Lee Rood

lrood@dmreg.com

The day Nathan Teggerdine began his job at Midwest Academy, one student at the tough-love boarding school had been held in isolation for 10 days.

Teggerdine said the boy's mother sent him to Midwest after he began acting out in the wake of his father's suicide. The boy did not leave the facility's out-of-school suspension room until day 47, Teggerdine said.

“He refused, no matter what, to conform to their rules. He was a tough case,” the former employee told The Des Moines Register.

Teggerdine, 34, said he was hired by Midwest director Ben Trane on New Year’s Day 2012 as a generic worker “herding kids around.” He said he quit Midwest after nine months and returned to his home state of Michigan to get a degree in psychology. Neither Trane nor his attorney returned the Register's telephone calls seeking comment for this story.

During the course of his studies, he says, he realized more fully that the methods Midwest used weren’t therapeutic.

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Early on in the job, he said, Trane told him Midwest was no longer affiliated with a controversial Utah network of boarding schools.

But there were signs the connection hadn't been severed entirely. The main Midwest property was still owned by a corporation started by the founder of the Utah network, and electronic time cards still carried the network's acronym, WWASPS, or World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, he said.

A search warrant application from January shows that Trane has been accused of sex abuse involving a student, fraud and child neglect. Investigators also are looking into allegations of child pornography.

During his brief stint there, Teggerdine said, he became an art teacher and family representative, working one on one with some of the roughly 157 students enrolled at the time. He also acted as a point of contact between parents and students.

“I had kids in there who had committed assault, and others who were just being disrespectful or not getting along with their siblings. Those stories were backed up by their parents ...," he said. “It just felt like those students were being shipped off because they were being difficult to handle. But the thing is, they weren’t being taken care of" at Midwest.

Teggerdine said he came to believe the school was driven primarily by profits after seeing how children were treated.

Parents were paying as much as $7,500 a month in tuition and room and board, he said. But the children often complained that they weren’t being fed enough, and that the bathroom supplies were the cheapest around.

He said he believes most staff who counseled students at Midwest had high school diplomas or “no training whatsoever in psychological care."

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One counselor, whose credentials Teggerdine did not know, came to the property once a week and worked with “whoever he wanted. But there was no way he could handle that type of workload," Teggerdine said.

Teggerdine said the sexual allegations against Trane surprised him because he felt the director was very good with kids. The former staffer said his biggest problem with how Midwest was operated was its ongoing use of isolation rooms.

“Kids were in there for really extended periods of time. They would be stripping their clothes off. Getting their hands on whatever they could ... to hurt themselves," he said. "They would go to the bathroom all over themselves. Some of the most erratic behavior you could imagine.”

Teggerdine said Midwest's approach to fixing an array of emotional and behavioral problems was to break down the residents. Some teens who were aggressive or displayed bad attitudes eventually did comply, he said.

But Teggerdine said most “got to the point" where they merely pretended to change their behavior to graduate and get out of the facility.

Parents, he said, were told only what Midwest wanted them to hear.

“Phone calls between the kids and parents were highly monitored," he said. "If there was any complaining, (staff members) would hang up the phone, escort them to (isolation) and call the parents back."

When Teggerdine questioned Midwest's practices, he said, he would be cut out of the loop.

Lee Rood’s Reader’s Watchdog column helps Iowans get answers and accountability from public officials, the justice system, businesses and nonprofits. Contact her at lrood@dmreg.com, 515-284-8549 on Twitter @leeroodor at Facebook.com/readerswatchdog.