How to use this site

Kids Over Profits documents the troubled teen industry: the wilderness programs, therapeutic boarding schools, residential treatment centers, boot camps and religious reform schools that take young people away from home, the companies that own them, and the consultants and transport companies that fill them.

Most of what is here comes from records: state inspection reports, court filings, government investigations, news coverage, and the programs' own brochures and handbooks. Records carry a link to their source wherever there is one. The pages below are grouped by what people usually come here to do.

Look up a program

For when you have a name: a program, the company behind it, or the consultant who recommended it.

Facility directory Every program on record, open and closed, grouped under the company that runs or ran it. Filter by status, or sort by the number of inspection reports; each name opens the program's own page.
Where are the kids? A page for every state and for the countries programs operate in: the programs there, the inspection reports that state publishes, its laws and its news.
Parent companies The companies and religious organizations that own and run programs, such as Universal Health Services, Sequel TSI, Aspen Education Group and Teen Challenge. Each one's page lists what it has run and where, its history year by year, the people who ran it, and the lawsuits and deaths on record across its programs.
Network map More than 1,400 programs, companies and people, and the documented connections between them: who owned what, which staff moved from one program to the next, and which programs changed names. A timeline shows the years each was operating.
Educational consultants and referrers The paid advisors who recommend programs to parents. Each listing gives the programs they have referred to, where they worked before, the trade groups they belong to and any legal history on record.
Youth transport companies The escort companies parents hire to take a young person from home to a program, with what is on file about each.
Young adult programs Transitional living, wilderness and therapeutic programs for people 18 and older. Many are run by the same companies and staff as the teen programs, or take young people straight from them.

Records of harm

What licensing agencies, courts, reporters and families have documented, each with its source.

Inspection reports More than 80,000 state licensing inspections from more than 25 states, gathered so they can be read without filing a records request. Each state's tracker lists the facilities it licenses, every visit on record and the violations inspectors wrote up.
Serious findings The most serious of those findings: deaths, sexual and physical abuse, restraints that injured a child, suicide attempts and medical neglect. Each quote is the agency's own wording, checked against its report by a person before it is listed.
In Loving Memory More than 200 young people who died in programs, reform homes and detention centers, with the program, the date, the cause of death and the reporting. Filter by state, decade or cause.
Lawsuits Court cases against programs, their owners and staff: what was claimed, where it was filed and where it stands, filterable by status, court and claim.
News feed Coverage of the industry as it comes out: arrests, closures, lawsuits and investigations. Long-running stories are collected article by article.
Document archive More than 4,800 documents: Senate and GAO investigations, court filings, research, and the programs' own handbooks, brochures and newsletters, filed under the program or company they concern. Free to read and download.

Get help or take action

If something happened to you or someone you know, or you have something to add to the record.

Report abuse Who takes a report in every state: the board that licenses a therapist, the agency that licenses the program, child protection and the police. They do not reliably share reports with each other, so the page says which to tell and what each can do.
Resources Crisis lines that answer around the clock, survivor support groups, advocacy organizations and further reading, grouped by what you need.
Add or correct a program Send what you know about a program, company, consultant or transport company. A person reviews every submission before it is added.
Send documents anonymously Upload records or photos without an account. Files are encrypted the moment they reach the server, and only the site owner holds the key that opens them.
Volunteer Research, data entry and news tracking, or send in the lawsuits, bills and articles we are missing.
Donate Kids Over Profits is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donations pay for records requests, document storage and hosting.

Understand the industry

Where the industry came from, how it works and the laws that govern it.

History Timelines and essays tracing the industry from older institutions for controlling children, through juvenile justice reform and corporate ownership, to the survivors now organizing against it.
Law & Policy The newest lawsuits and bills side by side, with links to both trackers.
Legislation tracker Bills to regulate programs in Congress and the states: each one's status, sponsors and last action, a plain summary, and whether Kids Over Profits supports or opposes it.
Research & Reports Government audits, academic studies and investigations of youth residential treatment, each with notes on what it found and the programs it names.
How the industry manages its reputation How programs shape what a parent finds online: instructions written for AI chatbots, "independent" directories run by the programs' own marketing firm, and one program's 2,500 near-identical pages, one for nearly every town.
Glossary More than 450 words programs use for their methods, taken from handbooks, staff manuals, state records and survivor accounts, each with the programs where it was used.
Frequently asked questions What counts as the troubled teen industry, where it came from, what happens in programs and how to help, answered briefly with links to the records.

Written for you

Pages written with one kind of reader in mind.

Survivors Support groups, a survivor-written guide to common after-effects, legal options and places to tell your story.
Family and friends How to support someone who survived a program: what to say, what to do and what to avoid.
Advocates The research, history and program data most useful for organizing against the industry, in one place.
Journalists Guidance on trauma-informed reporting and interviewing survivors, the sources we use, and how to reach us for interviews or reprints.

Finding something

Search the whole site. Press / on any page, or use the search in the header. It looks through programs, companies, people, inspection reports, lawsuits, news and documents at once, and finds a program under any name it has used, so a program that has been renamed turns up under its old name too.
Every program has its own page. It gathers what is on file about that program: the names it has gone by, the company that ran it, the state's inspection findings, lawsuits, news coverage, deaths, staff and documents. A program that changed its name is shown in one section per name, each with the records from its own years.
Every page, A to Z. The site map lists every page of the site, and every program and company page from A to Z.
Something wrong or missing? The flag button on each page sends an error report straight to us. To add what you know about a program, use Add or correct a program above.