Great Barrington — The temperature struggling to rise above one degree in the Berkshires this morning, I make my way up Route 23 to Eagleton School, where a massive investigation by police and the Southern Berkshire District Attorney’s office into possible abuse of students since early January resulted in the arraignment of 5 employees of the school, the firing of five as of Thursday evening, and others placed on suspension.
The school sits on 45 rural acres near the Monterey border, and is host to 75 year-round male students between 9 and 22 for whom this place is a last resort after schools, psychiatric hospitals and families could not manage their cognitive and developmental disabilities as they grew into large strong teenagers.
Basic academics are interwoven with “pre-vocational” programs, based on a student’s interest, like cooking, maintenance, working with horses, all for pay at minimum wage and in preparation for a life beyond Eagleton that may include at first, a job at a fast food restaurant or a two-year college program. Some may end up with their own apartments, a car, and full-time work. Others may go to live in a group home after they leave the school. Students are taught basic banking and other skills so they can integrate into society as much as possible, and the school provides a “transitional” program where students work at local businesses after school and on weekends.
While the school continues to provide care and education to the students, the administration is now like a hive trying to manage fallout from the last two weeks after 50 investigators descended on the school on Saturday evening (January 30) to gather evidence, and are still at it. The school is cooperating and, it appears, stretching itself further by applying more self-examination than usual into all of its systems and methods. Eagleton announced Thursday it had hired Charles Conroy, a consultant and former educator who specializes in schools like Eagleton.
And given the charges of “assault and battery on a disabled person” against four of the defendants, and a story that was picked up by news outlets near and far, it is no surprise that Eagleton’s attorney, Eric MacLeish, now has a desk here. He says the “kids here are wonderful, but with significant behavioral challenges connected to their disability.” And, he said, Eagleton “is really the last stop” for boys and young men who have been through a number of other settings that didn’t work.
MacLeish is better known lately for his “Spotlight” fame in which he was portrayed for his work representing abuse victims in the Boston Catholic Church scandal. He also represented patients in a class action suit against Bridgewater State Hospital. MacLeish works for Clark, Hunt, Ahearn and Embry in Boston, a firm that represents more than 100 schools like Eagleton all over the country. He tells me straight out his firm is not independent in this situation. “We’re working for the school,” he said. But he did say part of what he was doing here was “alerting law enforcement about problems.” He said he and others were going over some of the schools 24-hour surveillance, and saw a video of a restraint that troubled them. “We immediately called EEC (Department of Early Education and Care). We reported it to Children and Families and the DA, and we preserved the images and showed them yesterday to state officials.”
It is the reason for this occasional need to use restraints –– and generally manage large young men who sometimes lash out from frustration and perhaps events from their past –– that appears to have led some staff into trouble with the law, and to break school policies.
News reports have said some parents say the school saved their child and their family; others have complained of mistreatment.
For most students the $141,000 to $149,000 tuition is paid in some combination by school districts and the state, MacLeish said. Before coming here, many of these students had been abused and neglected.
MacLeish also said that 20 years ago students with such disabilities would have been institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals that “use medication to snow or zonk the mentally disabled.” Eagleton instead uses a number of systems including NAPPI (Non-Abusive Psychological and Physical Intervention) in which the ultimate goal is to de-escalate a situation that might lead to violence, he said.
“But in a community setting there are instances where you have to restrain,” he added. One of these is when a student runs, particularly dangerous on a campus in which fast-moving Route 23 cuts through. Recently, MacLeish said, a female employee tried to stop a student who started running, “and he began to assault her. He was on top of her.”
Originally trained at Cornell in psychiatric nursing and later in social work, Eagleton’s Clinical Director Maureen Pryjma, has worked here for 20 years. When she first arrives in MacLeish’s office, she is rattled by a report in another newspaper, which she is holding, that said she had wiped out video surveillance. “Totally, totally a fabrication,” she says. “I have difficulty turning my computer on and off.” MacLeish adds that Pryjma would have to be very sophisticated to have tampered with surveillance video.
Pryjma says many students here are “psychiatrically fragile” and have disabilities including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and autism spectrum disorder, as well as cognitive difficulties. “Many are very reactive from post traumatic stress disorder and attachment issues,” she said, and some “don’t have the language to communicate,” for instance, “that they have an ear ache or stomach ache.” Some students will “bolt” she says, without regard for the danger of the road; others will bite or punch. “Their intent is not to hurt someone, but without language things can happen quickly. The goal is to keep them from hurting themselves or their peers.”
Pryjma says many students were “physically, sexually, and verbally abused, and neglected” before they came here.
Pryjma, who bestowed a beloved pug named Rosie into the school’s therapeutic culture, says the NAPPI approach is a good one. MacLeish had earlier reminded me that Founder and President Bruce Bona is a part owner of NAPPI. NAPPI, Pryjma says, is “about encouraging students to make appropriate choices. It teaches how to do a restraint correctly, but a good part of NAPPI is how to avoid restraints…only if a student is dangerous should a restraint be used.”
Two of the staff charged in the investigation were charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, the weapons being a picnic table and a “shod foot.”
I ask MacLeish if it’s hard to work here. “Yes, it’s hard to work here,” he says. “There are stressors inherent in this business…the school looks for people who are compassionate and caring.” The school uses a private background check company, which MacLeish says “isn’t perfect because the system isn’t perfect.” Each employee undergoes extensive training that includes NAPPI and first aid, and for some, “medical administration.”
Each student, he adds, has a licensed clinician, and students are constantly supervised. He also tells me Eagleton “is ahead of the pay guidelines” for employees.
Founder and Director Bruce Bona started Eagleton, with 12 children, in 1977, he said. I ask him about his initial impulse do this work. “In the 1970s there was a big social movement in the United States working with children,” Bona tells me. “I was young, just out of college…I fell in love with it. I have the greatest job in the world. I don’t know where else you have the opportunity to work with these children.”
I ask Bona what it is about working with these particular children, with their differences, that strikes him and others who work here with great meaning and love. “It’s the way that you find out that you never know enough,” he said. “You learn to listen to children. You get hooked on it. We get to see them grow and go through obstacles and be more, and that’s what’s unique about this population.”
Alford native Chad Astore, head of the school’s Performance Quality Assurance, is a NAPPI advanced trainer and used to work in marketing and admissions here. He is young and energetic and fell into this work when a friend drew him here after he tried out different careers, including one at an investment firm. For a while he made a living as a professional poker player. He’s been at Eagleton for 7 years.
Astore gives me a tour of the school, and to watch him interact with students one might think this work was his calling all along. Students high five him, one tells him he should go home and take a nap, others want to show him their artwork. There is a lot of affection here; he says he finds the work meaningful because of “the connection I’ve developed with these guys.” But it’s not always easy.
“Not many people have a clue what a bad day is here,” Astore said as we walked from the gym to classroom hallway upstairs. He points to the wide-angle surveillance camera in the corner of the stairway. He says the media hoopla since the investigation, and the ongoing criticism “by people who never worked a day in this field” is “frustrating” and “discouraging” to staff who have developed well-earned relationships with students.
He says students are kept as active as possible; P.E. is every day in the gym in winter. In summer students are outside playing hoops, skateboarding and biking on the lane lined with dorm homes. There is an equine program; students ride the trails on the property, or work for pay with the Icelandic ponies and around their pen. And there is a vibrant gardening and seed program. Astore says while students do have access to video games, the school discourages too much time with those. He said students get good exercise as well walking outside from building to building. Most students, he added, can’t do regular academics all day, and need it interspersed with work programs and activity.
The work-for-pay is an important part of the program. The students have their tax-free pay deposited into their accounts and are taught how to balance them, and to “shop responsibly,” Astore said.
He showed me the dining hall and kitchen, where some students work as part of the pre-vocational program. Many students, he said, have “extravagant food issues,” a host of varying allergies, all requiring special diets.
We come to the art room, where some older students are making things, painting, and some are playing cards. There is an art teacher and another staff member at the table, gentle and encouraging. Astore takes me to the well-stocked library, with books familiar to any parent of teens. We talk about what life might be like for students who leave here. Some go to a two-year college; some go back to living with their parents or into assisted living. One graduate Astore is in touch with has “an apartment, a girlfriend, a car,” he says.
“After working in an environment like this,” Astore said, “the rest of the world is different to me.” He might see some young children somewhere start to run, he says, and his instinct is to try to stop them.
He says it’s impossible for people who have never worked with such students to understand. “It irked me that the police said they were here to keep kids safe. What happens when a 220-pound kid acts up and an officer can’t use his baton or taser? They can get violent — that’s why they’re here.”
He says he doesn’t engage with people in debates about police violence, for instance, because he hasn’t walked in an officer’s shoes. And he reminds me that this is a place where chemicals and mechanical restraints, like those used to control patients in psych wards, are not used. “The staff here have to make so many split-second decisions.”
That’s why de-escalating techniques are so important, he said, and as a NAPPI trainer Astore says the key is to “develop relationships,” and that’s how he instructs staff. He says there are two “qualifiers” for using a restraint: “If there is danger to self or others, and only if it is the next safest thing to do.”
He says all the media attention “has made our staff nervous now, and tentative. Kids do get hurt in restraints. They are only used for serious reasons.”
“The satisfying thing for me,” he says, “is I can say [to a student] come with me and let’s go talk about it. It’s definitely not easy work. I would challenge anybody to try it if you think it’s easy.”
Former employee Tessa Hutchinson wrote this letter to the editor, in which she said “the majority of kids at Eagleton are there because the facilities in their home states don’t exist, their homes are unsafe either due to parental abuse or their parent’s inability to manage their son’s behaviors, and the only options for these young men are juvenile detention facilities or hospitals. Hospitals where kids are given high dose antipsychotic medication and either chemically restrained for days, months, or years, or tied with leather cuffs around their legs and ankles in 4-point restraints to their metal bed rails when they ‘act up’.”
As we left recently renovated home-like setting for students with severe forms of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), Astore tells me that people who think they want to do this work, or who “went to school for it,” can be daunted by situations like one in which a student came out of the bathroom with “poo in each hand” and proceeded to pelt staff with it. “It’s not a line of work for everyone,” he said. “This is where the rubber meets the road. Burnout is high.”
But it is a glorious path for some, like Lexi, who declined to use her last name. Lexi, a special education teacher for 38 years, works with these ASD students, who attend their classes inside this building to avoid too many transitions. I watch her mother these young men, and they return the love; they are engaging and open. Except one, who sits alone, looking into a bowl of food. She and the other staff have helped him and several others to talk after arriving here “non-verbal.” Astore says one of these students, whom I met and saw engage with Lexi, was in a “nightmare” psychiatric hospital setting in which he spent most of his time in a cement block room. “He still has violent episodes,” Astore said, “but his quality of life is better.”
Another student comes over to talk to us. He makes warm eye contact and shakes my hand. Lexi asks him what he likes best about being here. “Being with you,” he tells her.
“Love and care and attention,” Lexi says. “That’s what it’s about.”
Once we’re back outside Astore says it is hard on staff like Lexi to hear District Attorney Capeless and police say children are not being cared for properly here.
But I remind Astore that five people were fired and several suspended for not following Eagleton’s rules and regulations, in addition to the arrests and investigation. More than one person made a mistake or crossed the line, I say.
“It’s not all sunshine and rainbows,” he says. “We struggle with staffing. We can’t compete. The pay is close to McDonald’s and Subway.”
“We strive to do the best we can,” he adds. “You do the best you can, not whatever it takes.”
After talking to both Astore and Bona, I got the sense working with these students may be more than a job or a place to house and control a challenging population. At least for Astore, Bona, Pryjma and Lexi, it appears to be more a path for spiritual and human growth.
“It’s about respecting individuality,” Bona told me. “Maybe it isn’t the child that needs to adapt to society, but society to adapt to the child. We can provide some tools to the child to become more flexible, and society becomes more flexible and opens the doors. We all become more because of the children that we work with.”
Berkshire County District Attorney David Capeless could not be reached, and his spokesperson was out of the office.
