HANCOCK - After escaping her rapist, 15-year-old Liz Ianelli ran across the grounds of the Family Foundation School to find someone she thought she could trust to protect her — the school chaplain. Ianelli’s plea to chaplain Stephen Morris would teach her a lesson reportedly learned by many students of the Family Foundation School — that nobody believes troubled teenagers.
The Family Foundation School, which operated in Hancock from the 1980s until 2014, has been the subject of an array of civil lawsuits alleging physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the school. At least nine staff members have been accused of sexually abusing students, including chaplain Stephen Morris who was accused of raping a student in a lawsuit against the school, Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, St. Paul the Apostle Church and the UHS Binghamton Hospital.
Ianelli was publicly shamed by staff and peers for “seducing” the adult staff member who repeatedly raped her, according to her book, “I See You, Survivor: Life Inside (and Outside) the Totally F*cked-Up Troubled Teen Industry.” Her punishment for her cry for help was eight days wrapped and duct-taped in a blanket in an isolation room.
The school has also become known for having an unusually high number of alumni die, with over 150 dead, many by suicide or substance abuse, according to alumni and media reports.
The school was founded by Anthony “Tony” and Betty Argiros who operated it until 1999 when it was taken over by their son, Emmanuel “Mike” Argiros with help from his wife, Cindy Ray Argiros, and sister, Rita Argiros. The school, which was formed around the tenets of a 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program, used a “family” structure in which students were assigned to one of eight “families” with 25–30 other students, according to media reports.
Paul Geer — a former choir director and “family” leader at the school — was indicted April 4 on three counts of coercing and enticing three different children, students at the school, to travel across state lines to sexually abuse them and three counts of transporting the children across state lines with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity with those children.
Ianelli was far from being the only student to report abuses at the school. According to alumni like ’04 alumna Miranda Sullivan, students were frequently punished for reaching out to their parents for help, and runaways’ reports were ignored by the law enforcement officials who returned them to the school.
According to an ongoing Child Victims Act legal filing, another student who was allegedly repeatedly raped by former counselor Curtis Newsome was placed on social “blackout” for reporting the abuse — a common punishment in which students could not communicate or even make eye contact with other students.
Fostering a
Faulty System
The school evolved from a foster care home where Tony and Betty Argiros, a gambling addict and an alcoholic respectively, took in teenagers struggling with addiction, according to media reports. The foster care system, abundant in loving parents looking to give sanctuary to displaced children, also attracts people interested in the monthly stipend that comes with each child. In upstate New York, foster parents receive a monthly stipend of up to $1,123.01 for children aged 12 and older as of March, according to the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS). The stipend increases for special needs children who have significant care needs. Prior to 1990, parents could receive the special rate for children who were abused or neglected, but it is now reserved for children with significant physical or psychiatric needs, according to state regulations.
A foster parent from Walton claims the foster care system does not properly prepare foster parents or monitor the wellbeing of children in foster care. The parent asked to remain anonymous because she said she recently faced retaliation from Delaware County Department of Social Services (DSS) for reporting that a staff member allowed a parent to violate a court order.
The foster parent, who has been fostering children for 19 years, said the training she received was minimal and insufficient in preparing her to handle the trauma that foster children often have.
“I’m always left learning on my own,” the parent said.
Foster parents must pass a background check and complete training to be certified. Criminal history record checks, conducted by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are required for applicants and all persons over the age of 18 living in the household. Applications are rejected for felony convictions for child abuse or neglect, spousal abuse, a crime against a child, or violent crimes at any time, or for drug-related crimes or physical assault within five years, according to New York State Social Services Law.
Trainings, conducted by local agencies, are required by the state and include training to prevent abuse and neglect, to meet children’s needs and to understand the foster care system.
Delaware County Acting DSS Commissioner Keith Weaver did not respond to multiple telephone, email and in-person requests for information about the foster care system. In reference to Weaver’s lack of response, Wayne Marshfield, Hamden supervisor and social services committee chairperson, said, “To re-make an old story for the paper is not, and rightfully so, his priority.” Marshfield further stated that he and Keith Weaver, acting DSS commissioner, “have little comment as we were probably not involved back then.”
The foster parent also said DSS caseworkers do not conduct visits as frequently as required by state regulation. Caseworkers are required to visit foster children a minimum of once per month, but the parent from Walton said she has gone six months without a visit from a caseworker at times. When she inquired about the lack of visits, she was told that it was due to a lack of staffing, the foster parent said.
“As a foster parent myself, if you were to come to me and ask me if you should become a foster parent, I would say, ‘No, run’,” the foster parent said. She said that is because there is not enough support for foster parents, and they are left unprepared to manage the trials and tribulations of caring for troubled children.
Staff Swindled, Parents Manipulated
Contact with the world outside the school was highly restricted, alumni say. Sullivan, who attended the school from 2003 to 2004, recalls that she made many attempts to access a phone to call the police but was never successful as the phones were strictly monitored. Devin Corvino, an ’08 alumnus, said the students were only allowed a 10-minute phone call to their parents each week, although this privilege would be taken away for misbehavior like complaining about the school to their parents.
Students’ access to their parents was extremely limited, and communication with friends outside the school was strictly forbidden, according to the school’s former website. Students were required to stay for a minimum of 18 months and were not permitted to go home for holiday breaks during their first year, according to the website.
Parents were told to expect their child to lie about the conditions of the school and to not believe their children.
Dotti Howe, a former math teacher at the school and now a licensed mental health counselor, said parents were manipulated by school administration to convince them to send their child to the school or to keep them there.
“Always believe your children,” Howe said. “Whenever your child is disclosing something, there is always some truth to it, and parents should be actively investigating that.”
Howe said students would sometimes complain to her about the mistreatment at the school, and when she advised them to tell their parents, they would say that school staff would just convince their parents that they were lying.
During her employment, Howe recalls hearing staff and administration plotting to manipulate the parents of students who would soon turn 18. Once 18 and a legal adult, students are able to make their own decisions regarding their education, but students are allowed to continue school until the age of 21.
Howe said parents were lied to about their child’s behavior to keep them at the school and to keep tuition money rolling in. She said students were turned against each other, tasked with finding or fabricating reasons why a student at risk of leaving should stay.
Howe worked at the school for six and a half weeks in 2002–2003. Despite having no experience in teaching or math, Howe was hired by Betty Argiros, she said, and students often had to teach the algebra class because Howe had no experience with the subject at the time.
Howe said she was mainly hired because she is in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. She learned of the job through other people in addiction recovery who worked there and said Tony and Betty Argiros preferred to hire people in addiction recovery. More than half of the staff members were in recovery from addiction, according to the school’s former website, and were sometimes recruited from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Hancock, Sullivan said.
During her brief employment at the school, Howe said she was disturbed by how the students were treated.
“I saw the emotional abuse, the starvation, the humiliation — I mean, it was beyond disgusting, and of course I addressed it, which ended my role there,” Howe said. “I would hear a lot of disparaging remarks against the kids … there was never anything kind.”
She said that after one instance of verbal abuse, she called out the male staff member who was inflicting the abuse and told him that he was emotionally abusing the kids.
“I said ‘You’re cruel to them, the way you speak to them, you’re unkind,’ and he said, ‘Well, I bring orange juice on the weekends for them,’” Howe recalled.
Howe said she was told she was laid off due to low enrollment, but believes she was fired for speaking out against the abuse. Before leaving, Howe said she shared her concerns about the school with the school’s administration.
“I said to them, ‘The stuff that you do to children here, and the way that you guys are treating them, if people on the outside knew about this, they wouldn’t be happy,’” Howe said, “and [an administrator] put her head down, and she said, ‘Did we cover your health insurance?’ and I said ‘Yes,’ and she goes, ‘We’re going to cover you an additional six months.’ That was her solution to it.”
While many staff members have been accused of abusing students or enabling abuse by other staff, there were also many who had the best interest of students in mind. Corvino recalls conversations with some staff members who he was particularly close with in which they revealed their own frustrations with the school, like being moved between “families” without notice.
Corvino said having staff members who were sympathetic to his situation helped him cope with life at the school.
“That was a beacon of hope for me,” Corvino said.
Howe explained that some staff members did not report or speak out about abuse because they believed they would be fired and therefore unable to help the students from within the school.
She said other staff told her, “We know it’s bad here, but we just feel that if we’re here, we can help soften the blow.”
Corvino, who stays in contact with former staff and alumni of the school, said he has heard similar sentiments from former teachers.
“If you had a vested interest in doing right, you had no choice but to drink the juice,” Corvino explained. “Your job was in jeopardy.”
Reports Fall on
Deaf Ears
Howe said she did not receive any training as part of her onboarding and was not informed that she was a mandated reporter. School officials are mandated reporters, according to state regulations, which means they are required to report suspected child abuse or maltreatment whenever they have reasonable cause to suspect abuse or maltreatment.
Although Howe was given no instruction on how to report abuse or made aware of her status as a mandated reporter, she alerted a DSS staff member to the situation after being fired. The staff member told Howe that DSS frequently received complaints about the school, but they were never able to find any evidence corroborating the claims during investigations, according to Howe.
After the Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY) sent a letter to Delaware County residents and officials alleging abuse at the school in 2009, Bill Moon, former commissioner of DSS, said that DSS investigated the school in the late 1990s in response to a complaint to DSS by a family member of two students, according to media reports.
Moon said DSS shared their concerns about the treatment of students with the school, and the administrators, on the recommendation of DSS, fired staff members who were mistreating students.
Moon, in a newspaper article, said the abuses alleged in the CAFETY letter were issues that had been addressed through DSS’s investigation in the 1990s; however, the letter contained complaints about mistreatment occurring in 2008.
Jon Martin-Crawford, a student who attended the school in 1995–1997 and former advisor to CAFETY, detailed alleged abuses that he experienced and witnessed at the school in a 2008 testimony to Congress. Martin-Crawford completed suicide in 2015.
In 2010, the New York State Commission on Quality Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities (CQC), New York State Department of Education (NYSED), New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH) and New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services (OASAS) conducted an investigation in an unannounced visit to the school.
The investigation did not find evidence of physical abuse during interviews with 60 students, staff and administrators. According to the report, administrators acknowledged that there was a previous culture of harsh treatment at the school that had been addressed. Mike Argiros, in response to this report, denied acknowledging that history, according to a later communication from the same four state offices.
The report from the investigation did include several concerns about the school’s operation.
One of those concerns was with the use of solitary confinement. Students and staff reported during the investigation that children would be kept in one of two seclusion rooms overnight or for multiple days, according to the report. The report states that the school’s use of seclusion exceeded federal and state guidelines, and “arguably constitutes aversive intervention practices in some instances.”
Other “sanctions,” or student punishment, were noted as being potentially harmful to students. The report stated that some of the sanctions used at the school would be prohibited in licensed mental hygiene programs for individuals with a history of trauma or mental illness. The report does not attribute this concern to a specific sanction, but later states that “table topics” could compromise students’ mental health.
“Table topics” were a mealtime ritual in which students were publicly shamed for actual or perceived misbehavior, and students were encouraged to taunt and humiliate the “offending” student.
The investigators also took issue with non-credentialed and unlicensed staff having authority to put students in solitary confinement, untrained staff performing restraints and non-credentialed staff providing “psychotherapy.”
Overcrowding in the dormitories and trailers was listed as a safety concern with as many as 14 students living in one trailer, according to the report. The practice of “landlocking” was also noted as a safety issue. This practice involved students moving their bunk beds to create a barrier around the bed of a student deemed a flight risk. Along with the safety concern of trapping a student in the event of an emergency evacuation, the report stated that it is not appropriate for students to be carrying out and enforcing such a practice.
The report also listed the lack of phones or communication devices in the dormitories as another safety concern.
Isolated and Ignored
Along with the limited phone access, the school was also physically isolated, located approximately eight miles outside of the village of Hancock. Escaping from the school proved a difficult task for the dozens of students who attempted it as they had to run through the woods and along state Route 97 where they were often picked up by school staff patrolling the route or law enforcement. A retired state trooper, who chose to remain anonymous, reported the Family Foundation School would routinely call the state police to report runaways, providing the students’ date of birth and physical description, and ask that a runaway be returned to the school when found.
Corvino said the school also had search and rescue dogs that would chase after escaped students. He said this deterred him from attempting to escape from the Hancock campus, but he did run away during a trip to Washington D.C., hiding in a bar with the intention of taking a bus back to his Long Island home, before being discovered by police.
A 2013 article from the school’s newspaper stated that Rita Argiros, former executive program director of the school and daughter of founders Tony and Betty Argiros, was also the president of Eagle Valley Search Dogs. The school had a dog corps program in collaboration with Eagle Valley Search Dogs in which students trained dogs for search and rescue, the article states.
Students who made it past the dogs and the search vehicles frequently hid in the Hancock McDonald’s where McDonald’s staff would eventually turn them over to the police who would return them to the school, despite their protest.
Ed Rosas, a retired New York State Trooper and former Hancock resident who, while on duty, picked up runaway students from the school in the early to mid 2000s, said the students never reported abuse to him.
“He is lying,” Sullivan said.
Rosas even enrolled one of his daughters in the school, he said, because she was not listening, was sneaking out of the house at night and disrupting the household. Rosas’ daughter attended the school at a discount for at least one year, with Rosas paying approximately $40,000 per year, he said.
Rosa’s late wife, Patty Rosas, worked for the Delaware County Attorney’s office, which focuses on legal representation of the county including DSS in foster care matters and juvenile delinquents.
“So many people I knew told the police that picked them up when they ran away, they told the police in a different town when they got there — nobody listened to them,” Sullivan said.
Escaped students would also find themselves at the doorsteps of Hancock residents asking for help, only to be turned over to police or the school staff. The Argiroses were, and continue to be, well-known and regarded in the Hancock community. Mike Argiros is currently the president of Hancock Partners — a non-profit charity that funds community projects in Hancock — and has been a member of its board since 2006. Mike Argiros is also the treasurer for the Hancock Area Chamber of Commerce. Mike and Cindy Ray Argiros have extensive business interests in the community as well, including The Hancock Herald, Kasos Enterprises, Kasos Associates, Kasos, Inc., The Upper Delaware Inn, Smith’s Colonial Motel and previously, the recently sold Capra Cinemas.
Cindy Ray Argiros, who worked at the Family Foundation school as a teacher, family leader, admissions counselor, billing manager and administrator, was also on the Hancock Central School Board of Education and was the advancement chair for the local Boy Scout Troop 74, according to the school’s website in 2014.
Current Hancock business owners and residents report Mike Argiros as well-liked and respected, acknowledging that “half the town” was employed at the Family Foundation School, during its operation. Hancock Supervisor Jerry Vernold, who was a member of the town council while the school was operating, declined to comment on the allegations of abuse, saying it is not appropriate for him to comment on pending legal cases.
“It’s crucial that we allow these processes to unfold without interference or prejudice,” Vernold said.
“Our community takes all allegations of abuse very seriously, and we are committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of all our residents, especially our youth,” Vernold continued. “We encourage anyone with information relevant to these cases to cooperate fully with the appropriate authorities.”
Clouded by the altruistic reputation of the Argiroses , attempts at reporting abuse fell on deaf ears in Hancock and beyond, disregarded as the schemes of troublesome teenagers.
“If you think a kid is labeled, very dismissively, as troubled or a bad kid — which I don’t believe are things — they dismiss what they say because they think they’re liars, they think they’re manipulators, they think they’re exaggerating,” Sullivan explained.
The culture of the school also contributed to the lack of significant student protest within the school, Sullivan said. Students were encouraged to report each other for violating school policies to receive favored treatment and take negative attention off of themselves. Punishments were frequently carried out by other students, Sullivan said, comparing it to the Stanford prison experiment.
“You treat your peers in this very authoritarian way,” Sullivan said, “that you call someone out, not call them in ... It was just to protect that other student’s position and safety within the family unit. If I’m holding you accountable, they won’t hold me accountable.”
While many students have said they were abused and traumatized at the school, many others have said the school gave them the “tough love” they needed. Corvino said that, for a long time, he was grateful to the Family Foundation School for helping him get his life on track.
However, Corvino’s perspective shifted after Geer’s April 4 indictment for coercing and transporting three students across state lines to sexually abuse them. Geer has pleaded innocent to the allegations, and his federal criminal case is ongoing. Geer waived speedy trial requirements June 28 and is being held in federal detention without bail.
Corvino discovered he had repressed many memories from his time there, and as a result, has joined the hundreds of alumni learning to cope with and heal from the psychological aftermath of life at the Family Foundation School.
“It was like whiplash after the indictment because there was truth to the matter that I wasn’t acknowledging,” Corvino said. “... I had to question my whole entire life on whether I was grateful.”
This is part two of a three-part series delving into systematic abuse carried out with the complicity of numerous residents, business owners, law enforcement and mandated reporters in Hancock and Delaware County. Listen to The Reporter’s podcast ‘Off the Record,’ at the-reporter.net and all podcast platforms, wherever you listen. Read part one online, at the-reporter.net, or in the July 11 print edition and part three in the July 25 print edition.
