We Went to the Real Culver Creek. It Was a Great School — With A Systemic Sexual Abuse Problem
Our phones and DMs lit up on October 18, when Hulu released Looking for Alaska, the long-awaited adaptation of John Green’s debut novel. “Are you watching?” “Have you started it yet?” The messages were enthusiastic but also notably apprehensive. One high school classmate texted to say she felt nervous about starting the show, but she couldn’t explain why.
She didn’t need to explain. Watching your small, independent Alabama high school brought to life in a TV series is a bizarre experience. Watching the series as your school mishandles an investigation into decades of systemic educator sexual misconduct perpetrated against you, your friends, and your fellow alumni, is both bizarre and upsetting.
We attended Indian Springs School, a small day and boarding school outside of Birmingham, in the early 2000s, when the novel Looking for Alaska came out and when the Hulu series is set. Like the book it is based on, the series tells a coming-of-age story set in Culver Creek Preparatory High School. According to Green, “Looking for Alaska is fictional but the setting really isn’t. The school in the book is called Culver Creek, but it is almost inch-for-inch the same place that Indian Springs School was in 1995.”
The resemblance between the actual Indian Springs campus we knew, and the Hulu version of Culver Creek, is striking. The show captures the 1950s bomb shelter architecture, the unairconditioned dorm rooms, the beautiful wooded campus that looks like summer camp. There really was a lake ruled by a ferocious swan. The dining hall really served a greasy, heart-stopping adolescent delicacy called crispitos (renamed bufriedos in the book and series).
Other aspects of the series are clearly fictional. Funny, even, if you knew how Indian Springs was. Lacrosse team? Fiction. Dr. Hyde’s on-campus mansion? No campus faculty house looked like that. And, of course, the characters’ accents: almost none of them talk like they’re from the South, let alone rural Alabama, as Alaska and the Colonel are supposed to be.
But what strikes some viewers as the most incredible aspect of Culver Creek — the measure of freedom given to teenage students — is right on the money. Indian Springs prides itself on the degree of independence and democratic decision-making it grants to students. The school’s motto is Discere Vivendo, Learning through Living.
This is intended to foster maturity and instill values of moral courage and independent thought. In many cases, it works. It also accounts for the depth of affection so many students and alumni feel for Indian Springs. To quote John Green, perhaps our most famous alum: “It’s an excellent school. Attending Indian Springs made my life possible, and I am very grateful to the school and its teachers.” Or, as the Colonel put it, “It may look like a summer camp controlled by a killer swan, but to the people who go here, it matters.”
Yet the series has evoked more than nostalgia from us. There is a shadow side to the mythology that Indian Springs is a special place, with special students, and therefore the usual teacher-student boundaries don’t apply.
This point arises, again and again, in alumni conversations about why so many sexual misconduct perpetrators were allowed to teach at Indian Springs for so long, and until so recently.
These aren’t entirely new conversations among alumni. We remember the whisper networks from our own time at Indian Springs. We have seen the pattern of faculty, sometimes popular and longstanding faculty, suddenly leaving mid-year without explanation.
But historic teacher sexual misconduct became a wider community conversation in December 2017, when the school announced that it had hired an outside law firm to conduct an investigation. Unfortunately, the school’s June and October 2019 community-wide letters have made a show of transparency while trying to push the open secret of teacher sexual abuse back into the shadows.
The letters give very little context or detail. They name only five perpetrators altogether. Five sounds like a lot, unless you attended Indian Springs and remember the climate of poor boundaries and open sexualization.
All five perpetrators are deceased: Ray Woodard, the “Father of Soccer in Alabama”; acclaimed Kentucky glass artist Stephen Rolfe Powell; longstanding geometry teacher Marvin Balch; longstanding chemistry teacher Lee Watkins; and a longstanding, mustachioed administrator, dorm master, and Latin teacher named John Lusco.
Among Indian Springs alumni, John Lusco is understood to be the inspiration for the Eagle. We were on campus near the end of Lusco’s long tenure. Like the Eagle, Lusco long served as Dean of Students, making him in charge of student discipline. Like the Eagle, Lusco lived in the dorm circle for many years — then arranged as the dorms in the show, like a circular Motel 6 with each student’s room opening outside.
Lusco had the Eagle’s same dark mustache and iconic status on campus. He taught at the school for 47 years until April 2013, when Lusco was fired, escorted off campus, and banned from campus for reportedly propositioning a student. The school sent a notification to then-current parents, though not to alumni or the wider community.
For all the parallels, the Eagle is not “inch-for-inch” John Lusco. The Eagle is rigid and unpopular. John Lusco was beloved. The 1986 Indian Springs yearbook is dedicated to him “not only for his 20 powerful years of teaching Latin, but for his countless contributions to the ISS community.”
Unlike the Eagle, Lusco had a charming, easygoing Southern personality. He was charismatic and avuncular. Boys spent hours in his office, where he sold snacks and soft drinks to them at low prices. Lusco also regularly had boys sitting in his lap — in his office, in the classroom. This was so normalized that one can find photos of it in Indian Springs yearbooks.
To many of us students outside Lusco’s mostly male circle of mentees, his behavior seemed inappropriate and creepy. It is difficult to imagine that we noticed as teenagers but that the adults in charge never did. This was the shadow side of the narrative that Indian Springs was a special place where the usual boundaries didn’t apply. John Lusco wasn’t discreet because at Indian Springs, he didn’t have to be. He hid in plain sight for 47 years.
Lusco still has his defenders, of course. They charge his victims with trying to ruin the reputation of a good man. The school’s lack of transparency enables this sort of denial and victim-blaming. Without information about what Lusco did, the men who loved him can more easily believe what they want to believe — that Lusco was the gentle, fatherly mentor they want him to have been.
The school has acknowledged, but refuses to name, four living perpetrators. One of them is Tim Thomas, who retired in 2016 after 36 years of teaching. We know this only because Thomas’ church, First Presbyterian Birmingham, has the moral courage and integrity that Indian Springs leadership does not. The church named Thomas, explained why he was no longer their Director of Music, and described the credible allegations against him in a June letter to members. Just a few days ago, WBRC Fox 6 in Birmingham picked up the story.
The church confirmed the authenticity of the letter to members and told WBRC that since that letter went out, more people have come forward.
Since the church’s letter went out, Indian Springs has quietly removed Thomas’ 2016 Outstanding Alum Award from the school website. Indian Springs still has not named Thomas, however, or any other living abusers. It appears the administration and Board of Governors are trying to weather the storm of alumni disappointment and anger.
Perhaps they are counting on the nostalgia of alumni, hoping warm memories of the “magical place” Indian Springs was will keep alums from speaking out. Perhaps they are counting on the shame of survivors keeping them from talking about their experiences of harassment and abuse by trusted teachers. Perhaps they are counting on the news cycle moving on, the topic growing stale, concerned alumni growing tired.
They are not, in any case, living up to their stated values: moral courage, integrity, “infinite respect” for students. Neither are they upholding their stated commitment to student safety. With no public record of their abuses, living perpetrators are unencumbered from seeking teaching positions elsewhere and gaining access to more children.
Watching Looking for Alaska, knowing what we know about Indian Springs, is strange and complicated. It brings up nostalgia but also anxiety, anger, and grief. Knowing what we know, we may recognize Indian Springs in Culver Creek, but we are also confronted with the truth that Indian Springs was not Culver Creek. It was not the idyllic, magical place where the adults in charge, however flawed, were ultimately there to guide and protect us.
The past cannot be undone. It can be reckoned with, but such reckoning requires a commitment to transparency, accountability, and justice that Indian Springs leadership has repeatedly refused. We hope they will change course. They could start by working to meet the demands endorsed by over 200 alumni, parents, and friends of the school, the first of which is: name all faculty and staff credibly accused of sexual misconduct.
Until then, we have no reason to believe Indian Springs will be transparent and accountable with any future reports of abuse and harassment.
In the meantime, it will be up to us — Indian Springs abuse survivors and the people who care about them — to tell the stories behind the story.
We invite survivors of educator sexual misconduct to share their stories, and we invite anyone in the Indian Springs community to share messages of support, at SpringsSurvivors.org.
For immediate support, please reach out to RAINN at their 24-hour hotline, 800–656-HOPE(4673), or via their online live chat.
