Students and staff at Alldredge Wilderness Academy in West Virginia: transcript

Key points

• Many students are escorted to the program by strangers, which is a chaotic and difficult transition.
• A staff member says that change cannot happen without desire.
• A student says a week alone in the woods, called self-sufficiency, gave time to think and learn about himself.
• By the academic and village phase, students ask for help with problems such as drinking or marijuana use.
• The village focuses on therapeutics and the school on academics.
• Students say the program helps prepare them for life afterward, but one expects to start over with new friends.

Chapters

1. 0:15Arriving at the program and entering the wilderness
2. 0:50A student on time alone and self-reflection
3. 1:41The village and school phase
4. 2:12Preparing for life after the program

Full transcript

0:15We have a lot of kids that are escorted. That's a tough ride. You've woken up in your bedroom and two people take you from your room and you are then on a plane or in a car and brought by strangers to our program. That transition is chaotic and really tough on the kids and then they go into the woods. So, in the wilderness, one of the things that I've come to realize that they come to realize is that you can't have change without desire.

0:50I started with doing like really bad stuff at home and now I realize why I was doing it so it just seems pointless now. I've done a lot of self-thinking. I've done like looking inside myself to see who I really am, just learning a lot about everything around me. The first couple weeks or the first, like, week you're just completely by yourself. It's called self-sufficiency. It's got, like, a lot of time just to think. And I don't know. I learned a lot about myself just with being a week out here by myself. And I don't know. It's a pretty interesting experience.

1:41By the time they come to where we're standing, our academic and village phase, they come to us asking, saying something like, I think I have a problem, for instance with smoking marijuana or drinking too much, what would you suggest I do about it? And we've created a desire as opposed to simply slapping a label on them. Now this phase of the program, we have the village and the school, they're kind of combined but the village is based on therapeutics and the school is based on academics. In the village, it's been a really good experience.

2:12I've learned how to deal with a lot of my problems, like anger, how to talk to people, how to be a family. The wonderful thing that Aldridge does... They don't just send a kid. With a lot of other programs I went to, they'd send me home and they'd say, alright, good luck. Like, go back to your old friends and relapse them. We're trying to steer them to life after the program and get them prepared to go back out into society.

2:59I basically have to start over, so I don't know what's going to happen. I'm going to have to make a lot of new friends, and I just hope everything goes well.

Source and licence

Recording: File:The Journey-6835700.webm by Tricia Fulks Kelley (30 September 2009, 13:22 (upload date)), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.