KGET Community

Semper Fi:

You know that there must be something to this if a person would choose prison over T.C....I think a little more 'digging' would be in order...
Of course,thats just my opinion

I received some paperwork in the mail last week from someone who supports my cause. They need a former Teen Challenge student to be a "test case" on an official complaint. Stay tuned.

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Michael Kincheloe

At a Teen Challenge women's home in Texas, the staff refused to let a woman who had left the program retrieve her personal belongings. Her brother threatened to pound the alligator mouth-hummingbird a** staff member into the ground while the woman called the police. She got her stuff.

Some organization, huh?

Teen Challenge owns property donated to the group, then rents it out (apartments)
to the general public not in their program in any way. They are a disgrace in how well they maintain their properties, or at least they used to be, and using the term slumlord would be generous. I suggest to anybody not to donate property to them; if you want to help out the community sell your property and personally get involved in making sure your donation is put to good use.

I hear your frustrations and concerns. My husband finishes a year at Teen Challenge in March. He has been to two previous programs costing us around $40,000. Both were suppose to be "one of the best" rehab programs in the country. One was a three month program and one 28 days. Both based on the NA philosophies. You want to talk about crazy. I went for a week to the family program where I was told you could find a higher power in a tree. Yes they had some valid points and very interesting lessons on family psych. I myself have a PhD in education and have had many classes in psychology. I agreed with most things they were telling me. When he left he worked the NA steps and still went back to meth after being clean 11 months. As a Christian however, I did not agree with the spiritual side of NA/AA. It was like NA became his higher power and that is nothing but false hope. Jesus is the only true hope. I do have concerns about the finacial side of Teen Challenge. I agree with TC teaching discipline through work. I do not however agree with all of a students earnings being donated.  TC should be open with earnings, salaries of staff, and how monies are dispursed. Also, because the students work all week Saturdays could be used for team building, skill building, witnessing, or other productive activities other than raising money. A good balance is never bad. I understand that it is expensive to house and feed that many students, however, if they are truely Christians and are not corrupt they should have nothing to hide and maybe former students would be trusting and donate more money just as we do to our church, college, and schools.

I'm concerned about your article. I feel it may be turning some people away that truely need help. There are good people at Teen Challenge. There are rotten eggs in all organizations. It may not have worked for you but please don't keep someone else from find hope through Christ and getting clean. I know you've been through it but I'm very thankful for the good lessons my husband has learned at TC  that he was not taught as a child. He is much more humble and disiplined. I haven't seen him as mature as he is now. He too questions some things they do but leaves it in God's hand to take care of. 

I sencerely hope your success continues and I also pray for anyone that is faced with addiction.  

i am a teen challenge grad and i have been clean for 7 years . i have been very ill and im still clean because of the seed that was planted in me threw teen challenge. i am very blessed.and i think everbody should try teen challenge no matter what.it will change your life.but you have to let it.it doesnt work if you let things like where the money is going get in your own way of gods healing.my name is sheri barton and if any one should have failed it would have been me. but i am a child of god thank you jesus amen

Michael, Just came up on your site... Please be careful. All Teen Challenges are not the same and some do excellent work. The Teen Challenge that we have been at for 18 years does not allow their students to work. they have personal accounts for the students who get the "odd job" on the weekends, so that that they will have money if they need it. We also charge a small entry fee and then don't ask the student for any more money at all after that. (Of course, we do need money to run the program, so we do ask for donations from churches and individuals, but I don't think that is what you are talking about.)

I've seen so much good come out of Teen Challenge, I hate for the name itself to be slurred. Let's close down (or fix!) the bad ones and encourage the good!

  

 

chauncey:

I've seen so much good come out of Teen Challenge, I hate for the name itself to be slurred. Let's close down (or fix!) the bad ones and encourage the good!

They can start rooting out the bad by prohibiting the hiring of a convicted sex offender as a co-director:

Registered Sex Offender Shondi Fabiano and her husband, Peter are the directors of the Teen Challenge in Winthrop, Maine. Shondi Fabiano was convicted of Second Degree Child Molestation in Rhode Island. She is listed on the National Sex Offender Public Registry.

http://www.nsopr.gov

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Michael Kincheloe

I have personally gone through teen challenge and it was the best thing that has happened to my life.  It was a hard program to get through, but being a drug addict irrisponsible idiot I needed structure in my life.  Well this program gave it to me.  Where I am in my life is because of teen challange and now I love my life

I have something first hand to combat this. Im not a Teen Challenge hater....Ive only been in one. For a year. I cant speak for the others because I want there. I saw kids get their nose broken, kids get beat and mentally abused. They refused to allow me to call the teen abuse hotline. They refused to allow me to call my lawyer. I was 15. Example: In West Florida Teen Challenge Boys Acadamy (a fancy word for boot camp) they give everyone a piece of cake when a cadets birthday arrives. I was made to stand at attention for dinner, not allowed a piece of cake, and was givin two minutes to eat my dinner. By the way...the dinner consisted of the the smallest amount of calories allowed by law. Thats one of the mind games they like to play. You try eating 2,000 calories a day at 15 and also work out and stress your body at least 12 hours out of the day. That was a good day. At the time I was a catholic. I might not of been a good one. I wasnt even a good person. I owed a debt to society. I would take the jail time any day. I know if I ever went back there I wouldnt come out alive. Im older now. I have a daughter. I work every day of the week to support my family. I dont commit crimes. All I do is go to work and come home to eat and sleep. West Florida Teen Challenge hires people that are underpaid washed up ex military personel. One guy was fired, Sgt. Ward, for stealing from the medicine cabnet. He wasnt one off the bad staff members. He actually did his job. He cared. But most couldnt give a *** less if you got better. The school teachers turned a blind eye.  There were a exactly three staff member I thought cared at all about there job. The rest could care less and most enjoyed toying with the weaker cadets. That place is not helping people. Every little problem any kid has they think he is possesed by a demon. They hold them down and douse them with water. Its like every night there was an "exorcism". Then the kid would go with it because if he did he was rewarded. He was thought to be "trusted". God forbid you dont speak in tounges. Forget sleeping if you cant speak in tounges. You cant graduate without. And if you completely deny Jesus Christ, well, you wont. I know for a fact they're success rates arnt as high as they say. I was a sneaky kid. I snuck into the office, read files. Nothing ever about other kids just information. In short they are nothing but con artists. Either that or they really are just insane. Either way I have had first hand knowledge and I know exactly how West Florida Teen Challenge in Bonify Florida operates. And nothing anybody does or says could ever take away the nightmares or truth abouyt what happens in that "cult". So you can thank them all you want...but as far as I know you could be employed by Teen Challenge. Please chck into it if you ever decide to send your children to West Florida Teen Challenge in Bonify, Florida. Pastor Dave Rutledge and his family are con artists. And if they could read this I would tell them if they ever walked into the store I manage it would be well worth the assult charge. Because they deserve it. For everything they did to me and are doing to other kids right now at this very moment.

Christopher Perry

276-274-3187

c.perry18@yahoo.com

Thanks, Chris. Thanks for helping Shirley Labo and her family.

One step at a time...

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Michael Kincheloe

Once again a letter-writing campaign has stopped a Teen Challenge from taking root, this time in Leacock Township, PA, which is outside of Lancaster. 

After the locals found out what Teen Challenge was really like, several people stood up in opposition and Teen Challenge brass decided to look for frendlier (see uninformed) folks.  

Thanks to Scott Farkas for contacting me about TC's ill-fated attempt to open a facility in his pleasant little community.

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Michael Kincheloe

My son was sent to the Teen Challenge program in Colorado a few years back, when he was ninteen, he is now twentythree. He was raised a christain so he had no problems with it being christian based, but when he arrived there the first thing they did was go through his stuff and take his King James version of the Bible away. they told him that it was a false Bible, and only theirs, the teen challange Bible was a true interpatation. My son was finaly given permisson, after about a week, to call his probation officer and he asked her for permission to leave the program, because it was a cult. I met with her and my son after he returned and this is what she told me. She did go and check it out, because she had recieved the same complaint from another person who had been sent there. She stayed for three day's and agrees that the program has become a right wing christain cult. she told me that the program used to be very good but that Teen Challange was taken over , several years ago by a different orginization.  TEEN CHALLANGE IS NOT THE SAME PROGRAM TODAY THAT IT WAS ORIGINALY.  My son's probation officer spoke to her superiours, and the program has been removed from their list of Re-Hab programs they send people to. 

marie59:

She told me that the program used to be very good but that Teen Challange was taken over, several years ago, by a different orginization. 

Teen Challenge was originally founded by David Wilkerson fifty years ago. Wilkerson is a guy who claims that the "Holy Spirit" has actually spoken to him on many occasions, and that he has received "visions" from God telling him what he needed to do.

Teen Challenge is now a mission of the Assemblies of God, but what the AoG sees and what really happens at Teen Challenge are two entirely different things. They teach that Lutherans pray to Martin Luther (silly), and that Mormons are "evil" (Teen Challenge wrote the book on evil).

Teen Challenge is a non-profit organization that makes a very healthy profit. As I type this, Teen Challenge's commercial business operations are being investigated (an investigator called and talked to me for over 30 minutes while I explained how their money-making ventures are conducted) for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. 

Stay tuned. 

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Michael Kincheloe