HANCOCK - Sitting just over the Delaware County border in Sullivan County, at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Long Eddy, is a small green vase Zelkova tree, encircled with stacked stones. The “lost souls tree” is unassuming to most who pass it, but for alumni of the Family Foundation School, it is a remembrance of their deceased friends and a symbol of unity among survivors.
The Family Foundation School, which operated in Hancock from the 1980s until 2014, has 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. It has also been the subject of an array of civil lawsuits and criminal charges alleging physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the school.
The school was founded by Anthony “Tony” and Betty Argiros and later operated by their son, Emmanuel “Mike” Argiros with help from his wife, Cindy Ray Argiros, and sister, Rita Argiros. Betty and Cindy Ray Argiros both declined to comment on the allegations against the school, and Mike Argiros did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Tony and Rita Argiros died in 2014 and 2015 respectively.
While Mike and Cindy Ray Argiros continue to operate several businesses in Hancock — 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 — many former students of the school report that they struggle to navigate the world, burdened by their trauma.
“There was no therapy there, there was no education system there, and, beyond that, it was a highly traumatic, highly abusive place that’s rewired all of our brains and fundamentally changed how we interact with and perceive the world around us,” ’04 alumna Miranda Sullivan said.
Devin Corvino, who attended the school in 2007 and 2008, said he is still trying to come to terms with what he experienced at the school.
“From time to time, you question things in your life and say, ‘Wow. Did that really happen?’” Corvino said.
He said part of his healing process has been learning to appreciate and understand himself because he was forced to adopt a façade to shield himself during his time at the Family Foundation School.
Corvino now runs his own education business, InnovativeED, with the goal of providing a compassionate and individualized approach to education that he said was absent at the Family Foundation School.
Sullivan is also working to prevent children from having the same experiences as she did, and works for an anti-human trafficking and child abuse prevention and intervention organization.
While many alumni of the school have led successful lives, over 150 other alumni have died premature deaths.
“Honestly, most of us are just waiting for our number to drop,” Sullivan said. “It’s really just about running out the clock on this.”
Sullivan said she believes a major factor contributing to alumni suicides is that their experiences have been dismissed in media, the legislature, and society. She explained that many of the people who completed suicide were heavily involved in the movement for justice and legislation regulating the troubled teen industry.
Jon Martin-Crawford, a student who attended the school in 1995, 1996, and 1997, detailed alleged abuses that he experienced and witnessed at the school in a 2008 testimony to Congress in a push for reform of residential treatment programs for adolescents. The industry continues to go unregulated at the federal level. Martin-Crawford completed suicide in 2015.
Despite an exceptionally high number of alumni deaths and hundreds of alumni testimonies alleging abuse, media coverage continues to downplay the impact of alumni’s experiences at the school on their lives. One New York Times article about the abnormally high alumni death rate attributes those deaths to the addictions and traumas that students had prior to starting at the school.
“Him blaming it on ‘oh, they were depressed kids, of course they’re suicidal adults’, the reality is nobody was helped by this program,” Sullivan said in response to the New York Times article.
Conflicting experiences at the school have also led to alumni being dismissed by their peers who did not experience abuse, or did not consider what they witnessed to be abuse. Many accounts by former students have claimed that they needed the “tough love” given at the school.
“It’s hard because you have a group of people that have all experienced this and have their own version of what their family was like, of what their table topics were like, of what their interpersonal relationships were like, and it creates a mishmash of convoluted feelings,” Corvino said.
Sullivan said she has been targeted by other alumni for speaking out against the school, saying people went as far as contacting her employers to try to get her fired. She attributes this to the culture of pitting students against each other at the Family Foundation School.
“I thought that my concern initially would be the people who ran these facilities,” Sullivan said. “Unfortunately, in an unhealed community — which we are, we’re a very unhealed community; most people don’t have access to mental health support — it gets really projected on others.”
The Lost Souls Tree
The lost souls tree was planted in 2017 by Liz Ianelli, a former student who attended the school from 1994 until 1997. Ianelli has been outspoken about her experience at the school and how it has affected her life to this day, writing a book titled, “I See You, Survivor: Life Inside (and Outside) the Totally F*cked-Up Troubled Teen Industry.”
The green vase Zelkova tree, chosen for its symbolic resilience, was planted at the church in Long Eddy after being denied by a church in Hancock and the French Woods Sports and Arts Center that occupies the former grounds of the school, according to Ianelli’s book.
Corvino also said the site in Long Eddy is better than having a memorial in Hancock because alumni may not feel comfortable in Hancock due to their trauma.
Rocks to surround the tree were sent in from loved ones of those who died, including professionally engraved, hand painted, and natural rocks. When Corvino visited the tree after learning about the April 4 indictment of former Family Foundation School teacher and choir director Paul Geer, he noticed many deceased alumni had not been memorialized.
Geer was indicted on six federal criminal charges, accused of coercing and enticing children — students from the school — to travel across state lines to rape or sexually abuse them. Corvino said he used to feel grateful for his time at the school, but when he learned about Geer, he realized he had repressed many traumatizing memories from the school.
In an effort to make sense of his new reality, Corvino began adding painted rocks to the lost souls tree bearing the names of his friends who died, starting with Tom Cook.
“Tom was my best friend at the Family Foundation school,” Corvino said. “Tom was someone that found comic relief in things and we used to enjoy laughs together. I had the most happy memories with Tom.”
Corvino posted about the project in a Facebook group, “Grateful members of the Family Foundation School,” where alumni and staff members from the school stay connected. Since posting his work, Corvino has received dozens of requests for rocks from friends and family members of deceased alumni.
Corvino now makes the four-hour drive from Long Island to Long Eddy every few weeks to drop off more memorial rocks. Each rock is adorned with the name of a deceased alumnus and a symbol that represents that person. Cook’s rock, for example, includes a basketball because some of Corvino’s favorite memories with Cook were from playing basketball together.
Corvino said working with the loved ones of each alumnus to be memorialized has helped him heal from his own grief.
“We’ve been able to exchange, in such intimate fashion, their relationship and create symbols that represent these beloved people in our lives,” Corvino said. “I’m at a loss for words for how much that means to me as it relates to healing.”
Repeating History
Although the Family Foundation School closed in 2014, similar schools and programs — known as the “troubled teen industry” — continue to operate throughout the country despite pleas from alumni to close them or improve oversight of private residential treatment programs.
A 2008 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ineffective operating practices and untrained staff at residential programs led to deaths and abuse in the eight cases examined from unnamed programs. In the report, the GAO notes that residential programs are not governed by any federal oversight laws.
In New York, the Justice Center for People with Special Needs is responsible for investigating abuse and neglect allegations at state-operated and licensed facilities. According to the Family Foundation School’s former website, the school was registered with New York State Board of Regents and accredited by the Middle States Association of Schools and Colleges.
In 2017, a review by the Justice Center found that private residential schools approved by the New York State Department of Education (NYSED) are not reporting all reportable incidents as mandated by state law and regulation. The review found that in the six schools investigated, the lack of reporting was largely due to poor or absent staff training or inadequate reporting policies by the residential program. Dotti Howe, who worked at the Family Foundation School in 2002–2003, said she received no training on reporting abuse and was not made aware of her status as a mandated reporter. School officials are mandated reporters, according to state regulations, which means they are required to report suspected child abuse or maltreatment.
Reportable incidents include physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, deliberate inappropriate use of restraints, use of aversive interventions, obstruction of reporting a reportable incident, unlawful use or administration of a controlled substance, neglect, or other significant incidents that could harm the health, safety or welfare of students. “Reportable incident” is defined in state regulation, the 2012 “Protection of People with Special Needs Act,” which requires mandated reporters to report to the Vulnerable Persons’ Central Register in addition to the Statewide Central Register in an effort to protect students in residential schools.
Several rehabilitative schools for teenagers that currently operate in New York have drawn scrutiny and reports of abuse.
A judge ruled May 31 that the New York State Education Department hindered an abuse investigation at Shrub Oak International School in Yorktown, a residential school for adolescents and young adults aged 7–23 with autism. A petition filed by Disability Rights New York against NYSED and NYSED Commissioner Betty Rosa accused the department of refusing to turn over documents detailing reported incidents of abuse and neglect at the school. Disability Rights New York was investigating the school as the designated protection and advocacy system in the state, as required by the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act.
Students at that school, which opened in 2018, have experienced physical abuse and neglect, according to media reports.
Alumni of the Summit School, a private residential school for students with special needs in Upper Nyack, have alleged physical, sexual and verbal abuse at the school as recently as 2016, according to media reports. Alumni said the abuse was ignored by local law enforcement for years.
Two former students of Green Chimneys School in Brewster filed a lawsuit in 2021 against a former employee of the school accusing him of the sexual abuse of at least four students. Another employee allegedly abused at least one student. Green Chimneys School provides day and residential education for students in kindergarten through 12th grade who struggled in a typical school environment, according to the school website. Students of the school live on a working farm in residences supervised by “house parents.”
Two staff members of Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health in Red Hook were arrested in 2022 for falsifying business records related to the death of a 14-year-old student at the school. Churchill Orodi and Beryl Orech, the staff members responsible for the student’s care, reported to police that the student was in “good condition” at 5:30 a.m. — 40 minutes after the student was hit by a car and killed, according to media reports. The Devereux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that operates programs for children and adults with special needs in 13 states, has been the subject of a myriad of lawsuits alleging physical and sexual abuse.
Multiple lawsuits against the Family Foundation School, staff of the school, and the Argiroses are ongoing, alleging abuse by staff and neglect by the administration for allowing abuse to occur.
While some victims of the troubled teen industry fight for justice in the courts, others push for preventative actions from state and federal legislatures. Current legislation relating to the troubled teen industry includes the bipartisan Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act which was introduced in the House of Representatives in April. The act would require that a work group be formed to make recommendations to reduce the number of children sent to residential treatment programs and to improve the treatment of children in such programs.
Geer’s federal criminal case is ongoing, and he has pleaded innocent to the allegations. Geer waived speedy trial requirements June 28 and is being held in federal detention without bail.
This is part three 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 our reporter’s interview on 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 2 in the July 18 print edition.
