New Names for the Same Programs

From Straight, Inc. in 1985 to Glen Mills and Diamond Ranch: programs with deaths, lawsuits and revoked licenses close, change hands or re-incorporate, and reopen under names with no history yet.

34 min read Updated

Contents
  1. What we found
  2. Congress was told in 2007
  3. Straight, Inc.: the template
  4. Two corporations, one name, one day
  5. Closed in one state, open in the next
  6. Closed in the morning, reopened the same day
  7. License suspended, company renamed
  8. KIDS closed, Straight opened in the same warehouse
  9. Straight-Detroit became Pathway Family Center
  10. New names out of bankruptcy
  11. A spelling change and a new corporation
  12. Dundee Ranch became Pillars of Hope
  13. One address in South Carolina, four names
  14. Church homes that move and rename
  15. Bethesda became Mountain Park
  16. Victory Christian Academy became Lighthouse of Northwest Florida
  17. Rebekah Home, New Beginnings, Marvelous Grace
  18. Bethel became Eagle Point, then Gulf Coast Academy
  19. Julian Youth Academy became River View; Escuela Caribe became Caribbean Mountain Academy
  20. Blue Creek Academy, then Canaan’s Land in Montana
  21. Mount Carmel became Triangle Cross, then Sunlight Mountain
  22. The same owners under a new name
  23. Arizona Boys Ranch became Canyon State Academy
  24. Hidden Lake Academy became Ridge Creek
  25. Birdseye became Kaizen Academy
  26. The Family Foundation School became Allynwood Academy
  27. Behavior Research Institute became the Judge Rotenberg Center, and Tobinworld
  28. A new owner, a new name, the same campus
  29. Anneewakee became Inner Harbour
  30. Integrity House became Havenwood Academy
  31. Island View became Elevations RTC
  32. Cedar Ridge became Makana
  33. Glen Mills became the Clock Tower Schools
  34. Diamond Ranch tried to become RAFA Academy
  35. Palm Beach Juvenile Correctional Facility became Palm Beach Youth Academy
  36. G4S Youth Services became TrueCore
  37. Sequel became Vivant, and Brighter Path
  38. Sequel Pomegranate became Torii Behavioral Health
  39. AdvoServ became Bellwether
  40. After Trails Carolina
  41. Trails Momentum became Grow at Momentum
  42. Solstice East became Magnolia Mill School, then Asheville Academy
  43. A new owner as a way to disown the past
  44. Search the old names too
  45. Sources

A program with a death, a lawsuit or a license revocation attached to its name has a simple way to clean up its search results: stop being the thing people search for. It closes, changes hands or re-incorporates, and reopens under a name that has no history yet. A parent who searches the new name finds a clean website and nothing else.

What we found #

  • The move is as old as the industry. On one day in 1985, Florida records show, the original Straight, Inc. changed its corporate name while a brand-new entity, also named Straight, Inc., was created to keep running the program.
  • In 2007 the GAO found that five of nine programs it examined had reopened under a different name or in a new place.
  • Brown Schools did business under 24 names, and went through two bankruptcies under two different ones.
  • Programs reopened in the same buildings after a state or a foreign government shut them: Straight-Orlando as SAFE, Dundee Ranch as Pillars of Hope, Glen Mills as the Clock Tower Schools, Diamond Ranch as RAFA Academy.
  • Sequel sold 13 facilities to a new company with the same founder and, the Senate found, “no public facing presence.”
  • Hidden Lake Academy told prospective parents on its own website: “Our attorneys have advised us to ‘rebrand’. Therefore, HLA ceased to exist.”
  • Arizona Boys Ranch became Canyon State Academy “to help improve its image after a student died amid allegations of abuse,” the East Valley Tribune reported.

Part of our series How the Troubled Teen Industry Manages Its Reputation. Every example comes from a court record, a government or corporate filing, the company’s own words or published reporting, and each is linked in the sources at the end. Where something is only alleged, or comes from a survivor or advocacy group, we say so. Our Corporatization of Residential Treatment timeline has the wider story of who bought whom.

Congress was told in 2007 #

Investigating deaths and abuse in residential programs, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that five of the nine programs it looked at were “a permutation of the original program operating under a different name or in a new location.”

In one case the owner of a program, whose name was on Utah’s child abuse registry, “opened and operated these programs elsewhere,” and one of those programs was still “marketed on the Internet, along with 10 other programs.” In another, an owner whose license was revoked after a child’s death “applied for and received a new license to start a new program” sixteen months later.

The same hearing heard from Paul Lewis, whose son Ryan died at Alldredge Academy in West Virginia in 2001, seven days after he arrived. The school and its owner, L. Jay Mitchell, were indicted for child neglect resulting in death; the corporation pleaded no contest and was fined $5,000. “In spite of two court verdicts,” Lewis told Congress, “L. Jay Mitchell continues in this business today.” Mitchell went on to found Greenbrier Academy for Girls, which NATSAP also admitted as a member, as our NATSAP investigation sets out.

Alldredge Academy, Mitchell and the Ayne Institute had settled the Lewis family’s suit in May 2006 for $1.2 million, acknowledging in writing that they “failed in that responsibility.” By February 2007 a Texas company, Solacium, owned the program. That August its chief executive announced that Alldredge would drop its academic phase and was “also changing the name to Alldredge Wilderness Journey.” Alldredge Wilderness Journey closed at the end of 2008. Solacium renamed itself as well, to InnerChange.

The GAO was describing something the industry had been doing for twenty years by then, and has kept doing since. The examples below are grouped by how it is done.

Straight, Inc.: the template #

Straight, Inc., the Florida drug program whose staff went on to found many of the programs that followed it, wrote the playbook.

Two corporations, one name, one day #

In 1984 a federal appeals court upheld a jury’s award of “$40,000 in compensatory and $180,000 in punitive damages” against Straight for the false imprisonment of Fred Collins. Ten months later, on September 26, 1985, Florida’s corporate records show two filings on the same day. The original Straight, Inc. filed a name change and became the Straight Foundation. A new corporation, also called Straight, Inc., was incorporated “to develop and administer programs for victims of drug abuse.”

The treatment program now sat in a company with no history. The records do not give a reason; Wes Fager, who has charted Straight’s corporate history, ties it to the Collins case. On December 5, 1995, after the last Straight program had closed, the Straight Foundation changed its name again, to the Drug Free America Foundation, the name it still uses. Fager calls that “a further effort to distance itself from the name Straight, Inc.”

Closed in one state, open in the next #

In July 1991 Virginia, which had accused Straight’s Springfield program of practices such as strip searches and “spit therapy” (Straight denied the allegations), had a licensing hearing set. Straight wrote to the state on July 19 that it would cancel its appeal and close. The Washington Post reported that it “has closed its facility in Springfield, but reopened the program across the border in Maryland.” A parent told the Richmond Times-Dispatch he helped move it over a weekend; its Columbia, Maryland program reported 65 clients.

Closed in the morning, reopened the same day #

“Straight-Orlando shut its doors on August 14, 1992,” Orlando Weekly reported. “But it re-opened for business the same day, in the same facility with the same administration. The only real difference was the name: SAFE.” SAFE was founded by Straight-Orlando’s program administrator and marketing director, and ran for ten more years.

License suspended, company renamed #

In June 1990 Utah suspended the license of KIDS of Greater Salt Lake, a program in the Straight mold. That August its own general counsel told the Deseret News that a new program, Lifeline, “has its roots in” KIDS and that “treatment is still based on the Kids model.” Utah’s corporate filings show the same corporation number filing its 1990 report as KIDS of Greater Salt Lake and its 1991 report as Life-Line, Inc. A Utah licensing specialist told The Record that Lifeline was a “completely different” program with new directors and policies.

KIDS closed, Straight opened in the same warehouse #

KIDS of Southern California, a franchise of Miller Newton, Straight’s former national clinical director, “operated for more than a year without a state license and was under investigation by state Department of Social Service officials and local police for alleged abuse of clients when it closed,” the Los Angeles Times reported in March 1990. Straight, Inc. then opened in the same Yorba Linda building “at the request of frantic parents whose children had been stranded in mid-treatment.” William Chastain, a Florida lawyer who had sued Straight, called it “the same dog with a different leash.” (See Straight – Yorba Linda.)

Straight-Detroit became Pathway Family Center #

Straight’s Michigan program closed in 1993, and Pathway Family Center opened in Southfield that summer, run by former Straight parents and staff. The Tampa Tribune called it “simply Straight’s Detroit affiliate, reincorporated under a new name,” The American Prospect reported. Its founder, Terri Nissley, had told the Detroit Free Press: “Out of appreciation for what the program had done for us, we started Pathway Family Center in Southfield (Mich.) in 1993.” Asked by The Times of Northwest Indiana in 2007 what program that was, she answered: “Straight.”

Pathway took in another Straight descendant. Kids Helping Kids, which ran in Straight-Cincinnati‘s old building in Milford, Ohio, was by 2007 “Kids Helping Kids, a Pathway Family Center” on its own website. “Pathway isn’t Straight, Terri Nissley insists,” the Times wrote. “It is based on a similar model, she said, but has evolved into something different.” The Ohio, Michigan and Indiana centers closed in 2008 and 2009.

New names out of bankruptcy #

Brown Schools, the Texas company that bought the CEDU schools in 1998, changed its name twice on the way through the bankruptcy courts. “In 1991, the company, then known as Healthcare International, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy,” Youth Today reported. “It emerged from bankruptcy in 1993 with about $250 million in debt and a new name: Healthcare America.” It filed for Chapter 11 again in January 1996 and “resumed using its original name – Brown Schools.” By its final collapse into Chapter 7 liquidation in 2005, Youth Today counted it “conducting business under 24 names.”

A spelling change and a new corporation #

The World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP) did the same thing on paper, at scale. The International Survivors Action Committee (ISAC), a survivor group, studied the corporations tied to WWASP and its associate J. Ralph Atkin. In thirty years, 1961 to 1991, it counted about 16 of them; between 1996 and 2003 it counted 213. Of 254 it examined, “75 corporations used addresses that do not exist, were incorrect, or were listed as ‘unknown.'”

ISAC described the method: “the names of the corporations are changed slightly in spelling only. That it is to say, ‘You’ corporation will be dissolved and then reincorporated as ‘Yu’ corporation. This prevents the state corporate record database from attaching a history to the new corporation.” Its example: “Teen Help, Inc has been renamed many times to Teens in Crisis 2001, Teen Help LLC 1997, Teen Assist, Teen Watch USA.”

The Montana Supreme Court traced part of the web in 2012. Around 1996, it found, Robert Lichfield and others formed Peacox Enterprises, bought a former boarding school in Thompson Falls, Montana, and formed a Utah company, Spring Creek Lodge, LLC, to run it. Woodbury Reports had noted the sale in 1997: the founders of the old Spring Creek Community school had sold the campus to the “Owners of Majestic Ranch and Cross Creek Manor in Utah,” and it would be called Spring Creek Lodge. In 1999 the school was sold to a Montana company while Peacox kept the land; in 2000 that company was dissolved and Spring Creek Lodge, Inc. was formed. “WWASP member schools were required to sign contracts with other companies owned by Lichfield and his relatives,” the court wrote.

Dundee Ranch became Pillars of Hope #

In May 2003 a Costa Rican prosecutor raided the Academy at Dundee Ranch, a WWASP program. Costa Rica’s child welfare agency “promptly closed the school, citing reports of abuse and saying the adolescents were being held against their will,” the Tico Times reported, and Lichfield was charged with false imprisonment and other crimes. By 2006 a new program, Pillars of Hope, was operating “in the same buildings as Dundee Ranch Academy.” Its co-owner was a former Dundee director, and “the land is being leased from Lichfield – who also serves as an advisor to the program.”

One address in South Carolina, four names #

Carolina Springs Academy, a WWASP school in Donalds, South Carolina owned by Narvin Lichfield, closed in April 2009, Woodbury Reports confirmed. WWASP Survivors, a survivor site, has documented the names that followed at the same address: Magnolia Christian School, Seneca Ranch and, in 2017, Palmetto Therapeutic Boarding School, which advertised a mission trip to “our Pillars of Hope Language Institute” in Costa Rica. Lichfield answered in a comment on that post that Palmetto “is owned by Dr Harold Dabel’s group and they asked me to consult when they leased the property.” Dabel, the Tico Times had reported, was hired by Robert Lichfield in 2003 to direct Dundee Ranch.

Church homes that move and rename #

Unlicensed religious homes use the same move, often across state lines to wherever oversight is weakest.

Bethesda became Mountain Park #

In 1982 the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the Bethesda Home for Girls near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, run by Bob and Betty Wills, over beatings, denial of medical treatment and inadequate food. In 1986 a Mississippi judge ruled that it was operating illegally as a detention center, and nearly 120 girls were sent home. “In 1987, the Willses packed up Bethesda and left for Missouri, where Christian youth facilities faced no government oversight,” NBC News reported. A federal court in Missouri later described Mountain Park as “an independent Baptist church established by defendants Pastor Bob Wills and his wife, Betty Sue Wills, in 1987,” whose “sole ministry” was its boarding academy for teenagers.

Former students sued Mountain Park in 2002, alleging “barbaric means of thought control, humiliation, degradation and punishment.” Wills called the allegations “ridiculous.” The academy closed in May 2004, together with its sister school in Florida. “It is just time,” its principal told the Associated Press. “We’ve been in some battles for the last couple of years.”

Victory Christian Academy became Lighthouse of Northwest Florida #

Michael Palmer, a Baptist preacher, founded Victory Christian Academy, a home for girls, in a gated compound in Ramona, California, in 1985. “It was never licensed,” the Tampa Bay Times reported. “In 1988, a student working on a campus construction project was killed by falling lumber. After that, California officials saw the ‘Get Right Room,’ where girls told them they were confined for up to 12 days, made to listen to hours of taped sermons. In 1992, a judge ordered that Palmer apply for a state license or shut down. Instead, Palmer moved to Florida, where a religious exemption meant he could run Victory without government hassle. That very year, Victory was up and running in Jay.”

In Jay the home became Lighthouse of Northwest Florida, with Palmer as its landlord, and the confinement room became the “Room of Grace.” Palmer also opened Genesis by the Sea, a girls’ home near Rosarito Beach, Mexico, which Mexican authorities shut down in 2004. Lighthouse closed in February 2013, four months after the Times described girls there being pinned down by their peers and kept in the Room of Grace for days.

Rebekah Home, New Beginnings, Marvelous Grace #

The Rebekah Home for Girls in Corpus Christi, founded by Lester Roloff, had already moved its girls to Missouri once, in 1985, “where a state license would not be required,” Texas Monthly reported. In 2001 its director “closed the Rebekah Home this summer after the Legislature failed to renew the law that allowed it to escape state regulation.” Wiley and Faye Cameron, who “had worked with Roloff for 35 years,” took over New Beginnings Girls Academy, Mother Jones reported; Faye Cameron “was banned from working with children” in Texas. By 2012 the Tampa Bay Times found Marvelous Grace Girls Academy running “on the old grounds of New Beginnings,” with no state license, no religious exemption and no accreditation as a boarding school.

Bethel became Eagle Point, then Gulf Coast Academy #

The Lucedale, Mississippi home had been renamed once already. As the Bethel Home for Children it was raided in 1988 by state welfare officials, who removed 72 abused and neglected children; a judge shut it down in 1990, and its founder, Herman Fountain, reopened it as Bethel Boys Academy four years later. In July 2003 Mississippi’s attorney general asked a court to “remove the children from the home.” Parents of former students sued in federal court.

In February 2005 the founder’s son, John Fountain, announced that the academy was now Eagle Point Christian Academy. He and his attorney had come up with the name. “I hope to put a new face on it,” he told the Sun Herald. He would not discuss the abuse suits, which he said “came during the past administration,” and called the allegations “hog wash.” That spring WLOX reported that Eagle Point, “formally known as Bethel Boys Home,” had sent 27 of its 122 boys home after what its director called an attempted riot. In December 2006 a federal judge entered a default judgment of more than $950,000 for a former student and his father against “Bethel Baptist Church of Lucedale, Inc., f/k/a Bethel Children’s Home, f/k/a Bethel Boys Academy.”

By 2007 the campus was Gulf Coast Academy, whose website described a facility “founded originally 20 years ago in 1988 as a boys school” that had been “recently acquired by Gulf Coast Academy.” That September the Sun Herald ran “Teens Escape From Gulf Coast Academy,” which Woodbury Reports indexed under the line “School problems continue under new name.”

Julian Youth Academy became River View; Escuela Caribe became Caribbean Mountain Academy #

River View Christian Academy in Northern California “used to be called the Julian Youth Academy,” BuzzFeed News reported in 2018, in a story about former students’ allegations of abuse there. Escuela Caribe, a Christian boarding school in the Dominican Republic, closed in 2011 and was taken over by another ministry, which reopened it as Caribbean Mountain Academy, Newsweek reported.

Blue Creek Academy, then Canaan’s Land in Montana #

Blue Creek Academy was an unlicensed Baptist boarding school for boys near Clendenin, West Virginia, on Bible Baptist Church’s old campgrounds, which its principal, JR Thompson, had reopened in 2010 and “renamed,” The Daily Beast reported. In 2014 the state removed its students, and West Virginia’s schools superintendent revoked its religious-school exemption, writing that “due to the egregious nature of the non-compliance, children’s health, safety and welfare, any future attempts by the school to seek reinstatement of the exemption status will be denied.” Former students later sued, alleging starvation, beatings and sexual abuse; the defendants denied the claims.

By then Thompson had moved to De Borgia, Montana. Within a year his home was registered as Canaan’s Land Baptist Church, and by August 2015 Canaan’s Land Boys Ranch was registered as a business. “This is the first I’ve heard anything about Canaan’s Land Boys Ranch,” the county school superintendent told The Daily Beast.

Mount Carmel became Triangle Cross, then Sunlight Mountain #

Gerald and Michaeleen Schneider ran Mount Carmel Youth Ranch, a licensed group home on their ranch near Powell, Wyoming. Its board “decided to close the facility and turn in their license in November 2012,” the Wyoming Supreme Court later wrote. Three or four boys stayed on at the ranch, their families paying $4,800 a month. In December Schneider applied for a license “in the name of Appellant Triangle Cross” because he “wanted to continue the good work that had been going on at Mount Carmel.”

The state closed the application when he did not finish it. The ranch kept taking boys, now at $6,000 a month, and Schneider told the state he had moved them “to the Montana portion of his property in order to avoid Wyoming certification and regulatory oversight,” the Cody Enterprise reported. When he realized he could not be certified, he testified, he “put a program together that would fit under the statute.” In 2015 the Supreme Court upheld an injunction against the unlicensed program: “The reality is that healthy people do not pay for the privilege of stacking hay.”

Triangle Cross Ranch was licensed from 2014. State inspectors recorded 45 rule violations there from 2015 to 2022 and 35 more in 2023, NBC News reported, and the license ended that year. The ranch became Sunlight Mountain Boys Ranch, and its owner told the state that he was the guardian of the boys living there, so no license was needed. The new website, NBC found, “is nearly identical to the Triangle Cross Ranch website, uses the same email and phone number, and lists the same staff members, but it does not mention its previous name.” One of its pages is still at the address /why-triangle-cross-ranch/. Former residents’ federal suits alleging forced labor at the ranch and at its sister program for girls, Trinity Teen Solutions, were settled.

The same owners under a new name #

Arizona Boys Ranch became Canyon State Academy #

On March 2, 1998, 16-year-old Nicholaus Contreraz died at the Arizona Boys Ranch boot camp near Oracle. That August the state Department of Economic Security refused to renew the ranch’s license. “The circumstances surrounding his death, and the repeated treatment of other residents, demonstrate a pattern of abuse and neglect,” its director said; state officials counted at least 29 other reported incidents of abuse and neglect. The ranch’s president called the death “a tragic aberration.” Two months later, under a settlement with the state that required a “zero tolerance” policy on abuse and an ombudsman, the ranch was “back in business,” Phoenix New Times reported.

In 2003 the East Valley Tribune reported that “the Canyon State Academy changed its name from the Arizona Boys Ranch three years ago to help improve its image after a student died amid allegations of abuse.” Canyon State Academy, in Queen Creek, is now owned by Rite of Passage. In 2022 Fox 10 reported that a 16-year-old there had died of a suspected overdose, and that a 17-year-old had died of an overdose in January 2020.

Hidden Lake Academy became Ridge Creek #

On September 11, 2006, four parents filed a federal class action against Hidden Lake Academy in Dahlonega, Georgia, and its founder, Leonard Buccellato. They had been told that “academic classes are led by state certified teachers”; the complaint said that “a large number and, at certain times, an overwhelming majority, of HLA’s teachers have not been certified.” It said the school let “unlicensed staff such as secretaries and pharmaceutical technicians” give students prescription drugs, enrolled “court-ordered,” “violent” or “severely disturbed” students while telling parents it did not, and used students “to do manual labor around HLA’s premises to save money on employing sufficient HLA staff.” The judge denied class status in 2007, and the school settled for a reported $400,000. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 14, 2009.

The school’s website explained what came next. The plaintiffs, it said, “continue their harassment on the internet and there is nothing we can do legally to remove the slanderous statements. Our attorneys have advised us to ‘rebrand’. Therefore, HLA ceased to exist and a separate corporation Ridge Creek School was created.” Georgia’s inspectors were already listing the licensee at 830 Hidden Lake Road as “Ridge Creek, Inc.” in December 2009. In February 2011 the state investigated complaints there and found that four residents had climbed out “through a broken window that was boarded up” and were not missed “until they were returned to the facility around 4:30 AM by the local sheriff.” Ridge Creek closed later that year.

Birdseye became Kaizen Academy #

In April 2014 the program director of Birdseye Residential Treatment Center, a Spanish Fork Canyon program for teenage boys with “sexual behavior problems,” was arrested, accused of sexually abusing a 15-year-old resident. That July she pleaded guilty to five counts of custodial sexual misconduct with a youth receiving state services. In February 2016 the program announced “the launch of the renamed Kaizen Academy,” which “was started 25 years ago by Lynn Loftin and Corbin Linde”; the announcement did not mention Birdseye. The new website put Kaizen Academy “in the rural, mountain community of Birdseye,” and listed Loftin and Linde on its leadership team.

The Family Foundation School became Allynwood Academy #

The Family Foundation School, a twelve-step boarding school in Hancock, New York, run by the Argiros family, had been named before Congress in 2008, when a former student testified that he “was locked up at a NATSAP-affiliated program, The Family Foundation School, in Hancock, New York, from 1995 to 1997.” In 2004 a 17-year-old student had died by suicide on the campus. In October 2013 the school announced that it was now Allynwood Academy: “The new program design and enhancements are so significant, we believed it deserved a new name.” The staff stayed. That November Woodbury Reports announced that “Allynwood Academy’s music director, Paul Geer,” would lead a choir at Carnegie Hall; Geer had taught at the school since 1994. It closed the next summer, “in spite of all of our efforts, including significant program changes [and a recent name change to Allynwood Academy],” a member of the family told the Sullivan County Democrat.

In 2025 a federal jury convicted Geer of taking two students across state lines to sexually abuse them, and he was sentenced to 327 months in prison. Prosecutors said that while he taught at the school from 1994 through 2001 he “imposed disciplinary sanctions on students that were tantamount to torture.” Former students have filed at least four lawsuits against the school and the Argiros family, The Reporter found.

Behavior Research Institute became the Judge Rotenberg Center, and Tobinworld #

The Massachusetts school that shocks its students with electric skin devices “was formerly known as the Behavior Research Institute,” the state’s highest court noted in 1997. In 1994 it renamed itself the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center.

Its founder, Matthew Israel, had opened a California branch, the Behavior Research Institute of California, in 1977 with Judy Weber. A 1982 investigation by California’s attorney general found that residents “were handcuffed to chairs, sprayed with a garden hose, refused access to a bathroom and denied food,” EdSource reported. In the settlement the institute agreed not to use aversive therapy, and California officials banned Israel from it. “Weber took over the administration of the institute, and after a few years she renamed it Tobinworld.”

In 2015, after Israel had pleaded guilty in Massachusetts and resigned from the Rotenberg Center, California’s Department of Education found him designing behavior plans for students at two Tobinworld schools run by Weber, by then his wife. It found he was “not qualified to do so” and suspended both schools’ certification. “Tobinworld has long maintained it has no official relationship with Israel,” EdSource wrote.

A new owner, a new name, the same campus #

Anneewakee became Inner Harbour #

Anneewakee, a Georgia treatment center that former patients sued over abuse, carried on under a new name. Georgia court records from 1994 name the defendant “Inner Harbour Hospital, Ltd., f/k/a Anneewakee, Inc.,” formerly known as. The campus is now Youth Villages’ Inner Harbour Campus.

Integrity House became Havenwood Academy #

Integrity House, a girls’ program in Cedar City, Utah, opened in 2001. In December 2002 a 17-year-old resident died after falling about 100 feet inside a cave near St. George on a program outing. In 2013 police arrested its executive director, Daniel Taylor, on charges that he had sexually assaulted three girls; prosecutors dropped the charges ten months later after one accuser recanted, and he denied the allegations. The state licensor reported that “the staff and clients in the programs appear safe,” and the program stayed open.

The owner, his brother, then spent six months trying to sell the business to employees, APM Reports found. When that fell through, “the attorney who represented Daniel Taylor in his criminal case — and in Integrity House’s interactions with state licensors during its early years — took over the business and renamed it Havenwood Academy.” It runs at the same address. Havenwood‘s own “Our Response To Press” page lists, among the claims it addresses: “Havenwood is merely a rebranding of a closed program called Integrity House.”

Island View became Elevations RTC #

Island View Residential Treatment Center in Syracuse, Utah, “technically closed in April 2014” and “was sold to a new company and renamed Elevations RTC,” in the same building, KUER reported. Syracuse police calls to the facility became 40% more frequent after it reopened as Elevations. NBC News reported that Family Help & Wellness, after a nearly $15 million investment from a private equity firm, “took over a treatment center known then as Island View, where former students alleged they were subjected to cruel punishments and aggressive restraints,” and “renamed the facility Elevations.” (See our Elevations RTC profile.)

Its neighbor changed name the same spring. “In an effort to make a clean break from our previous corporate owner,” the new owner wrote, “we have opened two new programs under new ownership, Elevations RTC and ViewPoint Center,” and closed “Island View RTC and Aspen Institute.” Survivors of Family Help & Wellness programs told the Oregon Senate in 2021 that the company was founded by a former executive vice president of Aspen Education Group, Island View’s owner, and that Copper Canyon Academy in Arizona was also renamed, as Sedona Sky Academy.

Cedar Ridge became Makana #

“Cedar Ridge Academy has a new owner now — and a new name as of February, Makana Leadership Academy,” the Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2020, in a story on sex crimes reported at the Roosevelt, Utah campus “at a rate 4.5 times higher than the average Utah youth treatment center.” “A few of the current staffers are holdovers.” The new owners said they did not know about the abuse when they leased the property and had overhauled the program. (See Cedar Ridge Academy and Makana Leadership Academy.)

Glen Mills became the Clock Tower Schools #

Pennsylvania revoked the Glen Mills Schools’ licenses in April 2019 after a Philadelphia Inquirer investigation found that staff “beat juveniles” and “attempted to coerce them into silence.” In 2021 “an entity called the Clock Tower Schools formed,” the Inquirer reported, and “the state incorporation filing listed a familiar address: Glen Mills’ sprawling 800-acre campus.” Its spokesperson called it “a new nonprofit entity.” In 2023 the state gave the Clock Tower Schools a provisional license; its director was a former Glen Mills executive.

Diamond Ranch tried to become RAFA Academy #

Utah refused to renew Diamond Ranch Academy‘s license in July 2023, citing “severe physical neglect”; the program blamed “unfair treatment from the state of Utah” and “false allegations.” In March 2024 an application was filed to reopen it under a new name, RAFA Academy, with “some of the same employees,” the Salt Lake Tribune reported. The state never licensed it, and the city of Hurricane revoked its business license.

Diamond Ranch’s first campus shows how long one property can stay in the business. Diamond Ranch ran on a ranch at 1500 East 2700 South outside Hurricane from about 2000 until it began moving to a new campus in 2012. By 2014 Olympus Academy was operating there; Utah put its license on conditional status in April 2015 after finding, among other things, that sixteen employee files held no evidence of background screening. In October 2016 Diamond Ranch’s land company deeded the property to Three Points Properties, and Three Points Center moved there in 2018. It shut down abruptly on February 14, 2025, under the KUTV headline “Utah treatment center closes abruptly after history of violations and abuse,” and the campus was sold out of its bankruptcy in January 2026.

Palm Beach Juvenile Correctional Facility became Palm Beach Youth Academy #

Youth Services International (YSI) ran the Palm Beach Juvenile Correctional Facility in Florida from 2003. Its parent company had changed its own name once: Esmor Correctional Services became Correctional Services Corporation in 1996, a year after a riot at the immigration detention center it ran in Elizabeth, New Jersey. “Amid a scandal that followed, the company changed its name from Esmor Corrections to Correctional Services Corp., and continued to bid for and win government corrections contracts,” InvestigateWest reported.

Staff at the Palm Beach facility “organized fights among the detainees. And sometimes they bet on them,” the Miami Herald found. In 2014 two employees were charged with child neglect over a fight that left a boy with a broken eye socket and nose. In March 2016 YSI settled a whistle-blower suit accusing it of billing the state for services it never provided, and agreed to give up seven of its Florida contracts. Sequel took over Palm Beach on April 1, 2016, keeping the facility’s administrator and some other managers on probation. By 2017 the program “has been renamed Palm Beach Youth Academy,” the Herald reported. (See Palm Beach Youth Academy.)

G4S Youth Services became TrueCore #

In 2015 a Polk County grand jury examined Highlands Youth Academy, a Florida juvenile justice program run by G4S Youth Services; Sheriff Grady Judd later said that “G4S and their staff routinely covered up, or tried to cover up, fights, uses of force, contraband problems, children ‘huffing’ gas, escapes, and even reports of staff having sex with children.” In April 2017 G4S sold the subsidiary for $56.5 million to BHSB Holdings, an investment group that included members of its own management. On June 30, 2017 the company announced its new name, TrueCore Behavioral Solutions, “formerly G4S Youth Services.” Seven weeks later the sheriff arrested three former Highlands administrators on felony charges, including tampering with evidence and failing to report child abuse, for their conduct in the G4S years.

In 2024 a 17-year-old girl was found dead at TrueCore’s Lake Academy in Tampa, and Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice ended the company’s contract there.

Sequel became Vivant, and Brighter Path #

The U.S. Senate Finance Committee found that in 2021, “after being plagued by reporting on abuse and neglect allegations, Sequel sold 13 facilities to a newly-incorporated company, Vivant,” which was “also founded by Jay Ripley” and “retained many members of Sequel leadership.”

Vivant’s leadership told Senate investigators “there was no public facing presence for the company.” Public reporting, the committee noted, “alleged that this move to private ownership has allowed providers to escape liability,” including for the 2020 death of Cornelius Fredericks at a Sequel facility in Michigan. In Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative found, Sequel’s facilities “remain open today, and the only clear change is their new name: Brighter Path.” (See Brighter Path Tuskegee, Montgomery and Courtland.)

At Owens Cross Roads, Alabama, the campus Sequel had bought with Three Springs, disability advocates had reported “unsafe living conditions, staff abuse and neglect, and improper and excessive use of restraints.” It closed on April 30, 2022 for “program restructuring and transitioning of service lines,” WAFF reported, and reopened at the same location as Brighter Path Owens Cross Roads after the company changed its name statewide “from Sequel TSI of Alabama to Brighter Path of Alabama.” Tommy James, a lawyer for former residents, told WAFF: “There’s a rash of bad publicity as a result of cases of abuse and neglect and then they attempt to rebrand, thinking people will forget.” By September 2024, when police were called to what they described as a riot, the facility was “originally known as Sequel, then Brighter Path, and now Pathway.” The mayor ordered it emptied, and in January 2025 the city council voted not to renew Pathway of Madison County’s business license; it later renewed it under conditions.

Sequel Pomegranate became Torii Behavioral Health #

Sequel bought Pomegranate Health Systems in Columbus, Ohio in 2016 and renamed it Sequel Pomegranate. In November 2019 Ohio’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services proposed to suspend the license of its psychiatric hospital after reviewing video in which staff were “observed striking the child’s face five times with a fist, grabbing the child’s hair, and pushing the child’s head against the concrete block wall,” Disability Rights Ohio reported. The next year the state threatened to revoke the license of its residential unit “following repeated calls to the Columbus Division of Police, fights, riots and reports of children and staff being hurt,” 10TV reported. “Instead, Sequel Pomegranate removed all children and turned in its license to its residential facility.” Under a settlement it kept the hospital open, “which it did under the name Torii.”

In 2021 the facility “re-branded itself as Torii Behavioral Health.” That September it told the state it would close, in a letter from “Sequel Pomegranate Health Systems, LLC d/b/a Torii Behavioral Health” that gave no reason. (See Sequel Pomegranate.)

AdvoServ became Bellwether #

AdvoServ, a private-equity-owned group home company, had “quietly taken a new name that makes it harder to follow the trail of media coverage,” ProPublica reported in 2017. The company said “the new name — Bellwether Behavioral Health — is just an outward reflection of the fundamental changes designed to deliver better outcomes.” By 2019 it had lost its licenses in Delaware and Florida and its relationship with New Jersey’s human services department. (See AdvoServ.)

After Trails Carolina #

Trails Momentum became Grow at Momentum #

North Carolina revoked Trails Carolina’s license in October 2024, eight months after 12-year-old Clark Harman died there; the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide by asphyxiation. Trails Carolina’s management company, Wilderness Training & Consulting, also ran a program for young adults called Trails Momentum.

In February 2025 the state told WLOS that “Momentum is not licensed” and opened a complaint investigation into whether it should be. By December 2025 the program had announced that it was “previously known as Trails Momentum” and was now “Grow at Momentum.” (See Momentum.)

Solstice East became Magnolia Mill School, then Asheville Academy #

The same company’s program for girls in Weaverville, North Carolina, “evolved into Magnolia Mill School between 2022 and 2024” and then into Asheville Academy, the Asheville Watchdog reported, and “all mention of both Solstice and Magnolia Mill has been erased from the Asheville Academy website.” Its old web addresses now forward to Asheville Academy.

North Carolina regulators had found 115 medication error reports at Solstice East in 2020 and fined it $3,000. Asheville Academy closed in 2025 after a 14-year-old died by suicide there. (See Magnolia Mill School and Asheville Academy.)

A new owner as a way to disown the past #

A change of owner is also used to disown a program’s past without changing its name. When Paris Hilton described the abuse she survived at Provo Canyon School, the school answered that it “was sold by its previous ownership in August 2000” and so “cannot comment on the operations or patient experience prior to that time.” The previous ownership was Charter Medical Corporation, which former residents had sued along with “Charter Provo School, Inc. d/b/a Provo Canyon School.” Universal Health Services, the owner since 2000, kept the name and the campus.

Utah revoked the licenses of both Provo Canyon campuses in July 2026; the school said it disagreed with the decision.

Search the old names too #

The examples above are a small part of what we track. Nearly two hundred facility records on this site carry at least one past name, from reform schools renamed by the state to private programs that changed hands. Every record lists its past and other names, the site’s search finds a program by any of them, and the network map draws a line from each old name to the new one.

Sources #

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