“I still have a nightmare that I’m there and I can’t leave. And it’s absolutely terrifying,” said one former student, who was at the Elan School from 1997 to 1999.

This student, now a successful consultant living and working in Virginia, said “everyone I know who went to Elan says they have the same dream.”

Enrolled at the school by his parents when he was 15 because of behavioral problems at home, this Elan graduate describes himself as a normal teenager who drank a bit and had a lot of anger issues.

He did well academically before he went to Elan and continued that success while at the school, but said, “I came out significantly more angry and destructive” emotionally.

He believes that staffers who deal with students are sincere in their efforts, but the “method itself is very misguided.”

This former student said he figured out “the game” pretty quickly after he arrived and “knew it was better to do what I was told and I did.” As a result, he gained privileges quickly and was soon supervising what the school calls the Expeditors — the student-led security crew.

“I never got put in a corner, never got put in a ring, never was in a general meeting,” he said, “but I became part of the system. I’m the one who was ooppressing some of these kids. That’s what I can’t get over. I can’t get over the feeling that maybe I screwed up someone.”

He remembers one incident when another student tried to eat some powder and he and another student force-fed the ill student ipecac syrup to make him vomit.

“I tied people in restraints, tackled people, chased a runaway through the woods and brought him back,” he said. Knowing that he had a hand in other students’ traumatic experiences is “distasteful” to him but seemed normal and was required at the time.

“I’ve later apologized to people who were there and all of them say, ‘Look, you were just doing what you were supposed to do.'”

But, he said, he can’t shake the memories that “I had to do a lot of things that made me feel like a Gestapo.”

He remembers being required to listen to other students during conversations with their parents, and monitor students when they went out with their parents. It was all done to report noncompliant behavior to staff.

While angry at his parents years ago, this former student has since developed a good relationship with them, “mostly because I realize that if I don’t forgive them, this is the kind of thing that will consume me. I don’t want that place to take any more of my life.”

To read more stories about the Elan School and students’ experiences there, visit sunjournal.com/elan.