Kathleen Balma

Review of Shelterwood

I was a teen in Shelterwood in 1989-90, before it ...

I was a teen in Shelterwood in 1989-90, before it was a boarding school. (We attended public school during the day and were at Shelterwood the rest of the time.) Though mine is a mixed review, I personally would not recommend it unless you have tried everything else and are just trying to keep your kid alive while you look for a better solution to whatever ails your family. It's better to have an indoctrinated kid than a dead kid, so do what you have to do, by all means. Strengths of the program are as follows: a person is much more likely to heal in a homey setting surrounded by natural beauty than they will in, say, a locked institution. Many of us kids had been to other types of facilities prior to our stay at Shelterwood and we could appreciate the regular exposure we got to the great outdoors, and were grateful to be residing in an actual house instead of a hospital ward or other institutionalized setting. Also, the fact of being hugged by people was great. I never had to go without a hug the whole time I was at Shelterwood, and you just don't get that kind of TLC in a secular or institutional facility, so for me it was almost worth all the zealotry and fanaticism of the place just to be able to smell fresh air, take walks in the woods, and get a hug from a caring-and-appropriate adult whenever I needed it. I say almost, because there were a myriad of ethical issues, too. Some of the biggest ones have already been addressed by other reviewers: the profiteering at the expense of desperate parents, the philosophy of "breaking the spirit so as to be renewed in the Lord" (a ghastly metaphor that should send off all kinds of alarm bells), and the fact that the staff of Big Sisters and Brothers are not screened well enough, so that your kid might end up sharing a room with the most caring and benevolent adult caregiver in the world, or might end up with someone who has anger management problems worse than any of the kids' and thinks that pushing and shoving your child or jerking them out of their seat by a shirt collar is an appropriate response to, say, the kid's grumpy refusal to eat breakfast. Or your kid might end up sharing a room with a white supremacist who is asked to leave midway through the year after it is discovered that he is teaching your child that black people are members of a cursed and inferior race.

It was also painfully clear to all of us residents that there were some kids who really did not need to be in such an extreme environment at all, but who were kept there indefinitely because their parents were wealthy and gullible. I think that many of the people working for Shelterwood are well-intentioned, lovable fools, frankly, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say, and this proved to be especially true at Shelterwood. The counselors were also a mixed crew, with some really out for the best interest of the family and others more interested in lining their pockets. So, ultimately, I understand why some alumns are saying, "This place saved my life," while others are saying, "This place did more harm than good." Lastly, while I wouldn't use the word "brainwashing" to describe the methods used here, the word "indoctrination" fits perfectly. Now if you are wondering how I turned out, I can tell you this: Shelterwood may very well have keep me alive during a scary and vulnerable time in my life, but it also left me with twice as much baggage as I had when I got there and drained my college fund, too. My parents ended up pulling me out of there and putting me into a fine arts school, where I went beyond mere survival and began to truly thrive. The scariest part was this, though: I did need an advocate to ensure I got medical care at Shelterwood the few times I needed it, and my diabetic roommate was regularly accused of faking low blood sugar for extra snacks, despite the fact that she had a machine to prove her need was real. I used to hoard my snacks for the girl so she wouldn't go into a diabetic coma in the night when the head of house refused to believe her blood test results!