For many teenagers at Wellspring Academy of the Carolinas, the remote mountain outpost students call “fat school” is a last-ditch stop in a losing battle that has consumed their lives.
The tiny school, which opened last year in a refurbished summer camp in Brevard, is designed to test one of the most radical, controversial and expensive ideas about how best to treat pediatric obesity.
At issue is whether plucking youths as young as 11 who are at least 30 pounds overweight out of “obesogenic” environments and sending them to a highly structured therapeutic boarding school for rapid weight loss and intensive behavior therapy actually works.
A month’s stay at the school costs $6,250.
“We know that moderation has not been successful for these kids,” said Wellspring President Ryan Craig, who characterizes such measures as improving school lunches as too little, too late.
Craig opened the first academy in 2004 in a shuttered mental hospital outside Fresno, Calif. Two more campuses are scheduled to open, one near Boston and the other near Austin, Texas.
“Overall, our success rate is excellent,” Craig said. The average weight loss for students who stay eight months (twice the required minimum) is 81 pounds, he said, and the first class of 15 students on average maintained their weight loss 10 months after leaving — the only results Wellspring has published.
Among the students is Terry Henry of Exeter, N.H., who enrolled in September 2004 at 15 weighing 558 pounds. He left 15 months later weighing 253 pounds and today weighs about 278 pounds, school officials say.
Henry’s success contrasts with the experience of Jahcobie Cosom, 18, of Dorchester, Mass. Cosom, who lost 167 pounds at the school and 30 during his first month home, gained 260 pounds in less than a year, his weight rocketing to 562. He is scheduled to undergo gastric bypass surgery this summer.
“If their families don’t change, [students] are going to be back to their old ways of doing things” when they get home, said Anjali Jain, a pediatrician at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., who specializes in treating obesity.
Jain and other experts question the expense and necessity of boarding school. They say there have been no published studies of Wellspring that meet the gold standard for scientific research and that an adequate assessment requires a follow-up far longer than 10 months.
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Life at Wellspring Academy of the Carolinas
Who’s there: About two dozen students as young as 11 usually are in residence. Enrollment is capped at 50.
The drill: The regulated diet totals about 1,200 calories per day, with fewer than 12 grams of fat. Students must do at least 10,000 steps daily on a pedometer (equal to walking about 5 miles) and participate in intensive behavior therapy.
Menu: “Uncontrolleds,” which are supposed to teach portion control, may be eaten in any quantity. Choices include fresh fruit and salad bar items as well as fat-free yogurt and cottage cheese. Skim milk is OK, as is Crystal Light soda.
Favorite: Most popular “uncontrolled” is Splenda, the no-calorie sweetener. Some students call themselves “Splendaholics” and go through more than 500 servings per day.
Banned: No use of cell phones, DVD players and computers except under supervision for schoolwork.
Discipline: Misbehaving students can be temporarily shipped to a “Camp Hope” disciplinary program run by Wellspring’s parent company.
Philosophy: Wellspring Clinical Director Daniel Kirschenbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University, says the program’s primary goal is to create a “healthy obsession” with weight that will endure long after a student leaves. “This is like training for the Olympics,” Kirschenbaum said.
