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By Brooke Adams
The Salt Lake Tribune
ST. GEORGE -- Ken Kay was doing his best to look unruffled.
At the headquarters of World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, in an office complex the same rusty red as the southern Utah hills, the phone rang incessantly Friday.
On the line were parents and reporters from across the country, clamoring for news about the confusing events taking place at the Academy at Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica. Calls also flooded in from the ranch, as staff sent garbled messages about the fate of director Narvin Lichfield and the status of the school.
Overnight, Lichfield had been jailed on a variety of charges related to the ranch's management, capping a tumultuous week that began when some students fled the school at the prompting of Costa Rican officials.
The ranch is one of nine boarding-school programs for troubled youth overseen by World Wide and as president, Kay had been at the center of the storm all week. He would continue to be tossed between chaos and calm.
At midmorning he received word that Lichfield was free and returning to the ranch to restore order. By late afternoon, any sense of relief was gone. Kay learned Lichfield was still in jail, the school was shutting down, an exodus of students was under way and World Wide faced a growing public relations disaster, if not the biggest challenge in its history.
Founded in 1998 as a nonprofit organization, World Wide and its tangle of affiliated businesses is the largest provider of services for troubled children in the country, according to Kay.
Its roots reach back to the Provo Canyon Boys School, which the state of Utah closed down in the late 1970s because of abuse, neglect and maltreatment of clients.
Robert Lichfield had been director of residential living at Provo Canyon, but eluded the school's legal troubles. He moved to La Verkin, a rural town in southern Utah, and with partner Brent Facer opened a new school in 1988 -- Cross Creek Manor, this time focusing on girls.
It promised, as Provo Canyon had once done, to turn around the lives of teenagers who were self-destructing -- a pledge made by all of World Wide's nine schools, including two in Utah.
Lichfield later created Teen Help to market the school, which in time added a boys' program.
As people associated with Lichfield opened other schools around the country and the world, he set up World Wide and gave it a supervisory role over schools served by an interconnected web that includes referral agencies, escort services, a billing company and motivational seminars for parents (see graphic). Held out as independent and individually owned, the companies in fact feed one another.
Kay said World Wide receives as many as three requests a week from independent private schools that want to open a school under its auspices or join its association -- requests he says have come from Haiti, New Zealand, London. None has been accepted.
"Sometimes growing too fast can be detrimental," he said.
Lichfield now acts as a consultant and serves as a director of World Wide along with Kay and Facer.
Corporate links are mirrored by family ties among World Wide's affiliates.
Narvin Lichfield, of Dundee Ranch and referral agency Adolescent Services Inc., is Robert Lichfield's brother. Jay Kay, director of Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, is Ken Kay's son. Robert Lichfield's brother-in-law, Dan Peart, is director of Majestic Ranch in Randolph, Utah.
Karr Farnsworth, who runs the three Cross Creek programs in LaVerkin, worked with Bob Lichfield at Provo Canyon School. His wife and three daughters work at Cross Creek, too. Glenda Gabriel is editor of a bi-monthly magazine about World Wide programs called The Source; her son Randy Cook, a program graduate, works for the company. And so on.
Many in the World Wide family, Kay among them, take pride in the fact that zeal rather than professional expertise drives the business. Helping youth has "been my passion," said Kay, an ex-cop and businessman who got to know Lichfield while working at the now defunct Brightway Hospital in St. George.
Kay makes no apology for the close connections. "We're all about family," he said. "Bob has such a passion for what he's doing to help kids. He tries to get as many family members and friends involved so they can enjoy the benefits."
The benefits are financial as well as the sweet sense of changing people's lives, he said.
As a nonprofit, privately held company, World Wide's financials are difficult to tease out. It receives a fee from each school based on enrollment. Collectively, the schools are serving about 2,400 teens. Kay said World Wide has worked with 15,000 families.
Tuition at the schools, which offer three-month or 12-month programs, varies from a low of $1,990 per month at Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica to a high of $3,990 a month at Cross Creek in LaVerkin. Parents also pay a $2,000 processing fee and provide about $95 a month to cover clothing, travel and similar expenses for their child.
Bottom line, fixing a broken child the World Wide way isn't cheap -- particularly given the fact that, on average, a teen spends 16 months in the program. Most insurance plans no longer cover such programs, so many World Wide parents pool resources (blended families are common), raid savings and 401K plans, take out second mortgages or pile on educational loans.
World Wide also encourages families to keep feeding the system, offering a month's free tuition for each referral.
Besides their child's program, tuition covers parents' participation in motivational seminars in seven U.S. cities and, at certain points, the child's school. The seminars, designed by affiliate Resource Realizations, borrow from a variety of "experiential motivational" programs and gurus -- from Lifespring to Dale Carnegie and Stephen R. Covey.
"It's not just an expensive baby-sitting program," Kay said of the seminars, which most parents find life changing but a few consider over the top.
The same could be said of World Wide's nine schools, which take in a seemingly endless supply of kids flirting with disaster and foundering in dysfunctional families.
Take Jen, a 17-year-old girl from New Jersey who is enrolled at Cross Creek, the system's only treatment center. Alcohol, pot, psychedelic mushrooms -- she'd tried it all by the time she was 12 and by the age of 16 was living in a host (foster) home. Or Randi, a 16-year-old from Arizona who also is at Cross Creek. Randi loved the feeling of punching walls, cutting her skin in acts of self-mutilation and purposely hurting her sister and making it look like an accident.
Strict rules, counseling, therapy, hospitalization and psychiatric care -- the girls say their parents tried it all before resorting to one of World Wide's schools.
It is often an act of desperation made on the spur of the moment, requiring little more than ticking off a series of questions -- is your teen defiant? Using drugs? Hanging around bad characters? Out of control? -- and quick run through of the child's history.
In Kay's words, the kid who is right for a World Wide school is the kid who is "disrespecting all of their family values."
"We're not looking for the gangster, the hard-core criminal or teen who is suicidal," he said.
Parents either packed up the kid -- often under a pretext such as a family vacation -- or hire an escort service typically affiliated with World Wide.
"Placement can happen that day," Kay said.
And that's just the first shock for the teen.
"I didn't believe she'd do it," said Alisha, a 16-year-old from Florida who is at Cross Creek. "I always laughed it off."
The second shock is the new life they've entered.
World Wide's boarding schools give the cachet of elite, private prep schools. Web sites and brochures depict smiling, seemingly well-adjusted middle-class kids participating in wholesome activities in idyllic locations.
The reality is closer to reform school. The schools promise a structured, rule-driven environment built around "emotional growth" seminars and an individualized, competency-based academic curriculum students work through at their own pace with limited help from a teacher. The isolated, foreign locales are touted in part as exposing kids to far less opulent cultures.
Stateside or abroad, there is no access to television, videos, popular music or the Internet. Books are chosen for wholesome content. Telephone use is controlled and mail monitored. Rooms are spartan.
Teens must work through six levels, each with its own degree of freedom and privilege, to graduate from the program.
"The structure is really strict," said Jen. "You have to ask for everything."
Control eases as teens move up the ranks. Mess up and a teen can be knocked back a level or receive "consequences."
"It's about structure and rules," Kay said. "It's a lot like you ought to raise your own children. They need a clear understanding of what rewards and consequences are."
Among the consequences: having to listen to motivational tapes and fill out worksheets or write lengthy 3,000- to 12,000-word essays.
Teens who act out, posing a threat to themselves or others, may be placed in an isolation room. Jen said she landed in isolation six times while at Academy at Ivy Ridge, a World Wide school in New York.
Karr Farnsworth, director at Cross Creek, claims its isolation rooms are rarely used.
Some students and parents say they have been abused in World Wide schools -- forced to kneel for hours on concrete, physically restrained by staff and made to perform menial labor.
But even more credit the program with saving their children's lives.
"I am very pleased with the program," said Dorn Hall of Los Angeles, who sent his 15-year-old son to Casa By The Sea nine months ago. At that time, Dorn Jr. was a chronic runaway who was failing school, constantly fighting and had no respect for authority.
"This was our last resort. And it's working, even though he has no choice in the matter. He's turned around dramatically," his father said. "He has a positive attitude. It's just all good."
As to success, Kay claims that 98 percent of World Wide's high school graduates go on to college and their stories are often highlighted in The Source.
Heather, a 17-year-old from Indiana, will graduate in June after two years at Cross Creek. She says she has faced hell -- life without her family -- and feels she is being reborn. "I'm alive. I'm living."
Kay rejects accusations of abuse but doesn't deny take-down techniques are sometimes used to control students or that students may be required to do things they don't like. The program is tough for teens and their parents, he said.
He describes the kids and parents who are critics as the vocal minority who couldn't handle the difficult growth required to make it in the program.
Dissenters, he said, are often parents involved in custody battles, who had a bad experience in a seminar "being told they have to look at themselves" or didn't get the quick fix they expected, Kay said.
Adds Karr Farnsworth, "We're caught a lot of times in mom/dad issues."
Still, Costa Rica is not the first country where World Wide schools have run into trouble. Its Morava Academy in the Czech Republic closed after officials there alleged widespread physical abuse. Similar charges were leveled at Paradise Cove in Samoa, which is no longer associated with World Wide.
California Attorney Thomas Burton has brought seven suits against World Wide and its programs with little success. Three are still pending, while four have been dismissed.
The common allegation in the suits is false imprisonment, misrepresentation and concealment. In other words, parents and their children have been shocked at what they got themselves into once they enrolled in a World Wide school -- which may be not surprising given the rash decision-making that leads some parents to opt into the program.
"These are not the same kind of cases where someone dies of dehydration or commits suicide by jumping off a cliff," Burton said. "Here the injuries are more psychological than physical. Here the primary physical injury is being locked up against your will when you haven't done anything wrong, someone doesn't like your lifestyle or your friends."
True, that someone happens to be a parent, Burton acknowledges. But they deserve to be putting their trust in programs that operate with good, credentialed staff and offer programs based on love, not force, he said. "I'm just against people doing things offshore, out of country, with no communication and no oversight."
While legal efforts to knock down World Wide have so far failed, Kay acknowledges the schools have made about 50 partial tuition refunds, typically in cases of divorce, where one parent was unaware of and disagreed with a decision to place a child in a program.
And World Wide has adopted its own tough-love approach to its critics. It has filed two defamation lawsuits in the past year against two parents, including one who started a competing program, for spreading what it sees as false and misleading information about its schools.
"Parent dissenters," Kay said, "have been very, very vicious."