CEDU

CEDU Educational Services Inc
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"See Yourself As You Are and Do Something About It"
Location
United States
Information
Type	Private therapeutic boarding schools
Opened	1967
Closed	2005

CEDU Educational Services, Inc. , CEDU (pronounced See-doo) was founded in 1967, by Mel Wasserman and wife Brigitta. The company owned and operated several therapeutic boarding schools and behavior modification programs in California and Idaho.

Quote form the original CEDU High School web site: "CEDU High is an emotional growth boarding school for adolescents who exhibit behavioral and learning difficulties. The curriculum has three cornerstones: The original CEDU Emotional Growth program; college preparatory academics; and an outstanding outdoor adventure program. Woven through this triangle is an enriching theme of visual and performing arts. CEDU High School is the original emotional growth boarding school. Since 1967, it has worked with teens and families to redirect negative behavior, teach vital life skills, create academic success, and reunite families."

History

Their motto says: "See yourself as you are and do something about it", however some claim that to be a backronym with the name actually being an acronym for Chuck E. Dederich University after the founder of Synanon. Before starting CEDU, Wasserman had sponsored teenagers into Synanon. CEDU was started in 1967, when Wasserman bought property in Running Springs, California east of Los Angeles. Some claim that he actually began his work with teens in 1965, when he - at that time running a furniture store - started to take restless youth into his household.

Original CEDU Period (1967 - 1985)

The average time a student spent at a CEDU school was 2-1/2 years. The school year was year-round. The original CEDU program did not believe in use of psychological medicine. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 1pm to 5pm (sometimes 6pm) students were required to attend group therapy sessions called "Raps". Raps, in this CEDU period were highly confrontational, at any given moment in a Rap there were could be between 1 to 15 students screaming at other students or, with their head pointed towards the floor, screaming at their own 'emotional issues' and/or crying uncontrollably. Approximately 95% of the faculty had no accreditation or training specific to intensive Gestalt based 'group therapy' which was very popular during this time period.

Expansion (1982 - 1990)

A small group of students and staff, including founding headmaster Dan Earle, leave the Running Springs campus for Bonners Ferry, Idaho to open Rocky Mountain Academy (RMA). RMA's curriculum, philosophy etc. was a carbon copy of the original, CEDU Running Springs. On rare occasions staff and students were transferred between schools. The staff generally transferred campuses for promotions, students were transferred because the staff felt a "fresh start" was the best (and usually last) option for the student.

Around 1990 the facilities began to accept that some of the teenagers could need medications.

CEDU Education - Brown Schools (1998 - 2005)

CEDU education was sold to Brown Schools while it was at its peak in the market; all the schools were full and everything was going well. Two years into its ownership by Brown Schools, the staff turnover was extremely high, no one with any time or stability in the company was left, and CEDU Education went backwards. Former employees watched helplessly as the Brown Schools made management decision after management decision inconsistent with the CEDU philosophy of education and inconsistent with what was effective in helping struggling teens.

Started	Name	Location	Closed	Fate
1967	CEDU High School	Running Springs, California	2005	Campus sold to Chabad of Los Angeles
1982	Rocky Mountain Academy	Bonner's Ferry, Idaho	2005	Property purchased by Universal Health Services
1992	CEDU Middle School	Running Springs, California	2005	Campus Sold to Chabad of Los Angeles
1993	Boulder Creek Academy	Bonner's Ferry, Idaho	2005	Re-opened by Universal Health Services
1994	Northwest Academy	Naples, Idaho	2005	Re-opened by Universal Health Services
1994	Ascent Wilderness Program	Naples, Idaho	2005	Re-opened by Universal Health Services
	Milestones Transitional Progam		2005	property tied up in litigation

Closure

Brown Schools operated 11 boarding schools and educational facilities in Idaho, Texas, Vermont, Florida and California. Facilities in Austin, TX and San Marcos, TX were sold to Psychiatric Solutions Inc. in 2003. CEDU closed in early 2005 due to financial problems . Several CEDU employees reported to Lake Arrowhead Mountain news, however, that pending litigation against CEDU for abuse and violation of rights as well as citations against the schools contributed to the downfall.

Idaho Educational Services

Universal Health Services, which is claimed to be the third largest hospital management company in the United States, reopened three of the former CEDU facilities. Ascent, Boulder Creek and Northwest Academy (now located on the former Rocky Mountain Academy property) will continue to operate under the new name of Idaho Educational Services; each program is overseen by individual directors.

Influence

The history of CEDU is largely the history of the development of parent-choice, private-pay residential programs. A significant number of the schools in the Emotional Growth/Therapeutic schools industry were developed or strongly influenced by people who were originally inspired by their CEDU experience.

Program structure

Ideological and therapeutic underpinnings

Lon Woodbury former admissions director at CEDU and current independent education consultant had this to say about the origins of the program. “Mel Wasserman was influenced by Synanon, and so used the confrontation model watered down quite a bit in the founding in CEDU.” No one suggests that any of the most unseemly aspects of Synanon were ever part of the CEDU curriculum.

Group sessions at CEDU, referred to as "raps", were inspired by Synanon's "The Game". Other influences in CEDU's methodologies can be traced to Large Group Awareness Training seminars such as Erhard Seminars Training and Lifespring. A variation of Lifespring was/is, in fact, used as the last workshop in the CEDU curriculum.

There are also many striking similarities in CEDU therapy to that of Primal Therapy and Bioenergetic Analysis, but it is at this point unable to be proven definitively as to whether Mel Wasserman actually borrowed directly from these practices.

Students experienced several workshops throughout their stay, these are referred to as "Propheets", in which the general theme for the propheet is based loosely on the writings from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. The propheet evolved out of all night "Rap" sessions by Founder Mel Wasserman in the late sixties. Examples of this is Gibran's passage about Joy and Sorrow, which is used in the Truth Propheet, or his prose about children, which was used for the Children's propheet. Mel Wasserman was quoted as stating that a propheet was to "Take the words of the Prophet and put feet to them." Propheets lasted a full 20–24 hours. It was soon found that certain questions had to be addressed before there could be meaningful work on other areas. It rapidly evolved into nine Propheets, taken in sequence by all students, each one addressing different issues any child must resolve in order to become a mature, successful adult. For example, a child has to have at least some handle on what the truth is about themselves before anything else can even be addressed. The first Propheet consequently is the Truth Propheet. Later is the Values Propheet where each child explores the basic values he or she is living by, and is helped to decide if those values make any sense. Other Propheets help them look at what they are really doing in creating relationships, help them ask what happened to the Dreams they once held, and explore and understand the things they do to undermine success and happiness. Each one helps them to better understand that area of their life, and to make changes when and where appropriate. Some workshops were multi-day events, the first one lasting three days, and the second one, based on Lifespring lasting six.

The school's philosophy was to take high risk self destructive teens and change the way that they viewed themselves and to change the destructive behavior they exhibited towards themselves and others. The staff provided a different curriculum which focused on the positives of some of our greatest heroes including Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Kahil Gibran as well as Martin Luther King Jr. and other intelligent, humane leaders of the world. This was used to help the students to understand that sometimes peace is more potent than violence in dealing with conflict. While there are many students who had a difficult time in the later years of the school, there are those who the program benefited and enriched. Unfortunately for those with a positive experience those who did not, have spent much time and on many forums verbally abusing anyone who says anything positive about the school and their stay there.

Another questionable aspect of the group raps was the expectation by staff that students were to reveal a wide variety of previous acts, such as sexual experiences, criminal activities and anything deemed by the staff to be emotionally traumatizing. Most of these revelations were done in very public settings with peers and staff often demoralizing students for these very confessions. The therapeutic premise was "break the student down, then after emotionally dealing with the issue, prop the student back up". The problem is that students began to act the way they were expected to when confronted and learned to cry and act out emotionally, with better performances reaping greater rewards. Many students have admitted to making up past events so as to have a past that was comparable to other students, who were "growing" through their past traumas through revelation.

Daily life

Daily life at CEDU was rigidly structured, however, depending on the era, could differ in nature of activities (i.e. such as what days of the week raps were held), or what the phase/level system entailed. The manner of punitive measures also changed greatly over the course of the CEDU lifespan. (See links to lawsuits below.)

One template of the daily structure, from the 80s/90s era, normally consisted of some form of manual labor in the morning, a four hour rap in the afternoon, followed by one hour dorm time, dinner, and then spending "social" time with other students in the evening. The days that did not have raps in the afternoon usually substituted those hours with some form of physical exercise or team sport.

Academic life

Academic life changed over the period of CEDU's lifespan. At one point, it was nonexistent, and students earned school credits for the activities they were forced to endure. (For example, one rap earned you a credit in "interpersonal dynamic workshops".) In the late 80s, the upper school students' daily labor (which normally consisted of supporting younger students at their family's/team's/group's/ work site) was replaced with academic classes. Many detainees did not graduate with high school diplomas and had to return to high school after attending one of the CEDU schools.

The Academics were based on a trimester schedule with an A.C.W. (Alternate Curriculum Week) at the culmination of each. The classes themselves were as small as the student body and enough work to keep the students occupied but not enough to learn any particular topic. This was prescribed as a means to keep the students focused on their emotional growth.

Many of the counselors and "teachers" weren't qualified to teach in an academic environment. Many students have said they learned little about how to function in the academic arena and found themselves at an educational level below their peers after leaving the school. The almost cultish focus on dealing with emotional issues and finding the "inner child" left little time for academic pursuits, and academic excellence wasn't recognized or even desired.

Celebrity and CEDU

The first facility was located in California - not far from Hollywood. The busy life of the persons in the entertainment industry meant that some of the known celebrities had less time for their children and outsourced the upbringing to CEDU. In relationship with the closure of the facility as local newspapers stated :

Tuition at CEDU schools was about $5,700 a month. Actress Roseanne Barr and broadcaster Barbara Walters are among the rich and famous who have sent their children to the academies, according to a Spokesman-Review report in 1998.

Paris Hilton stayed at the facility for some months after her detention at Provo Canyon School until she turned 18 and could leave as an adult.

Joe Francis - manager of "Girls gone Wild" went to CEDU before attending the University of Southern California. His parents were heavily involved in Herbalife.

Herbalife founder Mark Hughes [1] was a well known name during the early years of CEDU.

Mark, then 19, was not with his mother when she died. Instead, having accumulated several drug busts, he was far away in the San Bernardino Mountains, at an institution that paved the way for his success at Herbalife.

CEDU, as the drug institute is called, was the brainchild of Mel Wasserman, a Palm Springs furniture store owner who had sponsored recovering addicts at Synanon, a drug rehab program, at its facility in Santa Monica. In the late '60s, as Synanon developed cult-like trappings, Wasserman founded his own center for troubled teens in bucolic Running Springs, west of Big Bear. Its goals included liberating the "spirit of the child" and creating "a safe and healthy environment for making new choices." Wasserman eschewed Synanon's confrontational approach to therapy.

In the news

1993: A 17-year-old boy disappered from the Campus. He was never found .

1994: A 14-year-old boy disappered from the Campus. The family believes that he was abducted. He has not been found .

July 1994 - Jon A. committed suicide in one of the dormitories of lower Camelot at Rocky Mountain Academy

1997 - Five persons were injured in a riot at Northwest Academy..

2002 - CEDU Educational Services, Inc. pays settlement to former client on charges of abuse

2004 - Parents looking for child who ran away from CEDU Running Springs.

2009 - A police investigation is conducted into the unsupervised presence of the convicted killer James Lee Crummel on the CEDU Running Springs Campus in connection with the two disappearances in 1990's .

See also

Related topics Teenage rebellion Continuation high school Residential education Residential treatment center

Techniques Therapeutic community Operant conditioning Behavior Modification

Therapies Group psychotherapy Behavior Therapy Attack therapy

External links

• I Speak of Dreams CEDU Timeline, Liz Ditz