by Art Levine
Yet the law enforcement and regulatory lapses that made Vanguard such an apparently dangerous place for its most vulnerable students are worth understanding because, in some ways, they are so commonplace. The accused roughnecks and torturers at Restoration Youth Academy who eventually were arrested are in some ways extreme outliers. Vanguard was led by well-educated professionals, some with advanced degrees, who used their influence, and the school’s economic importance to the community, to protect themselves from scrutiny. In addition, the local police department’s response to allegations of assault and rapes at Vanguard is far more representative of those hundreds of police departments that generally ignore violence at residential programs until someone is killed. There was no dedicated Captain Kennedy on the Lake Wales police force doing his best to protect children and prosecute wrongdoers.
“I am not surprised by what happened with the Vanguard School situation in Florida,” Angela Smith of HEAL observes, “It is not unusual for regulatory and law enforcement agencies to ignore abuse complaints.” She adds, “Sometimes the complaints are ignored because the people are disabled and being disabled to some apparently means having a credibility issue.” By taking a close look at how an indifferent police department operates—while state regulators look the other way—we can better understand why genuine accountability is so rare. In this anything-goes field, Florida’s monitoring stands out as among the very worst in the country.
Fortunately, there have been no deaths at the Vanguard School, but it’s fitting that perhaps one of the most notorious cases in this field took place in Florida: the beating death by guards of a black fourteen-year-old boy, Martin Lee Anderson, that began when he stopped exercising at a Bay County Sherriff’s Office juvenile boot camp in 2006. Seven guards and a nurse were charged with manslaughter, but they were acquitted by a jury of their rural Florida peers. The controversy led to the closing of state-run boot camps, but the state’s juvenile justice department still contracts with reportedly abusive programs.
What all of these programs share is a lack of accountability. Few, if any, states do a strong job of monitoring. Trade groups such as the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP) have successfully defeated both federal and state efforts to impose greater oversight. Robert Friedman, an emeritus professor of the Department of Child and Family Studies at the University of South Florida and founder of the reform group ASTART for Teens, observes, “You not only need good licensing law and policy, you need good monitoring and frequent review—and the states do not have adequate staff to do the reviews.”
On top of all that, advocacy groups remain loose, mostly underfunded networks of volunteers lacking real clout. Courts are generally no remedy either, with parents slow to admit they’ve been duped and lawyers reluctant to take on anything except wrongful-death lawsuits.
Florida is especially notorious for its lax oversight of vulnerable children. Private schools are barely monitored. Outside of an easily obtained business license, they don’t get the oversight normally given to public schools or even state-sanctioned residential group homes that receive government funding. Some examples of the toll in children’s deaths and abuse in Florida:
In January 2014, University of South Florida researchers announced the findings from a makeshift graveyard at the notorious state-run Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which closed in 2011 after a long history of abuse and scandal. At least ninety-six children died at the reform school between 1914 and 1973.
In 2012, The Tampa Bay Times, as mentioned earlier in the book, exposed widespread patterns of brutality at unmonitored Christian academies, some operating outside the state’s minimal private accrediting requirements. That prompted a preliminary state review and a tepid government response, but didn’t lead the state to examine unlicensed secular schools such as Vanguard.
Most strikingly, DCF allowed nearly five hundred children—mostly five and under—to die under its watch in a six-year period, killed mostly by parents or other family members, as The Miami Herald reported in a horrifying 2014 series. The agency scrambled to cover up the real causes of most of the children’s deaths and continued to do so even after the newspaper broke the scandal. Limited new reform legislation was introduced and the Secretary of DCF resigned following the onslaught of negative publicity.
As with the abuses and deaths at the VA, New Life Lodge and countless other scandalous health-care programs, nothing was done until media attention focused on all these needless deaths. Those Florida child-killing atrocities were made possible by the same pattern of apparent bureaucratic neglect and indifference—although not leading to any deaths—that seem to be at work on a smaller scale in the weak response of officials to alleged incidents of sexual and physical assaults at the private Vanguard School for learning-disabled kids.
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DANGEROUS CONDITIONS AT FIRST GLANCE SEEM UNLIKELY AT THE BUCOLIC Vanguard School, a self-proclaimed “international learning community” that boasts a state-ranked basketball team and claims 95 percent of graduates attend college. Most of all, however, it promises desperate parents a safe and supportive environment for students with dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder and Asperger’s syndrome, who also often have emotional disturbances. The cost: up to $44,000 a year in tuition.
Before attending Vanguard, Susan Jackson was a pretty, doe-eyed girl whose affluent parents from a Mid-Atlantic suburb had been scrambling to find a program that would allow her to succeed. She had been diagnosed with an autism-related disability known as a “nonverbal learning disorder (NLD),” which made her particularly trusting, unable to read social cues or facial expressions and easily swayed. When she arrived at the school in September 2010, her parents hoped she’d fit in better and make greater academic progress than she had at her previous specialized private school.
Her parents also expected that the Vanguard School would do a good job protecting their daughter. However, rather than calling the police or a doctor immediately about her alleged rape in 2011, dorm monitor Kami Land contacted her immediate supervisor, Felix Lugo, the assistant director of residential life, on the phone. She then sent an email at 1:08 a.m. to top officials at the school, including then-Vanguard president Cathy Wooley-Brown, telling them what had happened. The incident report was labeled as having “high” importance.
After a drive from her home nearly an hour away, Wooley-Brown didn’t call police until she spoke to staff members and the boys the next morning—perhaps with an eye to keeping all their alibis consistent. Later that morning, before police arrived to investigate Susan’s rape report, Wooley-Brown took extra steps to keep the full story quiet, according to her dorm-mate Ellen’s deposition. When Wooley-Brown took Ellen to the infirmary on a golf cart to rest, the exhausted high-schooler confided in her that she’d been told that one of the boys had previously raped another female student. The victim herself had told Ellen.
Wooley-Brown then allegedly looked Ellen in the face and said, “You don’t need to get involved in drama like this,” Ellen said in a deposition. “And I think that is horrible. That is wrong for her to have said that.” That earlier alleged rape by the same suspect was never reported to police. Indeed, police records show Ellen was never interviewed by police in Susan’s case.
In sworn interviews led by Detective Mary Jerome in the president’s office at Vanguard later that morning, the boys, prodded by Wooley-Brown’s alibi-oriented questions during the “interrogation,” offered an alternate version of events from the previous night: Susan was looking to trade sexual favors for drugs.
“She said, ‘I want to have sex with you if you give me some drugs.’ I said, ‘No.’ I walked away,” William said in his interview, according to police records.
Detective Mary Jerome allowed the president of Vanguard to sit in and ask supportive questions of the suspects throughout the so-called interrogation. She treated her with unbecoming deference and essentially as a fellow interrogator who could j
ump in when Wooley-Brown chose—rather than as an administrator with a vested interest in squelching any scandals at her school. Wooley-Brown questioned them in a way that aimed to establish a timeline of events that showed they were in their dorms when Susan said she was raped—and essentially reminded William to tell the detective his tale about Susan’s purported offer of sex for drugs.
At the end of the questioning, Wooley-Brown and Detective Jerome implicitly reminded the suspects to tell the version of events that the school president wanted to hear. Detective Jerome urged William to “tell the truth.”
Wooley-Brown added: “Are you telling the truth today?”
William answered, “Oh yes, ma’am.”
The police report transcripts don’t tell us what sort of body language, facial expressions or tone of voice Wooley-Brown may have used to better convey to witnesses and suspects the meaning and sub-text of her questions. It’s reasonable to suspect that the school president’s presence was an intimidating one for the students whose academic careers she held in her hands, so it was in the mutual interests of both the suspects and administrators that it appear as if no rape had happened.
Then Det. Jerome closed the case the same day the rape was reported, accepting Wooley-Brown’s unverified claims that the school had videotape proving the boys were in their dorm rooms when Susan said they had raped her. Wooley-Brown never produced the videotape during either the criminal investigation or the lawsuit that followed. Detective Jerome’s closing of the case was approved by a captain, James Foy, who himself had pleaded “no contest” to having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl while working at another police department. He was fired in January 2012 after a county prosecutor said he would no longer accept the captain’s testimony as credible.
Indeed, there was no verifiable evidence supporting the suspects’ alibis, a review of Jerome’s report and other depositions in the civil lawsuit reveals. And Susan’s timeline of events clashed with that of the school staff and the suspects.
During the course of the civil lawsuit, though, the contradictions were eventually settled in Susan’s favor. The family’s attorney produced a time stamp—that Jerome had never obtained—from the front gate showing that Susan had arrived back at the school around 8:30 p.m. as she had claimed, not at 9 p.m. as the dorm supervisor Land, Wooley-Brown and all the suspects had alleged. Retired Detective Kirk Griffith, a former top investigator with the innovative Sexual Assault Unit of the Dallas Police Department, reviewed the case for me. “A lot was lacking in some of the things needed for verification,” he says, taking particular notice of Wooley-Brown’s presence at the interrogation. “The supposed interrogation of suspects was not a true interrogation.”
In the fall of 2011, Susan’s family sued the school for negligence. By August 2013, as the civil lawsuit moved ahead, Detective Jerome reportedly disavowed the findings and accuracy of her original report, according to a knowledgeable source familiar with her criminal investigation.
The suit was settled in October 2013 for an undisclosed sum. President Cathy Wooley-Brown faced no public consequences for her actions, nor has she answered questions about the Vanguard School outside of the deposition she gave in Susan’s lawsuit. She left the school in January 2015 to form her own educational consulting firm.
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THE FAILURE TO TAKE SUSAN JACKSON’S RAPE ALLEGATION SERIOUSLY contributed to an environment at Vanguard that allowed subsequent attacks to victimize other students without consequences. For example, on January 18, 2013, Gail Bonnichsen, then a teacher at Vanguard, listened with horror, she says, as a student she mentored described a sexual assault on Vanguard’s football field. A student musician with long fingernails, the girl said, had scraped her vaginal walls. Bonnichsen says she discovered that school staff had the night before brushed aside the girl’s claim because she was known to be promiscuous. “She needed medical care,” Bonnichsen observes. She says she contacted her own gynecologist, who treated the girl.
At 7:22 on the night she learned of the attack—she recorded the time—Bonnichsen says she called the DCF abuse hotline. Then, referred by DCF, she phoned the county sheriff’s office—and later spoke to the police department nearest her hometown. But DCF and three Polk County police departments, including Lake Wales, deny they were ever notified about the alleged rape at the Vanguard School. On top of that, Bonnichsen contends that Vanguard’s principal, Derri Park, even chastised her for reporting the alleged attack to DCF’s child abuse hotline, although the call was supposed to remain confidential. “I told her I did what I was charged to do: ‘This is abuse and I had to report it,’” Bonnichsen declares. (Park, who still works at the school, didn’t respond to my phone and email inquiries.)
Bonnichsen left the school in summer 2013 after working there only two years, and was reprimanded by supervisors again for reporting to authorities such incidents as a knife attack on one of her students. In her view, the school’s general approach to violence is “a cover-up,” worsened by the apparent failure of law enforcement to respond. “I hope you understand how sad this makes me. I tried to do the right thing,” she says.
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AIDED BY SUCH APPARENT COVER-UPS, REFORM EFFORTS IN THIS FIELD—or in any campaign to protect Florida’s most vulnerable children—face a steep uphill climb. The state’s news media, including The Miami Herald, have long chronicled DCF’s failures to protect kids from neglect, abuse and death. Most of the secretaries of the scandal-plagued DCF and its predecessor, Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS), have resigned under fire since the 1990s.
There have been myriad legislative fixes and vows of reform, yet not much has changed over time. Even with the passage of laws in the 2014 state legislature designed to create more transparency and strengthen abuse investigations, DCF’s historically toxic culture of neglect, secrecy and incompetence seems unmoved.
But some advocates, such as Broward County attorney Howard Talenfeld, have made a major difference, both through the courts and effective lobbying. Founder of Florida’s Children First, a group dedicated to protecting children under state care, Talenfeld successfully pressed for a change in DCF’s law requiring the agency to investigate teen-on-teen rapes up through age eighteen of the victims. But that change applies only to youth under state care or custody, not to students at private schools such as Vanguard. “Nobody tracks which kids are sexually aggressive between twelve and eighteen,” he says. “This is a big issue.”
And, as usual, there’s still no federal response to any kind of abuse in residential treatment. Although the House of Representatives passed an oversight measure in 2008, the “Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens” bill never made it through the Senate. The hopes for any national legislation have faded along with the retirement of the leading advocate for federal oversight—Rep. George Miller—and the reluctance of Congress to pass tough new regulation of any industry.
Even for Susan Jackson, the trauma is far from over. The day after the reported sexual assault in March 2011, the parents of the then-sixteen-year-old flew to Florida and pulled her from the school. “Susan and her family have been shattered by this,” says a Vanguard parent who knows them well but asked not to be identified.
Susan confided in a counselor at her new school that she didn’t tell anyone at Vanguard at the time about alleged multiple sexual encounters with a Vanguard staff “monitor,” apparently because of the fear, trauma and shame she felt then. Thoughts about the monitor’s alleged sexual exploitation recurred following new nightmares over Vanguard: “I don’t know, I just blocked it out,” she explained to her Utah therapist when asked why she hadn’t complained about it earlier.
Lake Wales police detectives identified another underage Vanguard girl allegedly exploited by the same man, adding credibility to her claims. But they couldn’t complete an investigation because neither girl’s parents wanted to put their daughters through an arduous, potentially traumatizing criminal probe with an uncertain
outcome. (The alleged perpetrator was never charged and denied any misconduct.)
Indeed, troubling memories of her time at Vanguard continued to plague her. A school counselor’s report in March 2012 detailed her psychological state: “Flashbacks/nightmares began that were associated with the sexual assault situation that had occurred with two boys at the school.”
These days, the Vanguard School seems to have sidestepped the scandal. A new president, Harold Maready, has taken over from Wooley-Brown, but, so far, he remains mum about the allegations against the school and the lawsuit. There has been no local publicity about the lawsuit or the two police investigations involving Susan or the numerous emergency calls to the county dispatch center about crimes and attempted suicides—even after I wrote a long-delayed article on the school for the South Florida New Times chain in November 2014. Because there has been no public acknowledgment that school officials did anything wrong, there has also been no indication that there have been fundamental changes at the school.
When I approached the front gate of the Vanguard School in the fall of 2013 near the end of my week of reporting in Lake Wales, and asked for Cathy Wooley-Brown, I was told, “She’s not available to come to the phone.”
The silence protecting the Vanguard School in Lake Wales, it seems, still continues.
CHAPTER 15
Karen’s Story and the Mental Health System That Never Was: Saving Families, Young People from Lifelong Madness
WITH ALMOST ANY OTHER DISEASE THAT RAVAGES SO MANY PEOPLE, you would think the government would take it seriously by now. The National Institute of Mental Health has estimated that the country’s neglect of mental illness costs the country not only in preventable deaths and blighted lives but also $444 billion a year in lost earnings, federal disability costs and about $200 billion in direct health-care costs, not counting the spending on incarceration.