Parents, Shopping for Discipline, Turn to Tough Schools Abroad

Wwasps, a Utah-based private school organization, has taken to setting up shop abroad, where rules on student treatment are not as tight as in the US. Beating students’ heads against concrete, enforcing prolonged periods of isolation, and creating affection-less environments are the mainstays of these “behavior-modification” schools, which call themselves “specialty boarding-schools”. Without tight regulation or really any outside governance, these schools take children of uninformed parents, who do not understand how to negotiate the legal monitoring institutions of foreign countries. These parents make decisions based on “a glossy brochure and a call to a toll-free number in Utah” and then are left without legal recourse to protect their children. – YaleGlobal