Academy at Swift River
coeducational therapeutic boarding school for teenagers
The Academy at Swift River, also known as ASR, was a coeducational therapeutic boarding school for teenagers, located in Plainfield and Cummington, Massachusetts. Established in 1997 and closed in 2013, it was a part of the Aspen Education Group, which in turn is owned by Bain Capital's CRC health group.
The school's student population was described as "bright but underachieving kids" with a variety of behavioral problems. The majority of students used prescribed psychiatric medications. ASR was in session year-round and offered a college preparatory curriculum for high school grades 9 to 12. Total enrollment was about 55 students.
The school was the focus of the 2005 book What It Takes To Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out by journalist David Marcus.
History
In July 2013, Aspen Education Group announced that it would close the school later that summer.
References
Further reading
Marcus, David L. (2006). What It Takes to Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out (Paperback).
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4671388. VIAF identifies the subject as 137408070. The Library of Congress control number is n2004012623. Authority coordinates are 42.481, -72.884. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2013, 2005 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Academy at Swift River” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.