review of the blockbuster Netflix documentary, plus the research I did for my novel and some thoughts on who gets to write about what
If you haven’t yet watched The Program on Netflix, queue it up and plan your weekend around it. The Program is a three-part documentary that took over a decade to make. The filmmaker is Katherine Kubler, a young woman whose high school was the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a boarding school in Upstate New York that promised to help “troubled teens” but instead detained and abused them while luring their parents into a highly lucrative cult.
In the film, Kubler and several Ivy Ridge alumni (referred to henceforth as survivors) revisit the now-crumbling facility and discover reams upon reams of dusty paper -- damning files which the school’s owners amazingly left behind after it closed. As they sift through the papers, they rediscover essays they had to write as punishment, confessions they were forced to make, and outright lies that the program fed to their parents. One girl was told that the drug test she took during her first day at the school “lit up like a Christmas tree,” but finds a handwritten record stating that her test was, in fact, negative.
Physical, sexual and psychological abuse were daily occurrences at Ivy Ridge. Solitary confinement awaited the kids who couldn’t or wouldn’t “work the program.” Phone calls home were monitored by staff and cut off if the student dared say anything negative about what went on within the school’s walls. Running away was virtually impossible in the town’s remote location.
The Academy at Ivy Ridge was part of a massive organization called the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs which owned and operated schools like Ivy Ridge all over the United States, and had schools in Mexico, Costa Rica, Jamaica and the Czech Republic. In The Program, Kubler takes the audience along as she learns about WWASP and the men who ran it. Let’s not mince words here: they’re schlubs. They’re brilliant con artists and evil beyond measure, but they’re also schlubs who can’t spell. It’s a striking paradox.
In the final episode, Kubler tracks down Narvin Lichfield, who opened and operated several WWASP schools. He announces on Instagram that he’s going to be singing karaoke, so Kubler and her camera crew roll up at the bar on the very night and film him crooning Sinatra tunes. I have questions about this -- I really want to know how they were able to use his image without blurring his face. Surely, he wouldn’t have agreed to appear in this film if he knew what it was going to be (as his response to the film clearly shows). I’m guessing they asked him to sign a release and he was just too stupid to ask what for -- like I said, a schlub.
I wrote a novel called Tough Love at Mystic Bay about a girl who finds herself in a school for troubled teens, and I based it on the WWASP schools, so I knew quite a bit about it before I watched the film. What I didn’t know before the film was just how much WWASP manipulated the parents. I knew that parents of kids in WWASP programs had to attend creepy, cult-like seminars, but I didn’t know they had parent “support groups,” and that if one parent was wavering, the others would descend on him to convince him to keep his child in the program.
One of the most nauseating moments for me was when one of the survivors asked, “How did so many of us from the same Evangelical community end up at Ivy Ridge?” The answer: “Alexa Brand’s parents made a lot of referrals.” WWASP promised parents a free month if they could get other parents to sign up. WWASP’s tuition was more expensive than Harvard’s, so the incentive was huge.
If you thought Lula Roe was a cult and a scam, wait til you hear about WWASP.
Falling Down the WWASP Rabbit Hole
In the film, Kubler mentions the WWASP survivor’s website, and the r/troubledteens subreddit. It was through these message boards that the Ivy Ridge survivors you see in the film found each other and reconnected.
They’re also how I learned about WWASP and the Troubled Teen Industry. Sometime in 2015, I watched an old episode of Intervention that centered on a young woman named Cassie, whose father and stepmother sent her to Adacemy at Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica. After a riot at the facility, Costa Rican officials closed it down and arrested Narvin Lichfield. Cassie then transferred to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, a former hotel ringed with barbed wire.
I was shocked. I googled Tranquility Bay and landed on the WWASP Survivors’ website, eventually reading every testimonial for every school. I read comments on the now-abandoned fornits.com forum and interacted with survivors on r/troubledteens. I also read Help at Any Cost by Maia Szalavitz, who appears in Kubler’s film.
On r/troubledteens, someone posted a scan of an article from Spin magazine about a boy who’d been incarcerated at Paradise Cove, a WWASP school in Samoa. Paradise Cove had “The Box” for kids who refused to get with the program. (It’s as bad as it sounds: a narrow wooden box you’d have to stand in until someone decided to let you out.) The Spin article talked about how the boy had tried to work the program, but when he failed, he decided to tough it out in solitary confinement. (One of the survivors in Kubler’s film recounts a similar experience.) After reading this article, I decided it would work as a story arc for the main character of my novel.
In college, I took a course titled “The Final Solution: The Psychology of Inhumanity,” which examined the Holocaust from a psychological perspective. Marvin Frankel, the professor, told me that there’s something inherently voyeuristic about studying atrocities, and we have to acknowledge that. But turning away is not an option, so when we fall down the WWASP rabbit hole, we have to speak up. We’re voyeurs if we do nothing. That’s why I hoped my novel would be more than just a page-turner; it’s a protest against an industry that shouldn’t exist.
Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Do Non-Survivors Have a Right to Write?
A few months before Tough Love at Mystic Bay was released, I was interviewed on a podcast called Talk Troubled, hosted by two women who are TTI survivors. At one point they asked me how I, a non-survivor, could write about the abuse that happens at these hellholes without experiencing it directly. The meaning of the question seemed to be twofold -- not just, how was I able to capture these experiences (readers can judge for themselves whether or not I was successful at that) but how could I? Understandably, they expressed a preference for “survivor-made” books and films. But I think the question stemmed, in part, from a misunderstanding about how publishing works.
The hosts may have believed that my book took a spot away from another writer, which would mean my book could have, theoretically, prevented a survivor’s book from seeing the light of day. But that’s not how publishing works. The publishing industry relies heavily on “comp titles,” which means if you want to publish a book, it helps a lot if there’s a similar book on the bestseller list already. In other words, a successful novel about the troubled teen industry only opens the door for more memoirs by TTI survivors. Work by outsiders doesn’t displace or diminish survivors’ efforts, it augments them.
In the interview, I pointed out that the great thing about fiction is that it can go places true stories can’t. In January 1995, a 16-year-old boy named Aaron Bacon died in a wilderness program in Utah called North Star Wilderness Program. During a trek through the desert, he developed a treatable ulcer, but instead of getting him medical attention, the leaders of the program called him names and abused him. After he died, his parents took legal action. The program leaders were convicted but served no jail time.
A Hollywood movie studio bought the rights to the story, but no big-budget project ever came to fruition -- the ending was just too depressing. In the end, people who could’ve learned about the TTI through such a film didn’t. As a fiction writer, you can take real stories and put creative twists on them to make them a little more palatable to a broader audience. I won’t give away the end of my novel, but suffice it to say that readers have called it “satisfying.”
I should mention that there is a short film about Aaron Bacon. Nick Gaglia, a filmmaker who is a program survivor, wrote and directed it. It’s beautiful and people should watch it. But the choice here is not either-or. Fiction and nonfiction are both necessary because both open up new avenues of discovery and lead more people to see just how serious this issue is.
A Satisfying Ending
Throughout The Program, Kubler talks about how frustrated she is that she cannot get her father to see just what a mistake it was to send her to Ivy Ridge. She finally decides to cut off contact with him for fifteen months -- the same number of months she spent at Ivy Ridge. At the end of fifteen months, she reestablishes contact, but only through email. Eventually, they meet on camera, and it seems like he’s starting to get it. He apologizes for sending her away. It’s a poignant moment that reminds us that there is hope -- something we don’t get from a tragic story like Aaron Bacon’s.
The Program is a homerun. Kubler did excellent work, and I hope this will be just the beginning of a long and successful film career for her. I also hope that the work she and the other survivors put into it has helped them heal from the trauma they endured.