Rogers Johnson III was kicked out of public school as a teen and his father was desperate to change his behavior. So, Johnson was enrolled at the Elan School in 2001 when he was 17 years old and remained there through 2002.

Now living in Philadelphia, Johnson remembers one of his first days at Elan when he attended a mandatory morning meeting. He was asked to sing a song in front of the group, but he refused. As a result, he said, he was required to sit in a corner on a wooden chair where “you can’t move. You can’t do anything unless you ask permission.”

And, he said, “you can’t leave until they give you what’s called a general meeting, where they put you in front of the house (the student body) and they yell at you until you admit what you’ve done.”

He refused to stay in that chair, he said. Other students grabbed him, pushed him to the floor and restrained his legs and arms in plastic zip cuffs.

Johnson remembers fighting back, which prompted a general meeting.

After an hour of being yelled at, he decided to admit he was wrong to resist the restraint, and was permitted to go back to his chair.

Johnson said his leg had fallen asleep during the general meeting, so when he started walking he immediately fell down. “I was embarrassed, so I crawled back to my chair, but they thought I was making fun of the whole general meeting process,” so he was required to go back to the corner for several days.

The school permitted students to sign themselves out of the program when they turned 18, and Johnson started “tallying up the days so I knew when I could leave.”

He left as soon as he was 18, with $10 and a bus ticket to Boston in his pocket. His parents wouldn’t allow him to go home, so he wandered around Boston for several weeks before he decided his only option was to return to Elan, so he did.

“You could never joke, never have fun or anything, or you would get in trouble,” he said, which was hard for him because he’s a natural jokester.

Johnson estimated that he endured close to 50 general meetings while he was at Elan, and still isn’t sure whether his self-control skills came from the Elan training or would have come to him through basic maturity over the years.

The program, he remembers, “was like a fraternity or Army concept, except it’s a little bit worse.”