Weighed down by the past

I apologize in advance for how jumbled this is going to be.

I still remember the exact day that I was sent there. January 27, 2020. I woke up with my "mom" crying at me, saying that I was going to "one of those schools." I immediately jolted up in bed. The lights turned on and I saw a pair of huge men. One of them went to shake my hand, like it was no big deal that they came to abduct me from what I thought was a safe place... My own bedroom! At four in the morning! You might be wondering why this was happening. Well, aside from some behavioral issues and major manic and depressive tendencies, I had attempted suicide the week prior. And how do they react to that? By sending me away.

Anyway, let's fast forward a little bit to when I was being escorted out of my house. When we got outside, one of the men, ("goons" they call them at D.A.) handcuffed me and dragged me to the car, which I am sure only police are allowed to do. I might be wrong. Anyway, when we finally got to the Discovery Academy campus, there were people in the front office. They acted as though it was appalling that I was brazen to them.

Fast forward a few months, I had made a few friends, including a guy we'll call Jon for the sake of privacy. The way the staff treated the outsiders was disgusting, to say the least. It was one thing not to act like a gang member or be white. It was a whole other thing to be gay, like I am. The staff supported bullying and held things called fight nights, (in which they would force the little guys to participate and be beaten up while everyone watched and laughed) in the house, called North House, which was reserved for the lower levels. If the staff didn't like you, they would tell other students to jump you and bully you. Luckily I never got jumped or beaten up, but it was threatened multiple times.

While there, I had to fear for my life on many occasions. Sometimes a knife would go missing from the kitchen, and after having multiple threats to my life from other students, I had reason to be terrified. When I say the staff are bad here, that does not apply to all of them. There were a few who were there to love and support the students, and I credit them for my life. The rare kindness of some people there was the only thing that kept me going. When I leveled up and was able to leave North House, I had endured a week of depressive panic attacks where I would hide from everyone and claw at the skin under my clothes, drawing blood. When this behavior was found out, I was put on reflection, which was a way of isolating someone from the rest of the group by not letting them speak and making them wear a bright blue shirt. If you were to break any rules of reflection, you would be extended for a day.

Often times, the failure of one student would lead to the punishment of the whole group, which made a vicious cycle of harassment and intimidation among the group. Basically, if you f***ed up, thus screwing everyone else over, you were targeted by the other students and were often times assaulted. Anyway, let's move on to the subject of how fights and assaults among the kids there were poorly managed and prevented. One day, my friend Jon, who I mentioned previously, walked down with blood streaming from his mouth and nose. He was the one who was assaulted, yet he got punished after he DEFENDED HIMSELF. I'm sorry, but that really bothered me. That's aside from the paint though. The pony is that if the staff were actually effective, that would have never happened.

And now let's move on to the topic of how corrupt the discipline system is there. D.A. has this idealogy that a failure by one is a failure by many, which I already described before. But worse than that, if you so much as DARE to do anything but be pelted by your attacker, you were put on reflection. In another instance, and read on with caution because this is gross, a guy I knew drank URINE because someone peed in his water bottle, and then was put on reflection. For no reason. I'm sorry, I'm just getting way to upset by this right now. I'll post again soon.

Source
The original testimony on Reddit