DCF Wants Unlicensed Religious Children's Home Closed
Source: The Lakeland Ledger.
State officials asked a judge Friday to shut down an unlicensed Port St. Lucie children's home that for years has been allowed to operate despite evidence it has hurt kids in its care.
In an 80-page petition, attorneys for the Department of Children and Families cataloged more than a dozen incidents in which its investigators found evidence children were neglected, injured or otherwise mistreated while in the care of Alan Weierman, the self-professed "colonel" who runs Southeastern Military Academy.
The agency says the home must be shut down because it operates with no state license and has failed to get other state-recognized credentials, such as private school accreditation.
The state's action was prompted by a Tampa Bay Times investigation that chronicled Weierman's more than two decades running religious homes in Florida.
Read more: http://www.theledger.com/article/20130105/NEWS/130109700?p=all&tc=pgall
Here is an earlier article about the abuse in these Florida centers exempted from regulation because of religious reasons.
The article is long, but it is important reading. I am listing links to two videos at the end. One boy's foot is swollen and cut, and his urine was bloody. They told him he was okay.
Children were reportedly hurt at nearly a dozen Florida facilities.
The sun had not yet risen over the Christian military home when Samson Lehman collapsed for the sixth time. Still, he said, they made him run.
The screaming, the endless exercise, it was all in the name of God, a necessary step at the Gateway Christian Military Academy on the path to righteousness.
So when Samson vomited, they threw him a rag. When his urine turned red, they said that was normal.
By Day 3, the 15-year-old was on the verge of death, his dehydrated organs shutting down.
Two videos of the abuse. It was not just the Florida School for Boys at Mariana, Florida, it is still going on. They shut down the School for Boys, and now they are realizing it is still going on.
http://bcove.me/jcxi7srh
http://bcove.me/rr0j49vr
= new reply since forum marked as read
Let me try to make my point clearer.
It is perhaps revealing to turn the mis-education example around and consider if someone reeducates a correct lesson: if you stick your hand in a fire, and learn it burns, then if someone else tries to teach you that you can stick your hand in a fire and not get burned, you'll tend to reject the retraining, as you should. The problem is what learning occurs first. Now, consider what happens if mistraining had first occurred. Consider the hypothetical that a school says to put your hand in a fire (not much different than "don't worry about blood in your urine"
, so you do, and thus you get burned. Now, you're going to consider everything that school says as suspect. Because you first learned the school told a harmful lie, further efforts at retraining will always be "suspect", your mind will always, unfortunately, tell you that. That is the second victimization.
There's a whole bunch of reading available from the search string, "the difficulties of mistraining" (no hyphen in "mistraining" . If you don't like the term, try "the difficulties of re-education". Both come with revealing glimpses of incorrect first training.
The only way to fix it, is not to train incorrectly in the first place.
