*Update 3 — Keeping That CEDU Dream in 2018
On September 11th, a couple weeks before Northwest Academy closed for a second time, Lon Woodbury posted “CEDU — The Early Years,” a two-part podcast with Bill Lane. Like their first installment in late spring — a podcast of misinformation I discuss in “Running My Anger” — Woodbury allows Lane to lie about everything. The people who continue promoting CEDU share an utter disregard for its reality.
Though “early years” is the topic, this chat is really about CEDU in 2018. “There are a lot of people still working in this industry that came from CEDU…and I just love to keep that name out there,” Bill Lane says.
When Woodbury asks about Mel Wasserman’s legacy, Lane responds like a man who hitched himself directly from Synanon’s messianic founder to CEDU’s messianic founder. “What Mel started was one of the finest, best therapeutic boarding schools in the country…Mel was one of the founding members of the therapeutic boarding school concept, and a lot of the words that are spoken today are words that Mel coined.”
Lacking technical proficiency, and presumably an audio producer, the podcast is full of awkward edits and, in the second part, a ridiculous drop in Woodbury’s chirpy Idaho voice. Amateurishness aside, the conversation ends with Lane and Woodbury bewailing what’s left of CEDU. Boulder Creek Academy, Lane says, is “probably the only school going that was from the CEDU family of schools.” Woodbury — now speaking in a slow, sticky bass voice — adds that “they’ve tried to keep that CEDU dream.” Oh, but don’t worry: Boulder Creek is “doing great,” Lane says with confidence. “Thank God for their niche, doing a phenomenal job.”
(It’s here I remind you that Boulder Creek Academy hires Bill Lane & Associates for “additional emergency services” — a fact still buried in BCA’s enrollment releases.)
I’m writing this update because Lon Woodbury continues to give pro-CEDU individuals a platform to endorse (and falsely portray) a multigenerational cult and criminal enterprise. But what’s more unsettling than ex-staffers spreading the good word about CEDU (or this survivor spreading the words of its complaint reports) is that, at any moment, parents seeking an educational consultant might stumble on Woodbury’s website unaware that it’s also a propaganda weapon.
As part of his planned CEDU inundation, two days after the newest Bill Lane podcast went live, Woodbury reposted a syrupy 2,500 word essay titled “CEDU Education — ‘Here Forever.’” This piece, which originally appeared during CEDU’s 2005 closure, was written by an Idaho-based “educational consultant” and a “former staff member of Rocky Mountain Academy.” In other words, someone exactly like Lon Woodbury.
I don’t know Linda Shaffer, the “Here Forever” author. What I do know is that, in September 2018, with Northwest Academy’s second closure looming, Lon Woodbury exhumed a thirteen-year-old essay of full-throated, “there’s a land that I see where the children are free” rubbish:
Someone or someone’s will be stepping forward with the financial means to resuscitate CEDU. And then the doors will reopen. My vision. My hope. And the children and their families will return. And the staff and surrounding communities will again live happily ever…
Inspired by Shaffer’s essay, I stepped forward to report Boulder Creek Academy (and Lon Woodbury and Bill Lane) to the Idaho Department of Health & Welfare’s Children’s Residential Care Agency. The state of Idaho, I was told, has only two Licensing Program Specialists, Brent Porges and Kelle Johnson. I contacted both.
On September 26th, the day of Northwest Academy’s second closure, I had a forty-one minute call with Porges. On October 10th, I had a sixty-four minute call with Johnson. These lengthy conversations were off-the-record. What I can say is that they both expressed concern about CEDU-Synanon.
Boulder Creek Academy, I was guaranteed, will continue to be monitored. However, there is no licensing or oversight for peripheral players like Bill Lane and Lon Woodbury, and the number of CEDU staffers currently working full-time at Boulder Creek is unknown. And, besides, just because you came from a self-help cult that “admitted it had systematically violated the rights of children under its care” doesn’t mean you won’t pass a criminal background check now.
To understand what’s really happening inside the Academy, Licensing Program Specialists rely on interviews with residents (As it was in California, you won’t find “propheets” and “smushing” and “raps” in the Idaho Administrative Code.) Apart from limited phone privileges and call monitoring — something state employees may personally discourage but professionally can’t change — Johnson reported nothing too CEDU-y to me. Then again, as I reminded her, a resident has more incentive to comply with the program than confess to a stranger from the state. Johnson recognized this, but trusts that child interviewees are honest about their treatment.
Is the CEDU dream alive in remote Idaho? Are the surrounding communities — and former CEDU staffers — “again liv[ing] happily ever” because “children and their families” are returning to its program? The state couldn’t answer these questions. But it was recommended that I get my findings in front of educational consultants — the ones who pitch therapeutic boarding schools to parents.
So, consultants like Lon Woodbury. Or Linda Shaffer, author of the “CEDU Education — ‘Here Forever’” essay. Or, moving out of Idaho, “Brandi Elliott Consulting,” a slicker, SoCal “educational consulting firm that works with adolescent private treatment programs.”
What you won’t find on Brandi Elliott’s website? Until 2004, she was the merciless “School Director” of CEDU Middle School.
(If this update is read by Brandi or Lon or Linda, and if there is some pushback, let me again quote one of their own. “There are a lot of people still working in this industry that came from CEDU…and I just love to keep that name out there.”)
A word on CEDU Middle School: according to the California Department of Social Services, a young resident was “not provided appropriate meals for at least three days.” The evaluation report states that this was “a usual practice for any children who do not comply with the facility program.”
Improperly feeding middle-schoolers — just another CEDU punishment — was a practice occurring under Brandi Elliott’s directorship. And yet, in 2018, how would parents hiring this educational consultant know that she once oversaw a hellish facility receiving Type A citations, “issued for the most serious types of violations”? And who would know that, up until recently, Brandi Elliott shared her consulting firm with another CEDU believer, the program’s old Clinical Director, James Powell? And who would know that when Brandi Elliott publicly advertises her role as a “Volunteer Liaison” for the “Friends of Families with Children in Crisis Foundation,” she’s referring to the renamed Friends of CEDU Foundation? (In a further twist, Brandi Elliot Consulting and the Friends of CEDU Foundation share the same Lake Arrowhead P.O. box.)
In a better world — or, at least, one in which the general public knows about CEDU’s terrifying past — my conversations with the Children’s Residential Care Agency, 105 minutes in total, would result in a ban of admissions at Boulder Creek Academy. Instead, the week of my call with LPS Kelle Johnson, Boulder Creek confirmed they were “expecting a couple more enrollments.” (I wonder: did Lon Woodbury help?)
As of this writing, October 17th, 2018, Boulder Creek Academy houses around thirty-five residents. If they are currently undergoing the CEDU dream, it’s for the same reason that residents underwent it in 1998 or ’88 or ’78 or ’68: the failure of adults to understand an extremist group, and the failure of the media to expose it.
Like Synanon, CEDU was skilled at marketing and violence, and mind-bogglingly amateurish at everything else. (One of a billion examples: according to a long-term counselor I contacted for my research, part of his CEDU job interview occurred while he was defecating in an unlocked bathroom. Impressed by this multitasking, he was “hired on the spot.”)
Bill Lane developed both these weird, virulent programs, putting in twelve years at Synanon and thirty-two years at CEDU. If Lane is correct, its true believers have been disgorged all across the “Troubled Teen Industry.” Hell, these Synanites/Ceduites invented this industry.
But it’s 2018: how can their dream keep going on so quietly and merrily?
If there is an answer, it can be found in a newspaper article published the last time CEDU received constant scrutiny from the press. With growing concern about Mel and Brigitte Wasserman’s swingin’, screamin’ teen utopia, almost exactly forty-nine years ago — October 21, 1969, to be specific — the San Bernardino Sun quoted one of several anti-CEDU councilmen as saying “many people don’t care about their children.”
This councilman added, “and they’re mighty happy that Cedu is boarding them.”
