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By Martha Shirk
Youth Today
June 1999
Who owns the seven behavior-modification programs that are marketed jointly by several Utah umbrella companies? Good luck figuring it out.
Karr Farnsworth, president of the nonprofit World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP), one of the umbrella corporations, says that the seven programs are individually owned and independent of one another.
That may be true. But documents on file with the Utah Department of Commerce show there’s considerable overlap among the officers, registered agents and general partners of the four umbrella groups with links to the programs.
“It’s quite a web,” says Dick Baldwin, a licensing officer with the Utah Department of Human Services. “They’re constantly reorganizing. It’s a game trying to stay on top of what they’re doing. They don’t want to divulge anything.”
For instance, Farnsworth was once the director of Cross Creek Manor, one of the programs, and is listed with the state as a trustee with Browning Academy, the academic program at both Cross Creek and Spring Creek in Montana.
J. Ralph Atkin, the founder of SkyWest Airlines, is listed in Commerce Department records as the registered agent for Cross Creek Manor, Red Rock Academy, the two limited partnerships that own Teen Help, R & B Billing (which provides financial services for the programs) and Browning Academy. The state also lists him as a trustee of WWASP, although he has denied that recently. And he has been quoted by Associated Press as saying that he was a co-owner of Morava Academy, the Czech Republic program that was shut down last year.
Robert Lichfield was the founder, registered agent and president of Teen Help, Inc., which was voluntarily dissolved in 1997, and the state now lists him as general partner of one of two limited partnerships that own Teen Help LLC. (He told the Salt Lake Tribune in February that he was merely a consultant.) He, too, is a trustee of WWASP. His wife, Patricia, was secretary of the dissolved TeenHelp, Inc.
Robert Lichfield’s brother, Narvin Lichfield, is registered agent and president of Adolescent Services, Inc. (ASI), another of the umbrella corporations. He’s also one of the three trustees, along with another Lichfield named Cameron, of the At Risk Teen (ART) Foundation, a nonprofit corporation set up last year to raise scholarships for the behavior modification programs. Forbes magazine reported this spring that Narvin Lichfield owns Carolina Springs Academy, a Teen Help-affiliated program in Abbeville, S.C., although the South Carolina Secretary of States says it’s registered as a nonprofit corporation.
Brent Facer is the general partner of the other limited partnership that owns Teen Help and is a trustee of the nonprofit WWASP. He was vice president of Teen Help Inc. before it was dissolved.
Confused about who owns what? So are Utah licensing officials. “The one thing I do know for a fact, because I’ve seen the papers, is that Bob Lichfield owns the buildings [that] Cross Creek Manor’s in.” says Baldwin of the human services department. Lichfield declined to be interviewed.