The sun will rise in the east. Winter will turn into spring. Whisper Ridge (nee The Brown Schools, nee The Millmont Center) will abuse their patients. Time after time the facility, which has frequently renamed itself to stay one step ahead of its reputation, has been charged with human rights abuses against its teenaged mental patients. Its employees have raped patients, beaten kids, threatened to kill kids, allowed patients to wander freely through the facility, and had half of their staff consist of utterly untrained temps.
In today’s Daily Progress, Megan Rowe reports that police locked down the place at 5pm on Thursday and searched it for evidence of sexual assault until after midnight. (Bad news, Megan: You’re stuck following this story now, like Claudia Pinto was before you.) It’s thought that a dozen people may be involved in the matter, including both perps and victims.
Since no one is commenting, I will. Whisper was a disaster waiting to happen. I know someone who worked there back when it was Brown and I know someone working there now. There is little to no training. Also, the working environment is the opposite of what you hear about big companies and their paranoid sexual harassment policies. In fact, the atmosphere at Whisper is about what you would expect from total lack of respect for what we used to called the underprivlged… but worse. At Whisper, the men and women working there have graphic sexual discussions constantly. Yeah it’s a bit outrageous, but in a custodial facility for juveniles, really a bad idea.
Also the kids there are not so much mental patients as court diversions, I believe. They have teachers and classes, but the teachers have no support to keep the students from acting out as if it’s the worst day you had with a substitute teacher in middle school or high school.
In other words, it’s a kind of jail, and it’s a little out of control. This looks to me like privatization of the juvenile detention system, and maybe that is what our local journalists could inform us more about.
Letting this get to the point of prosecutions means it’s way beyond where it should be without the public being informed. There’s been nothing in the papers or web sites I’ve seen to indicate this place is a jail with little staff supervision, as has been reported to me by anyone who’s worked there. So get to it, local journalists!!
In fact, it’s easy enough to get a job there. Go undercover!
Geez. Can you imagine being a parent without a lot of resources (read: $$) and you have a kid who’s been labeled (rightly or wrongly) “troubled” and needing psychiatric help, and you don’t know what to do but something has to be done, and you end up putting your kid in a place like Whisper Ridge (what a name–“whisper” usually connotes something shameful or secret, what a marketing move that was…) and it ends up being like this? What a horrible thing, and how sad that so many parents/guardians feel they have no other choice or trust the marketing/promises.
You don’t think the judge makes that decision? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems more likely.
Anyway, next on my hit list would be nursing homes. I know for a fact that several nursing homes in the C’ville area have one of the same problems mentioned in today’s Daily Progress story about Whisper Ridge: patients are denied their medication because the facility runs out of supplies.