New Netflix documentary unearths harrowing case of boarding school abuse

New Netflix documentary The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping explores the account of Katherine Kubler at the Academy at Ivy Ridge.

We’re only in March and Netflix has already delivered its subscribers a handful of compelling documentaries, shining a light on stories that demand to be told. The latest that is sure to peak streamer’s interest is The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping, which started streaming on Tuesday, March 5th. The show is an investigative docu-series spanning three 60-minute episodes, exploring the issues of abuse in the troubled teen industry.

The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping Netflix documentary

The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping dives into the account of students who once attended the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a for-profit boarding school in Ogdensburg, N.Y. The school was promoted as a place to send teenagers who were acting out, a place where they could become better through methods of team sports, fostered learning, and more.

Ivy Ridge ran between 2001 and 2009, but the documentary breaks down that teens sent there suffered physical restraints, solitary confinement, and other scarring experiences.

The director of the Netflix documentary, Katherine Kubler, was once an attendee of Ivy Ridge herself for 15 months, and she and other former students share the accounts of their days there across the installments.

Katherine has spent time devoted to gathering and compiling files that serve as a testament to the abuse she and others suffered at the school: “No one thought to clean up the evidence,” she told PEOPLE in an interview, explaining that when she went years later to the abandoned property the files on the students were still there.

Among the evidence recovered was surveillance footage of abuse and restraint logs.

Katherine also explained that the recovery of the evidence brought back old wounds, not just for her but others who were alerted that the evidence existed and had been found.

Katherine Kubler exposes Ivy Ridge Academy

In the documentary, Katherine breaks down the intricate details of how the staff were able to manipulate the teenagers there, the school itself designed to keep people there as long as possible to make more money from the parents.

She relays that the staff used “brainwashing techniques” that were actually modeled on the Synanon cult of the 1960s in California led by Charles ‘Chuck’ Dederich. She and others trapped there were deprived of sleep, and food, and made to repeat, for hours, tasks that pushed them into a trance-like state.

Now that the documentary has exposed the extent of the horrific abuse of power within the walls at Ivy Ridge, Katherine says she and others hope “there’s some justice that comes from all of this and that it will empower more people to speak out.”

The school opened under the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), and the organization faced widespread allegations of physical and psychological abuse of those sent to partake in the programs the teenagers sent into its programs. A lawsuit was filed against WWASPS in 2006 and it’s now no longer in business after Ivy Ridge lost its accreditation the previous year.

After Ivy Ridge shut its doors, the property of the former Academy was purchased by a businessman, NNY 360 reports, but nothing was made of the place and the land has since been abandoned.

The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping is now streaming on Netflix.