John Dewey Academy -- Elite Boarding School for Troubled Teens -- Was Torture Chamber
BY ALISSA FLECK
When Kelsey took to Facebook in May 2020 to expose the abuse she had undergone at a handful of residential treatment programs as a teenager, it was meant to be a final act. By that point Kelsey, 28, had made two prior suicide attempts and she wanted the world to have an explanation when she finally completed the act, she’d later tell me of her decision to go public with a Facebook post. In fact, one of her first brushes with suicide had happened crammed in a bathroom stall at one of those treatment programs, when Kelsey stared down at the plastic bag in her hands and wondered if she had the time to suffocate herself before being discovered by staff members. She’d heard of someone else who successfully exited this world that way.
But what Kelsey did not expect was the outpouring of support — for so many people to reach out to her to talk about their own hellish experiences, or inquire more about and validate her own. Fighting to expose what had happened to her and so many others gave Kelsey a renewed sense of purpose. When she took to social media last spring to start telling her story, it had been over a decade since Kelsey had been one of those “troubled teens” shuttled away to various institutions, including one therapeutic boarding school tucked away in a faux-medieval castle in the Berkshires, called John Dewey Academy (JDA), which is still operating today.