Keep your kids far from this place! We made the heart breaking choice to leave our son with them. It's one of the worst decisions we've ever made. But, after much deliberation and research, we made the decision to trust our son to them. After an intake meeting on the day of his drop off and signing, we made the heart-wrenching decision to leave him there and go essentially no-contact, for weeks. This is pretty standard practice for these facilities.
However, the problems started almost immediately. We received calls from the facility about allegations our son was making of sexual harassment being directed at him from other students there. Many allegations were made from our son against them at the time that he was there. Many! However, we again decided to believe them, what we thought were the professionals, rather than our troubled son. This was a huge mistake!
After two months there, I get a call around 9:30 or 10AM that there had been an incident during the night. At some point the preceding evening, our son and another boy had gotten into a verbal altercation. The boys had been separated and the argument had come to an end. However, sometime after midnight but before 3AM, the other boy (a very large young man weighing over 270lbs) ran out of his own room and down the hallway and burst into my son's room attacking him while he slept under medication, beating him in the head until he had a severe concussion and a brain bleed. My son had zero chance to defend himself or really even know what was going on. The over-night staff eventually pulled the boy off my son and out of his room. The boys were brought out and talked to as if they had gotten into a mutual fight and then the staff sent my son back to bed! It was not until after the nurse came in around 8AM or so that she examined my son. He was medicated and had slept hours at this time. She lived on campus. Why was the nurse not called immediately? Why was he sent back to bed after being severely beaten in the head? If you know anything about brain injuries, you know this could have lead to his death with this severe of an injury.
As I stated earlier, it was not until 9:30 or 10AM that we were finally notified with a phone call that he had been attacked and that he was being taken to the hospital and that we needed to meet their staff there. This was at least six hours later! The hospital confirmed a severe concussion and brain bleed. After waiting several hours at the hospital, we came back to the facility to address the situation. Neither his mother nor I were in any way irate as many parents, understandably, would have been. Our main concern was our son and helping him through this traumatic incident. We even discussed leaving him there for a couple more days to allow him to transition out in a healthy way and set up after-care plans so as to give him the best chance to transition out healthily.
I'm not sure why we even considered this other than being in shock over the entire ordeal ourselves. However, after talking this over with our son he was, also understandably, scared to death to be alone in that place again and no progress would or could be made while he was there to help him process what had just happened to him. It was also very clear that the head of the facility was playing CYA at this point. He even went so far as to try and sneak and record our son with his phone as we were leaving. He asked, "Hey *****, how are you feeling? Are you excited to be leaving?" Of course the kid was excited, he was being released from his own personal hell!
For months now, he has woken up in nightmares and, as I'm sure you can imagine, his problems sleeping and behavior overall have gotten significantly worse. Embark was absolutely no help getting him set up with after-care to transition out. He is so much worse now. At one point, DCS was called by an outside party scared for our other son's safety. We sent him there to gain therapy and skills. We are now dealing with the trauma and fallout that resulted from it. read more
