If you have some time, this is a good read to understand and see inside the gulag school industry and the escort services that support it. For those unfamiliar with youth rights, I hope this is eye opening. For those already on board with youth rights, I hope this spurs you to action.

Its a long article, I’ll just post the first bit here. Read the whole thing here.

WANT YOUR KID TO DISAPPEAR?

By Nadya Labi

For $1,800, former Atlanta police officer Rick Strawn will make that problem child someone else’s problem. He even makes house calls.

Louis Boussard has hired a professional to abduct his son.

Flicking on the lights to look for Boussard’s number, Strawn dialed his cellphone. “Um, Louis. Hi. Does your house have a circle driveway with a Jag in it?” he said. “If you’re ready, we’ll come on in. Is he asleep?” The connection broke up. Moments later, Strawn’s phone rang. “Much better, yes. No, don’t wake him up. We’re going to talk to you for about an hour,” he said. “I’m going to help you through all that. Okay. Bye-bye.”

We drove back to the house at a crawl and got out of the car, easing the doors shut. Both men wore khaki pants and dark blue shirts embossed with a globe logo and the website address of Strawn’s company. Strawn walked up the stone pathway, peered in the window of the front door, and lightly rapped. No one answered. “Maybe he said go around the back,” Strawn said. “Wait here for a second.” He began to walk toward the back of the house when a light came on inside.

A Haitian-American man in his late 40s opened the front door and beckoned us inside. Boussard (his name and the names of his wife and son have been changed) guided us to a dining-room table covered by a white tablecloth. It held a white vase filled with artificial pink flowers and two fat red candles in wrought iron stands. The matching white cushions of the dining-room chairs were covered in plastic. Boussard sat at the head of the table, flanked by his wife, Sandra. In spite of the late hour, they were impeccably dressed—he wore a beige linen suit and she wore a scoop-necked sweater set off by a gold necklace and bracelets. The couple’s formality, however, soon gave way to the urgency of the task at hand. Two rooms away on the other side of the kitchen, their 16-year-old son, Louis, Jr., lay asleep in his bedroom.

The Boussards had hired Strawn Support Services to transport Louis, Jr. to Casa by the Sea, a school near Ensenada, Mexico that seeks to “modify” the behavior of troublemaking teens. Casa takes kids who parents have decided are out of control, usually because the teens are talking back, getting poor grades, staying out late, drinking, having sex too soon, or taking drugs.

Louis, Jr.’s parents had not told him that he was going to Mexico—nor how he would be taken there. They thought he would run if he knew what was about to happen. Now they kept glancing in the direction of the kitchen. “Louis is very suspicious,” Sandra whispered about her son as her husband began a hurried account of the teen’s misbehavior.

The troubles had begun a year earlier when Louis, Jr. was in 10th grade. His grades fell from A’s and B’s to C’s and below. He stopped playing basketball with his father. He started talking back when his mother wouldn’t let him go out to clubs with his friends. He broke his curfew, which was 7:30 p.m. during the week and 9 p.m. on the weekends. Often he left the house by his bedroom window. The Boussards thought Louis, Jr. might be smoking pot. Then all of a sudden, his report cards improved dramatically. “I thought, something is not right,” said Boussard, squinting at the memory. He discovered a bad report card in his son’s backpack, and Louis admitted that he had faked the good ones.

The Boussards enrolled their son in counseling; the counselor said he was doing fine. They sent him to boot camp for a day, where he got anger-management and drug counseling. He behaved better for about a week. At around the same time, Louis was told that he had to repeat 10th grade. His parents transferred him to a vocational program in carpentry at his high school with the hope that he would find the schoolwork easier. Louis hated it.

Continue reading here.

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