REVEILLE FOR TEEN BOOT CAMPS

What to do when your teenager goes off the rails in ways that seem
beyond your control -- anything from drugs and alcohol abuse to
depression, violence and more? In desperation, many parents turn to
the hundreds of private boot camps, wilderness camps and therapeutic
boarding schools across the country.

Last week, a report to Congress stamped a long-overdue "buyer beware"
label on an industry that has exploded since the 1990s with only
patchy regulation and oversight. Many slick operators sell expensive
"solutions" to frantic parents, yet seem to have borrowed their
manuals from the sadistic fictional camp in the movie Holes.

There's no hard data on how widespread the abuse is, or even how many
camps exist. But the report, by the Government Accountability Office,
the investigative arm of Congress, is a wake-up call.

It found thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which involved
death, at programs across the country and U.S.-operated programs
overseas. During 2005 alone, for example, 33 states reported 1,619
staff members involved in incidents of abuse. In one tragedy, a
15-year-old girl collapsed and died while hiking. She lay dead in the
road for 18 hours. Staff had accused her of faking two days of
illness, not recognizing classic symptoms of dehydration.

Yet despite years of controversy, the industry is lightly regulated.
In many states, monitoring and licensing is so lax that camps simply
give themselves a label and falsely claim to have expertise in areas
from survival training to specific mental illnesses.

Properly run, the camps do give many troubled teens "a general sense
of mastery" and "the opportunity to feel successful," says Allison
Pinto, spokesperson for Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic and
Appropriate Use of Residential Treatment (A START), a task force of
leaders in children's mental health. At the same time, "the problems
are not limited to just a few programs with a few bad folks."

So how can desperate parents, and their troubled teens, separate the
worthwhile camps from the horrors?

Some lawmakers want better federal and state regulation and oversight
of the industry. Other proposals include databases and websites like
those maintained by Consumer Reports or Trip-Advisor.

All good ideas. And a more comprehensive report later this year will
provide better data to work with. For now, though, parents should
proceed with extreme caution.