When I toured Logan River Academy, it appears to b...

When I toured Logan River Academy, it appears to be clean and there are nice classrooms and administrative offices. What they didn't show me on my tour though was the rooms they use for detention and solitary confinement. Apparently you have to know about them and ask to see them. They administer different levels of punishment. The first level is called devo , which is a euphemism for detention. In devo , kids are not allowed to draw, do homework, or move their legs. The increment of time in devo is at least one hour at a time, with no maximum. At the time my brother was pulled from the school, he had 4,000 hours he had left to work off. The next level of psychological punishment is solitary confinement. They keep the kids in a small cell for the entire day, and if the staff feels like it, they bring a cot into the room so that the kid has to sleep there too. They denied my brother a shower for ten days and when they finally did let him shower, it was brief and only once all the hot water was gone. The worst level of punishment is called physical interventions or P.I s, which sometimes proceed solitary confinement. The directions the staff get are only to use it only when the kids get violent first. My brother confirmed that they used it on him even when he wasn't, and has never been violent. The individual staff member has full discretion to use whatever punishment they want, whenever they want. Going to the bathroom during these punishment periods is considered a privilege at the discretion of the staff. There is no appeals process or outside (federal government) party to oversee what goes on behind closed doors. And the school limits communication to only the parents, once or twice a week, according to the discretion of the therapists . They have no psychologists on staff, and the majority of the staff are therapists in training , meaning they are working on their hours with the goal of being licensed at the end. The school doesn't have to provide any learning achievement data. The organization that they are accredited by, NATSAP, is a membership program, and not a legitimate accreditation institution. When we reported the school to the American Medical Association, the American Pediatric Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, they agreed it was horrible, but told us they couldn't pull any licenses because they never actually gave them any to begin with. If I sound bitter, it's because the school charges $7,500 a month (for the year, it totals to more than the tuition of an ivy league), and they kept him in detention for 80% of the eight months he spent there. If they are going to charge those prices they should produce a comparably high level of treatment.