The 1990s saw the establishment of my school, The Lifeworks School, which grew from a a converted office space meant to support the administrative functions of a mental hospital on the same grounds with only a half dozen students in 1996 to a school with over 100 students today ranging from elementary age to 12th Grade. The campus, featuring Lifeworks, various in-patient hospital units, a “partial hospitalization program” in the basement where students may leave at the end of the school day, a gymnasium, a residential treatment facility for long-term care of juveniles whose parents have simply given up on them, and multiple trailers, (yes, the kind that people live in) which have been converted into classrooms where students from our “lower” or grade-level school spend much of their time in a space with little or no air conditioning. Although the gymnasium is sometimes used by students, its primary function is to afford the use of exercise equipment to the campus’s security staff which are frequently called upon to break up fights which happen most days of the week. Excessive force has been used by these security guards more than once and nothing has been done about it. In many cases, there is no fight, simply a person having some sort of hysterical fit where they are hurting no one, but the so-called “crisis team” is called anyway, and when they arrive, there is a tendency for them to lay hands on students whether it is called for or not. Last year, a student’s upper arm bone, one of the strongest bones in the human body, was split in two purposefully by a member of the crisis team. That individual was asked to be more careful in the future and still works here.
For this sort of lovely service, school districts from around the area must shell out, with little federal subsidy, for the 2021-2022 school year, $42,840 for each student they send to Lifeworks or a similar facility. They must also cover the cost of transportation for students, which varies based upon the distance they have to travel. An average student here travels about 10 miles at a cost of $5,000 per annum, making for a total cost per student approaching $50,000 annually. One of our students commutes from Media, Pennsylvania to our school in New Britain, Pennsylvania, a distance of 36.4 miles each way at great expense to their home school district.
Without exception, every student at the school has been prescribed medication for any one of a variety of mental issues, and the only ones not medicated are those who have rightly or wrongly chosen not to adhere to the recommended course of treatment. Our staff, although consisting titularly of teachers, in reality serves as babysitters and observers and are required to file page-long monthly synopses for each student they see for class, describing any difficulties they may have, any odd behaviors they may be exhibiting, and whether they are involved in any romantic relationships, the identities of the persons they are romantically involved with, and whether the relationship is homosexual or heterosexual in nature. All in-patients in our neighboring intensive care facility are, in fact, routinely asked if they are homosexual upon admission despite the APA not considering it a mental illness since 1973.
