Ake Pecha story

The story of Ake Pecha

by Marianna, USA

folkfreeatlast@angelfire.com

Wow!!! Surfing the web this afternoon, I decided to see what I might come up with if I entered "International School Ake Pecha' into Google.com. And lo and behold, here I landed, like Alice through the looking glass, once again, deja-vu. Astonishing... this group is still up to its old tricks? Still functioning in the US???      Still growing????? Cripes!!! This is really infuriating...

I am a former American employee of the International School Ake Pecha (circa 1984-85). I, along with another American teaching colleague hired at the same time -- both of us, I can say, were "liberal, but world-worn, fairly worldly-wise". Neither of us were the young starry-eyed revolutionary idealists our employers were used to dealing with. 

My American colleague and I always wondered about the "holes" in the picture we were able to put together about ... Where all the money the Commonwealth of Virginia paid to house, feed, clothe and educate their students ("Our" children, American children, wards of the courts of Virginia), was going... Why the obsession with collecting donations: of books, of clothes, of food (some of which went to our students, some... who knows)... Why the shabby little cinder-block nursing home that served as school and dorm to our 26 students was never invested with adequate repair monies, leaving our kids to live in third-world conditions...Why so little actual care for our students, who were pretty much left to run wild by their burnt-out dorm captains (who were on call 24/7/30/365 -- sound familiar...?), most of whom were, frankly, too inexperienced, unskilled and immature to have been placed in the role of sole parent of up to 9 at least haywire, if not profoundly disturbed, pre-teens, teens and (violent)young adults. 

We recognized the political bent, and had some sympathy for the idealism and the dedication of our Scandinavian peers, but there was something just really fishy about the whole thing from the top down. It was the money...It was the secretiveness (the main office was deemed out of bounds for my American colleague and I from the first week of our employment -- which made us just itch to get in there). It was the hostility toward us, when it became clear we were not interested in moving on campus or handing over our (grudgingly paid and always late) paychecks to the school. It was the wierdness and nervousness of the American "executive director," who eventually just disappeared without an explanation or a trace. It was the vehemence with which my students were "shooed" away from the Ake Pecha bus, freshly arrived from Massachusetts with a load of newly returned Danes (and what else, we always wondered?... on their way to Central America), to whom my students were simply extending a kindly welcome.

One of the things that rankles me to this day is that our kids could have benefitted greatly from the (generous) funds alloted monthly to the school for the care of each child -- these kids had already lost so much in their lives, and time was wasting for each one of them. It became very clear, very quickly to my American colleague and I that those dollars received by the school were not going provide services for our kids, but to feed somebody's pockets somewhere else in the world. We thought at the time -- I think we got the impression from our Scandinavian peers, who probably thought it themselves -- that they were scornfully sending "rich American dollars" to their schools in Zimbabwe, St. Johns, in the UK, Holland, (Thailand, I think?)... where it was needed so much more than it was needed by our students, who could do without, because, being American, they were, of course, so much "better off". 

My American teaching colleague and I, within about three months being hired -- enough time to get the picture that the picture was not good -- with much deliberation, and with growing outrage, decided to go through channels to at least initiate an investigation of the school. The scarey thing about that process was that we didn't know who to contact who would listen to us... from what we could tell, the placement agencies had been ignoring all the problems, some of them MAJOR safety issues for the students that clearly indicated the school should have been closed (never mind the financial and political stuff). The clever Tvind people had made inroads -- and, for all we knew, had the full support of -- at least the Department of Mental Health and Retardation, Department of Social Services, Department of Education. (..There might have been another agency, too.. I remember five funding agencies.) The Department of Corrections had already ceased placing students there when it became clear to them that their students were at greater risk there than they might have been anywhere else -- I think they only had one student still placed there when the school was closed. My American colleague and I eventually met with the heads of the Departments of Mental Health/ Retardation, and Education. The gentleman from the Department of Education (Les Goode) was very concerned with what he heard, and it is my understanding that it was he who pushed for a thorough investigation.

The hearing was held in Richmond on May 21, 1985. Both my American colleague and I testified, along with social workers who had filed complaints or who had concerns, and some of our Scandinavian peers in their own "defense." The political and financial concerns were shied away from -- too embarrassing, probably, for the funding departments to approach -- in favor of the stacks of reports and complaints that had been on file with the separate agencies: security and safety infractions, neglect, students attacking other students, students being left behind a distance from the school when they became out of control. Separately, (tragically) these reports did not appear to amount to much, but combined the stack was impressively tall -- this was pointed out in the courtroom -- containing enough material to justify rescinding the school's license. After the hearing, we were thanked by one of the social workers (who had no doubt contributed to the pile of compliants, but had not for some reason been motivated to publicly question the depth of her personal pile). We were thanked for "having the courage to speak out." 

When you go through something like this, you don't forget. We always wondered what the heck WAS going on at Ake Pecha. Several years after the school was closed my American colleague encountered a British teacher who worked for an American school in Denmark... The question was asked... "Say... have you ever heard of The People's Folk School... the school in Tvind?" The Brit visibly recoiled: "Why do you want to know?" "Because I had a bad experience working there, and I'm curious about how the school is thought of in Denmark." The Brit: "Oh, when people in Denmark hear of that school they cringe. They go making money off of everybody, starving their poor idealistic workers,working them to death, and the people on the top are driving around in Merceds and wearing Italian suits." Click! So it wasn't a Euro-communist/Maoist/revolutionary cell (whatever)...It was a scam, for the Commonwealth of Virginia, for our kids, even for our idealistic Scandinavian "peers." We were all "suckered."

And here on this website today I'm seeing confirmation of everything we'd pretty much put together without confirmation. Thanks! A long-standing mystery in the process of being solved.

I'll be certain to email this site to the woman who was our contact in the Virginia Attorney General's office, for her information...

One more thing that remains a mystery to me... in about November of 1984... something happened to the ship the Folk School was operating in the Atlantic -- My Scandinavian peers were on the phone to Denmark, walking through the halklway of my section, very upset. Everybody was speaking in Danish, hush-hush about it... I've always wondered, and was never able to find out... What happened to The Big Bear? Would somebody who's "out of the cult" be willing to share that story with me?

folkfreeatlast@angelfire.com