“They’re making money off of parents who think they’re helping their kids. It’s brainwashing,” said a 28-year-old New York man who attended Elan School between 2001 and 2003.

“I was having problems at home, getting into trouble and my mom was really looking for some help,” he said. While not physically harmed at Elan, he was restrained and still views the experience as traumatic.

“I try,” he said, “to put that place out of my mind.”

He scoffs at the assertion that Elan prepares students for college. “There’s nothing college prep about that place,” he said, and he had no interest in attending college after he graduated from Elan.

Instead, he enlisted in the Army in 2003 and was discharged in 2009.

“I served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and both were better than that place,” he said, referring to Elan.

He knows that the school markets its therapeutic behavior treatment to parents as a means of teaching teens greater self-control, but he disputed that, saying, “if anything, it might have made me worse. It forced me to have a lot of resentment toward my parents for forcing me to go there.” But he’s certain now that his parents never really knew what was going on.

When parents or state officials visited the campus, he remembers the worst-behaved students, or those who were acting out, were cordoned in buildings where parents did not tour. And, those students who were seen by parents were warned in advance by staff and by other students that they had to behave.

This student said he heard stories of students being forced to box bigger, stronger students, but “they were not doing that when I was there.”

He was restrained by other students, he said, whom he didn’t think were “trained to do this. They were just regular students.”

He found the systematic behavior programs well-organized and overwhelming, and “you either did what they say or you get punished. That’s the way the school runs. It runs on fear.”

“People complained, but there’s no one to listen.”

To read more stories about the Elan School and students’ experiences there, visit sunjournal.com/elan.