A 55-year-old school in Utah was recently ordered to close, and some, including Paris Hilton, are celebrating online. On Monday, local news announced that the Utah Department of Health and Human Services had revoked the license of Provo Canyon School’s Springville campus.The school was cited for multiple violations, including failing to maintain health and safety and reporting serious incidents and using aggressive physical contact. Its license was already on a conditional basis due to the previous citation and now, it will have to cease all operations by August 6. At a media briefing Tuesday, Shannon Thoman-Black of the Utah Department of Health and Human Services said the school’s owners “cannot reapply for a new license for five years,” and in the meantime, the department will monitor the facility as “these children are discharged to secure locations.”“Provo Canyon Schools CEO Tim Marshall said in a statement: “We disagree with the state’s decision to revoke Provo Canyon Schools’ Springville campus license and are evaluating all available legal and administrative options, including an appeal,” adding that “our priority remains providing safe, high-quality care and support for teens and their families.”Amidst all this and that, one thing has been established. American heiress and media personality Paris Hilton is celebrating the decision, which she has been rallying for for years. On Tuesday, she took to X to share a post celebrating the news. She wrote that she had been “waiting for years” to announce this news. He said, “The place that hurt me and countless children before and after me will no longer be allowed to operate.” “The dream I had of protecting future generations from the abuse I endured is finally coming true.”
a shock from the past
Hilton’s association with the school goes back a long way. She forcibly went to school for 11 months in 1997 at the age of 17. While she remained silent for years, in 2020, she began speaking about the hardships she faced at the institute in interviews and in her documentary ‘This is Paris’. In her Washington op-ed, she wrote that she arrived at school after a parent-sanctioned kidnapping where “two guys with handcuffs” woke her up and “asked if (she) wanted to take the ‘easy way out or the hard way'” before allegedly taking her screaming from her home. Her parents, she said, did this to help curb her “rebellious” behavior.He wrote, “I did not know why or where I was being taken against my will. I soon learned that I was being sent to hell.” They wrote that staff “monitor and censor” their communications with the outside world, eliminating the possibility of seeking help. Hilton said she was kept in solitary confinement “in a room where there were scratches and blood stains on the walls”, and was regularly scolded by staff who allegedly hit and strangled minors in their care.In another instance, she said she was sexually harassed by staff members at school as a teenager. In a New York Times interview, she alleged that male staff members took her and other female students to a room “very late at night” and digitally penetrated them under the guise of performing a cervical exam. “It wasn’t even a doctor,” Hilton told the Times. “It was with a few different staff members where they would lay us on the table and put their fingers inside us. I don’t even know what they were doing, but it definitely wasn’t any doctor and it was really scary.In an X-post, she wrote that she “didn’t sleep and took a lot of medication” during the exam and “didn’t understand what was happening” at the time. She wrote, “I was forced to lie down on a padded table, spread my legs and submit… I cried as they held me down.”She also said she endured similar violations at three other facilities in her youth, writing that she was given medication without diagnosis and “strangled, slapped in the face, spied on while bathing and deprived of sleep.” Hilton’s allegations prompted other former residents to come forward with similar complaints.
Troubled Teen Industry
At least one industry organization will no longer be allowed to traumatize and abuse children
In October 2021, the National Disability Rights Network released a damning report on the for-profit residential-treatment industry, prompted by the 2020 death of a 16-year-old Michigan youth academy student who died of suffocation after staff piled on top of him to restrain him. The report catalogs rampant abuses at for-profit facilities across the country, “ranging from broken bones, fight clubs, and sexual abuse by trusted staff, to forced isolation, shaming, and a complete failure by some facilities to provide the mental health treatment that prompted placement in the first place,” just to name a few examples.According to a 2022 Times report, the troubled teen industry receives billions in funding annually and provides inadequate medical care to patients, leading to assault, sedation, physical restraint, and imprisonment. Facilities have traditionally been run with little or no federal oversight. From 2000 to 2015, 86 children have reportedly died at these places.Hilton previously described it as a $50 billion industry that includes therapeutic boarding schools, military-style boot camps, juvenile justice facilities and behavior modification programs.Thus, Hilton lobbied Congress to push for stricter regulations and increase funding for government oversight of the areas. At the time, he called on then-President Joe Biden and federal lawmakers to “enact a basic federal ‘Bill of Rights’ for youth in congregate care.” Ultimately, in 2024, Biden signed the bipartisan Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act.With Provo Canyon’s license revoked, at least one institution in the industry will no longer be allowed to operate to traumatize and abuse children and for Hilton and other former attendees, that’s good news.