Unmade beds in the boys' dorm room at Ranch For Kids in Rexford indicate the sudden sweep of 27 children from the facility on July 23. The state health department and law enforcement removed the boys and girls, roughly ages 11 to 17, following allegations of abuse and neglect dating back 10 years.
A new day for state's troubled teen industry; allegations against Ranch for Kids span a decade
REXFORD — Last week's unprecedented state intervention in removing 27 children from the Ranch for Kids here marked a watershed moment for the private teen treatment industry in Montana.
On July 1, the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services took oversight of 14 programs, most of them private and for-profit, that previously fell under an essentially self-regulating board housed in the state Labor Department. That agency conceded earlier this year in a legislative hearing that it was ill-equipped to regulate the industry. The shift to DPHHS allows the state to investigate whole programs, not just individual cases of abuse and neglect.
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The Ranch for Kids in 2014 moved into a vacant school building in Rexford, a retirement community nestled along Lake Koocanusa near the Canadian border.
Most of those programs, with annual tuition and fees ranging as high as $100,000, are scattered in the isolated reaches of far northwestern Montana. By the time the health department took regulatory authority of the programs, it was already actively investigating allegations of abuse and neglect at the Ranch for Kids. State Sen. Diane Sands, the Missoula lawmaker who carried the legislation to move oversight to the health department, said Saturday that "I expect, when the state does a full review, more of these programs will be shut down."
Meanwhile, the investigation into the Ranch for Kids is ongoing, and state law enforcement is simultaneously investigating possible criminal charges from the allegations that have surfaced.
"DPHHS has allegations going back 10 years. That also means our criminal investigations go back 10 years," said Division of Criminal Justice Administrator Bryan Lockerby.
“In my career spanning almost 40 years, I haven’t seen something of this scale before.”
It was also 10 years ago when an inspector from the Department of Labor wrote in court documents that Bill Sutley, executive director at Ranch for Kids, refused to let him into the facility before an inspection.
Inspector Rick Cockrell wrote in court documents in a 2009 case related to other licensing issues that, in personally inspecting the other 20 teen treatment facilities at the time, he had never been turned away. Cockrell wrote in his affidavit that he perceived the encounter with Sutley as "threatening," and asked local law enforcement to accompany him at the next visit.
Lincoln County Sheriff Darren Short told the Missoulian on Thursday that encounter, in part, is what spurred him to send more than half of his sworn officers to the Ranch for Kids removal operation earlier that week.
"That's kind of why they wanted the law enforcement presence they had," he said, "based on their prior history and their intel that they had gotten on Mr. Sutley."
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Bill Sutley, executive director of the Ranch for Kids, grimaces in describing the removal operation carried out by state officials last week.
***
Short first received notice of the effort to remove the children — 27 boys and girls, ages roughly 11-17 — on July 12. An official at the Division of Criminal Investigation, a branch of the Montana Department of Justice, called to ask if his office could meet in Kalispell to discuss "something happening in the Eureka area."
"So I really didn't know what their plans or intent was at that point," he said.
After the initial July 12 gathering, personnel from the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office, state Division of Criminal Investigation, Department of Public Health and Human Services, along with Flathead County Sheriff's Office and the Kalispell Police Department, met again several times to set the blueprints for logistics, people and placement, Short said.
Since 2014, the Ranch for Kids has been housed in the town's former school building on the main road through town. The program's former sites were more out of view, on back roads and an actual ranch. Its current location presented more challenges for law enforcement, who were mindful of the children heading toward Lake Koocanusa and retirees strolling toward the post office from the surrounding homes.
"We had to contact all the outside agencies," Short said. "In case something went sideways."
The Lincoln County Sheriff's Office's role was strictly ensuring safety of the children, staff at Ranch for Kids and in the community, much like a civil standby for a domestic case or when a search warrant is executed, Short said. State law enforcement joined the operation on the request from the health department and with permission of local law enforcement, Lockerby said.
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Rexford Mayor Bill Marvel describes the associated troubles related to the Ranch for Kids in the Town Office. In winter of 2018, one resident burned down a Canadian family's summer home, he said. Rexford residents have been calling for tighter security at the Ranch in recent months.
Jon Ebelt, a spokesman for the health department, said reports of weapons on site at Ranch for Kids had "created a potential safety risk for the youth and our 20 child welfare workers who conducted the removals."
The removal was unprecedented, Ebelt said, in the extensive planning that went into the drawing board before Tuesday morning.
"We needed to make sure we had things set up to ensure their needs were met once we transported them off site, including medical, mental health and nutrition needs," Ebelt said in an email.
On July 23, 20 caseworkers joined 15 law enforcement officers — including 11 of the 20 sworn officers at the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office, and four from the state Division of Criminal Investigation — and made their way to the Ranch for Kids property.
Down the road, a hostage rescue team made up of Kalispell police and Flathead County Sheriff's deputies were staged in an armored vehicle.
"I don't know why they think there was going to be violence," he said.
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The state health department and law enforcement are simultaneously investigating abuse and neglect at the Ranch for Kids, including disciplinary "walks" of up to 22 miles according to state regulators.
Sutley said the Ranch staff was heading into Day Two of training in de-escalation techniques Tuesday morning. They had just wrapped up their morning prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance when his attention was rerouted.
"One of the staff came in and said, 'You're needed in the office,'" Sutley said. "There were law enforcement officials and state officials. They said, 'We're here to take your kids.'"
Sutley told the Missoulian he challenged their authority to remove the children, then asked if he could speak with the children and staff before they were swept away. His request was denied and a deputy stayed with him to ensure he and the children remained separated, Sutley said.
For the next two hours, caseworkers guided the Ranch children into more than a dozen rented cars, collecting what clothes they needed.
The kids were shuttled out of Lincoln County to an undisclosed location. One mother told the Missoulian this week her daughter is now in Missoula. (See related story). State law enforcement is still conducting interviews and tracking down former students and staff to corroborate any allegations.
“It is important for people to understand we have to move slowly on this and be compassionate,” Lockerby said.
Sutley's response to the claims against Ranch for Kids has been one repeated throughout the time that programs like his have battled for regulatory control.
He said the state's policies don't allow room for programs like Ranch for Kids to develop and administer the proprietary treatment that he believes these children need.
In the Ranch for Kids' case, all of the residents go there to learn how to live with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and Reactive Attachment Disorder. Many were adopted overseas, mostly from Russia, and the program has a Russian translator on staff, according to records obtained by the Missoulian. They find their way to the Ranch after all other options have been exhausted, he said.
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A sheet of paper located above a resident's bunk bed at Ranch for Kids illustrates the program's teachings.
"Expect your perception to change," Sutley said to those who believe the allegations leveled against his facility. "Expect to be educated."
Sutley can understand that a 15-mile walk in testing conditions might seem cruel to someone outside the program, but he said staff's relationship with the students is actually the ingredient that makes such discipline walks OK.
"These people (the Ranch staff) get it. Why? Because they've lived it," he said. "Unless you've lived it and lived with these kids, you're not going to get it."
***
Sutley actually grew up in a home with adopted children with the same conditions as the children at the Ranch. He is educated as an electrical engineer, not a psychologist or therapist, but nonetheless founded the therapeutic program with his mother.
Administrators from the teen programs have stressed the need for such "tough love" techniques in legislative hearings each session since 2005. Michelle "Mickey" Manning, who now runs Reflections Academy in Thompson Falls, begged lawmakers not to impose regulatory measures that restricted the programs' ability to treat children with programming developed outside the box of mainstream psychology.
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A surveillance camera looks out over the boys' dorm room at the Ranch for Kids.
That particular hearing, in 2007, came three years after a 16-year-old girl had died by suicide at the program where Manning worked at the time, Spring Creek Lodge Academy. Karlye Newman's suicide came shortly after an untrained and unqualified staffer voted her off high-risk status, according to lawsuit against the program.
That year, the Legislature passed the bill establishing the self-regulating board under the state Labor Department.
By 2009, Spring Creek Lodge Academy shut down. Regulators uncovered, among other things, a small outbuilding termed the "hobbit hole," where students were held for long periods of time in isolation.
Reflections Academy, where Manning now works as program director, is currently being sued by three families who allege girls there were subject to sexual harassment and assault. The families also allege girls were sometimes sent to live with an unlicensed program staffer in Utah for a "transitional program" after their time at Reflections.
The law that moved regulation of the programs to the health department was passed this year after a Missoulian series revealed that none of the 58 complaints filed against the programs over 12 years under the old system resulted in significant sanctions.
The agencies involved in last week's removal operation at the Ranch for Kids declined to comment on whether any other investigations have opened into other programs since the health department took regulatory authority this month. Starting this month, the department's Quality Assurance Division begins touring the 14 facilities coming under its watch.
Sheriff Short said he is aware of the programs in Lincoln County, as well as the concentration of such programs in northwestern Montana. Deputies were well aware of Ranch for Kids before the removal effort.
"I think all of the deputies at one point or another had dealt with runaway issues or some type of a complaint (there)," he said.
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Nearly all of the 14 private teen treatment programs, including the Ranch for Kids, are clustered in remote corners of northwest Montana. Four are located in Lincoln County, with several more scattered in neighboring Sanders and Flathead counties.
If the health department continues to turn up problematic practices, Short said his office is prepared to assist any agency in another removal effort, and he's also offered a deputy to any inspector heading out to one of the programs in his jurisdiction — another shift signaling the sea change in this industry.
"We'll just kind of play it by ear as DPHHS steps in and takes more of an active role in licensing and oversight," he said.
Lucy Tompkins grew up around the American West and graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Montana in 2017. Upon graduation she worked at the Missoulian as an education reporter, during which she worked on the investigative series Troubled Kids, Troubled System. Tompkins now lives in Berlin, Germany, where she recently completed a Young Professional Journalist Fulbright Fellowship. Tompkins was recently granted a year-long reporting fellowship at the New York Times, beginning in June.
Seaborn Larson
Reporter
Seaborn Larson is the crime and courts reporter for the Missoulian. He covered business, local government and public safety for papers in Libby and Great Falls in his home state of Montana before joining the Missoulian. Larson, an avid hunter, graduated from the University of Montana School of Journalism in December 2014.
Cameron Evans
Reporter
Cameron Evans has covered K-12 schools for the Missoulian since August 2018. She graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 2017, where she minored in Women's and Gender Studies. In 2019, she was the co-recipient of a fellowship from the Education Writers Association to cover the role education plays in upward mobility. She previously worked as a health writing intern for Insider, editorial intern for Psychology Today, and university correspondent for Men's Health.
Gwen Florio
City Editor
Gwen Florio has covered stories ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing trials and the mass shooting at Columbine High School, to the glitz of the Miss America pageant and the more practical Miss Navajo contest, whose participants slaughter a sheep. She's reported from Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, as well as Lost Springs, Wyoming, population three. Florio has worked at daily newspapers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Denver and now Montana, where she's the editor of the Missoulian and the Ravalli Republic. She's the author of six novels.
Tommy Martino
Photographer
Tommy Martino started taking pictures when he was a sophomore in high school. After spending a semester in the darkroom, he figured why not continue taking pictures and enrolled in every class he could that had photography involved. Martino graduated in 2014 from the University of Montana School of Journalism -- from there his love of telling stories with a camera grew. After interning at the Missoulian during the winter of 2014, he went on to intern and work as a photojournalist at papers in Michigan and Wyoming before rejoining the Missoulian as a staff photographer in the fall of 2015. After four years at the Missoulian Tommy took a new position as a staff photographer at the University of Montana, where he has been since November 2019.
Kathy Best
Executive Editor
Kathy Best was editor of the Missoulian in Missoula, Mont., and the Ravalli Republic in nearby Hamilton from June 2016 through April 2019. She previously worked as executive editor and managing editor of The Seattle Times and as a top editor for the Baltimore Sun, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She was also a reporter for the Post-Dispatch in its Washington, D.C., and Illinois statehouse bureaus. Best now leads the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
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Butcher & Bolt brilliantly brings to life the personalities involved in Afghanistan’s relationship with the world, chronicling the misunderstandings and missed opportunities that have so often led to war.
Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Jerusalem 1913 shows us a cosmopolitan city whose religious tolerance crumbled before the onset of Z ionism and its corresponding nationalism on both sides-a conflict that could have been resolved were it not for the onset of World War I. With extraordinary skill, Amy Dockser Marcus rewrites the story of one of the world's most indelible divides.
They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq
Based on "Blood Brothers," the award-nominated series that ran in Army Times, this is the remarkable story of a courageous military unit that sacrificed their lives to change Adhamiya, Iraq from a lawless town where insurgents roamed freely, to a safe and secure neighborhood. This is a timeless story of men at war and a heartbreaking account of American sacrifice in Iraq.
The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle against America's Veterans
Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since. The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti
Kathie Klarreich's compelling memoir interweaves shattering political events with an intensely personal narrative about the Haitian musician Klarreich, who turns out to be as enthralling and complicated as the political events she covered.
In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, Columbine is destined to be a classic. A close-up portrait of hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers-an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times
Juvenile, photographer Joseph Rodríguez spent several years following several youths, from arrest, counseling, trial adjudication, and incarceration, to release, probation, house arrest, group homes, and the search for employment and meaning in their lives.
By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East Los Angeles gang warfare. This story is at times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.
Still Here, documents the ongoing expressions of hope, perseverance, and suffering in the still-devastated communities of New Orleans and Texas post hurricane Katrina. Rodríguez spent two years photographing and interviewing families and individuals who shared their daily struggles to rebuild their lives.
Breaking News, Breaking Down, Two journalists' emotional journey after 9/11 & Katrina - This program tells the hidden story of how traumatic news impacts the men and women who cover it. Mike Walter loved chasing the big story, but on one September morning, the biggest story of his career chased him down: a jet rained from the sky, piercing the Pentagon and shattering his emotional well being.
One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers
The debate about women and torture has, until recently, focused on women as victims of violence. The essays in One of the Guys challenge and examine the expectations placed on women while attempting to understand female perpetrators of abuse and torture in a broader context.
Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War
Tara McKelvey — the first U.S.journalist to speak with female prisoners from Abu Ghraib — traveled to the Middle East and across the United States to seek out victims and perpetrators. McKelvey tells how soldiers, acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of which the vast majority, according to army documents, were innocent civilians.
Gogo Mama : A Journey Into the Lives of Twelve African Women
This book is a journey across Africa, in all its complexity; from the townships of Johannesburg, to the back alleys of Zanzibar; from the frontline of the war in the Sudan, to the nightclubs of Cairo. It is a vivid, illuminating and often haunting composite picture of an extraordinary continent, in the words of the women who know it best.
Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America
This is the first anthology of its kind, bringing together outstanding practitioners of the muckraking tradition, from the Revolutionary era to the present day. Ranging from mainstream figures like Woodward and Bernstein to legendary iconoclasts such as I. F. Stone and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the dispatches in this collection combine the thrill of the chase after facts with a burning sense of outrage
Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice
This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions.
Ari Goldman’s exploration of the emotional and spiritual aspects of spending a year in mourning for his father will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, as he describes how this year affected him as a son, husband, father, and member of his community.
What began as a project to deepen his knowledge of the world’s sacred beliefs turned out to be an extraordinary journey of spiritual illumination, one in which Goldman reexamined his own faith as an Orthodox Jew and opened his mind to the great religions of the world. Written with warmth, humor, and penetrating clarity, The Search for God at Harvard is a book for anyone who has wrestled with the question of what it means to take religion seriously today.
Being Jewish: The Spiritual and Cultural Practice of Judaism Today
In Being Jewish, Ari L. Goldman offers eloquent thoughts about an absorbing exploration of modern Judaism. A bestselling author and widely respected chronicler of Jewish life, Goldman vividly contrasts the historical meaning of Judaism's heritage with the astonishing and multiform character of the religion today.
This book is a collection of reflective crime pieces, often approaching the events from different angles, yet written by on-the spot observers and reporters. There is an emphasis on the victims, and as a result these stories are written with sensitivity and compassion rather than sensationalism.
Over twenty-five tales of grisly murders and suspicious killings are laid out for inspection, including the story of the Police Killers and tales of the seedy Melbourne underworld.
This fully revised and updated new edition of Smart Health Choices will provide you with the tools for assessing health advice, whether it comes from a specialist, general practitioner, naturopath, the media, the Internet, or a friend. It shows you how to take an active role in your health care, and to make the best decisions for you and your loved ones based on personal preferences and the best available evidence.
The Spanish-language version of the Dart Center's 40-page guide to help journalists, photojournalists and editors report on violence while protecting both victims and themselves.
9/11: Mental Health in the Wake of Terrorist Attacks
This book comprehensively describes the psychological response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and, to a lesser degree, Washington DC. The impact of what happened on the local and US national population is considered through various epidemiological studies, as well as personal accounts from some of those more directly involved.
Filled with astonishing personal stories, conflict, and drama, Feet to the Fire gives readers the rare opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of this nation’s most powerful journalists and news executives and experience their highly stressful environments. With each new and revealing interview, Borjesson gathers devastating details from national security and intelligence reporters, White House journalists, Middle East experts, war correspondents, and others. Like pieces of a terrible puzzle, these conversations combine to provide a hair-raising view of the mechanisms by which the truth has been manufactured post 9/11.
Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.
Daring to Feel: Violence, the News Media, and Their Emotions
Daring to Feel is a bold, brave book. Jody Santos challenges the entrenched doctrine that journalists are neutral, dispassionate observers of 'fact.' Santos demonstrates how journalists themselves and society as a whole benefit from emotionally nuanced and emotionally engaged reporting. This is a beautifully written tribute to the passion of journalists and the heart-wrenching stories they cover.
The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War
In The Things They Cannot Say, award-winning journalist and author Kevin Sites asks these difficult questions of eleven soldiers and marines, who—by sharing the truth about their wars—display a rare courage that transcends battlefield heroics. For each of these men, many of whom Sites first met while in Afghanistan and Iraq, the truth means something different. One struggles to recover from a head injury he believes has stolen his ability to love; another attempts to make amends for the killing of an innocent man; yet another finds respect for the enemy fighter who tried to kill him. Sites also shares the unsettling narrative of his own failures during war—including his complicity in a murder—and the redemptive powers of storytelling that saved him from a self-destructive downward spiral.
Kevin Sites, the award-winning journalist, covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity.
Swimming with Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War
Using his trademark immersive style, Kevin Sites uncovered surprising stories with unexpected truths. He swam in the Kunduz River with an infamous warlord named Nabi Gechi, who demonstrated both his fearsome killing skills as well as a genius for peaceful invention. Sites talked with ex-Taliban fighters, politicians, female cops, farmers, drug addicts, and diplomats, and patrolled with American and Afghan soldiers. In Swimming with Warlords he helps us to understand this kingdom of primitive beauty, dark mysteries, and savage violence, as well as the conflict that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives--and what we might expect tomorrow and in the years to come.
The Price They Paid is the stunning and dramatic true story of a legendary helicopter commander in Vietnam and the flight crews that followed him into the most intensive helicopter warfare ever—and how that brutal experience has changed their lives in the forty years since the war ended.
What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars
Most Americans are now familiar with PTSD and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking book, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.
Collective Conviction: The Story of Disaster Action
Collective Conviction tells the story of Disaster Action, a small charity founded in 1991 by survivors and bereaved people from the disasters of the late 1980s, including Zeebrugge, King's Cross, Clapham, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Marchioness. The aims were to create a health and safety culture in which disasters were less likely to occur and to support others affected by similar events.
When Lynne O’Donnell met Pauline and Margaret in Iraq she could never have guessed the wealth of stories she’d discover. Over tea the two women tell Lynne of their lives in the country: each having married Iraqi men had then relocated from England more than thirty years before.
Trauma Reporting A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories
Trauma Reporting provides vital information on developing a healthy, professional and respectful relationship with those who choose to tell their stories during times of trauma, distress or grief.
