This is a blog for my research and processing of my experiences at what I not-so-affectionately call "cult school": a (non-religious, but) high-demand, high-control school for "gifted" and "social-emotional" education. I'm calling it "alighting" (as in getting off a train) because I used to privately refer to people in the school community as "on board" or "not on board" to describe how much they truly believed in the school's ideology, and then I found out that one of the founders of the program used a metaphor of a train and that people should "get off the train" if they weren't on board with it. I'm writing this for myself, but since it is visible to others, I'm going to include a little background information. Here are some acronyms I will use (may be added to as this progresses): YMS - the school I attended. NN - its founder. TAS - the school where NN taught before losing his job over abuse allegations. NA - the whistleblower who exposed NN at TAS. Spoiler: Further info NN was accused of psychological abuse while teaching at TAS in the 80s and 90s. For years, the TAS administrators covered up complaints. In the 90s, NA blew the whistle on years of accounts of NN's behaviour. There was a huge schism in TAS's community, with many people obsessively defending NN at all costs, no matter how damning the new developments were. After he was forced to leave TAS, NN's supporters helped him found YMS, which I attended in the 00s. I can attest that NN was very psychologically abusive to his students which sometimes this involved violations of bodily integrity, but did not (to my knowledge) include sexual assault. Most of the abuse was not legally actionable, because it's not really a crime to be a shitty person, even if it traumatises people for life. On multiple occasions, NN was accused of things that were legally actionable, but there was never enough evidence to get him in serious trouble. I believe that he was very familiar with the law and that he was deliberately avoiding things that would lead to actual convictions, whether that was by stopping short of an actual crime, maintaining plausible deniability about his intent, or avoiding leaving evidence.
