A place in rural Missouri helps parents whose adopted kids have problems — a camp by a lake where kids get better with golden retrievers, and where kind workers “create joy.”

The company that runs Calo Programs says it exists “to help the hardest cases — the students and families the bigger system has given up on.”

But a reporter's work shows a more hard and less nice picture.

Police often go to Calo to look into attacks or find people who run away. State groups that pay to send children there have asked about its work, training, and openness. Parents and former workers say there is very little help and almost no school, with only young, badly trained staff to watch the children. Two mothers said it was like something from “Lord of the Flies.”

The price is very high, and taxpayers often pay. Also called Change Academy at Lake of the Ozarks, Calo has charged up to $20,000 a month to help adopted children. Some stay for years.

It is part of the troubled teen industry. This is a big group of centers, schools, and outdoor programs with few rules. They make money. They have been sending adopted children away quietly. Adopted children are up to 10 times more likely to be sent away than other people.

A simple look at Calo’s work — how it gets money, and what happens to kids there — shows a bigger thing: Some youth treatment centers, backed by private equity companies, use a business plan that needs government money, even with little check and few results for bad care.

Reporters got many state papers and records by asking for public records. They also talked with young adults who had just been there, parents who sent their children there, former workers, and lawyers in more than a dozen lawsuits against the company.

In an emailed statement, Calo said the claims were not true and said student results show their way of doing things and new treatment are strong.

"Parents in the country came to us when they needed help. We are happy that we helped their children and sent them back to their families with the help they need to do well."

Many pages of Camden County Sheriff’s Office reports about calls to the place from 2020 to the fall of 2025 show that children in Calo’s care were said to be hurt, saw things, and did bad things.

Last summer, girls ran to the woods and jumped into the lake. Workers chased them and took them back, but they ran away again. (Calo said none of them were hurt.)

Just before that, sheriff’s deputies said two kids got high on meth. A Calo employee brought it in her purse. Calo said the employee was fired and the drug was never confirmed to be meth.

Before that, deputies called to Calo were told staff had fewer people than the teens, who ran into a room to attack another student. One boy climbed onto the roof, jumped, fell on rocks below, and had to go to the hospital by air. (Calo said fights happen among troubled kids, staff followed the rules when they called for help, and the boy who jumped had a sprained ankle.)

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Stacy Roberts runs the local juvenile detention center. He said his agency is unhappy with Calo and handles as many as 12 cases each year about Calo kids who live in other states.

Many families say Calo is like jail. Roberts says this is not true because places like his for young people must follow higher rules, he said. Unlike Calo, Roberts answers to the public, a judge and the juvenile justice system, which watches children’s stays in his facility.

"It is a business," Roberts said. "They do not help. They make money from these kids."

Calo started in 2007 with 40 beds. Now it has 144 beds this year. It helps with adoption trauma. It says 90% of its clients are adopted.

Many people have a rare illness called reactive attachment disorder. Experts say it has been used for many adoptees who have problems because they were taken away from their birth families and, for foreign adoptees, their country and culture.

The company says it has helped many young people, ages 9 to 20, from more than 30 states. It is one of the biggest centers of this kind in the country, and many people go there from other states.

Critics from groups and local police say helping families far away has let places like Calo avoid close checks and strict rules.

Calo said it helps with very bad problems as the law says, and it “works under strong checks” from governments that pay for its students. Some of them visit the campus every year or every month.

And it helps families in trouble.

"Many people think for-profit groups are more expensive or less good than non-profit groups," Calo said. "Talking to them in a careful way and using ads helps reduce the shame about mental health that stops people from getting treatment …"

More young people need help for mental health, and it costs more.

That need, with free public money, has brought investors. It is thought that the bigger industry gets billions of dollars each year from government money, including health programs, child welfare groups, school districts and juvenile justice systems.

Calo was bought around 2011 by a private equity company led by Alex Stavros. He went to Stanford. In the next 13 years, he grew the business by joining with other treatment centers. It became the parent company Embark Behavioral Health. Stavros left in 2024. He did not answer reporters.

Stavros says on his LinkedIn profile that he built Embark to 38 programs in 20 states and made revenue go up 40 times, to $180 million. Under his leadership, Calo changed its business model “from entirely private pay to majority third party reimbursed,” including private health insurance and Medicaid, and many government programs.

This is very important for Calo’s business. Nicole Fuglsang is the current CEO. She once gave a talk at an industry conference about how to get money from many places. The 2014 talk was called: “Show me the Money — An Innovative Approach to Finding Funding for Families.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many residential programs had few students, but Calo kept admissions going.

In 2020, there was a 9-year-old boy from Haiti. Illinois education funds paid for him to stay there. He later told his mother that other kids were mean to him. They used bad words about his race and made a mess on his bed, his mother said. When she took him out, he woke up screaming for weeks, she said, before finally telling her that an older boy had sexually hurt him there.

Later, Calo officials told the police that they could not prove the sex abuse claim and that both sides bullied each other, according to the report.

Her mother, whose name reporters are not saying to protect her son, said she told everyone she could about what happened to him: police, Illinois state authorities and Calo’s parent company. She felt no one cared. They said they looked into it, but she said she saw Calo keep doing business as usual.

“The money will win again,” she wrote to the Illinois State Board of Education, “and Calo will get more money from school systems and hurt young children like my son.”

A month after her son came to Calo, Embark asked many people to talk about business. “DOING EPIC SH$T” was on the cover of the August 2020 “Embark Academy Sales & Marketing Conference” book. It had a talk about how to “overcome objections” with sales ways to “build your client base and keep your pipelines full!”

People were told to help a child who does not believe or a spouse who is angry feel better. In a meeting that said admissions are a very important part of the treatment team, the handbook said: “The admissions person sells hope when the family is at their lowest and most hopeless, scary, and vulnerable time.”

At Calo’s request, reporters called families the company said were good. Some said the place helped their children get better.

Bill Hayden said his daughter came from Russia. She was never hurt during the 15 months she was at Calo, starting in 2016. Hayden is a retired doctor. He thinks Calo changed his daughter’s life, and said that his daughter agrees.

"I thought they were good workers who tried hard to do their best with one of the hardest groups of kids you could ever have," Hayden said. "We were happy that things were going as well as they could with kids with very big problems."

A family in New Hampshire said they paid about $100,000 for their adopted daughter’s 10-month stay. It started in June 2023, when she was 10 years old. The New Hampshire state government gave more money.

The girl had many bad things happen to her before she was adopted — drugs before birth, violence, sexual abuse, and very little care, her mother said. In her new home, she still had problems with her mind and more and more bad behavior.

Her mother remembers the bad signs she did not see — how dirty the place was and how unhappy the children looked. Her daughter woke up screaming during a visit months into her stay. Her mother found a bad journal note: “I had a vision that (she) attacked me but not just a few scratches,” her daughter wrote, naming the person who did it. “I had blood dripping everyw(h)ere.”

Late one night, weeks later, the mother’s phone rang. It was another mom. Her daughter had been at Calo. The woman from Illinois said both girls had been hurt by another girl.

Reporters do not say the names of the mothers or their daughters because they do not usually say the names of people who say they are victims of sexual assault.

The mothers say they both told the same therapist about their worries, and say Calo hid the assaults.

The Illinois mom said her adopted 11-year-old daughter was sent to Calo after she had thoughts of suicide. In February 2024, she told her mom that a girl in her preteen program had touched her private parts months earlier while lying next to her and had said she would beat her up if she told anyone.

The girl said to her mom: “She touched me. She touches everybody. Everybody knows that.”

The mother says the Calo therapist first said it was “girls playing footsie” before the company said it had lost the daughter’s first report. The mother also says the therapist and a Calo director later told her the problem had been “handled,” and said the troubled girl was gone, so everyone was safe.

The mother was sad, but she thought Calo was right that it was only a small mistake in talking and that the problem was fixed.

Then, weeks later, the girl told her mother that the same attacker did the same thing to a younger girl from New Hampshire.

Both families took their daughters home at once and told the authorities. Now they are in a group of families suing Calo.

After the mothers said they were unhappy, Calo said it told the authorities right away, including the state child welfare agency, which looked into it and “said the claim was not enough for a full investigation.”

"We say the report was late because a staff member did not follow the rules and did not send the statement to the quality assurance team," Calo said.

The Missouri Department of Social Services said before that Calo did not fully report serious incidents many times. In 2022, for example, the state told them to turn in five missing files, and a company official "acknowledged Calo needs to change their practice as it is not currently working."

The mothers were also the first to tell the police about the claims. The sheriff’s office told AP in a statement that deputies “found what looks like a mistake by Calo staff not telling the police about the claims,” though deputies did not look more.

They also called people in their home states, and some helped pay for the girls to stay at Calo.

The Illinois mother said her daughter’s treatment was paid by a program called the Family Support Program. The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services runs it. It is for help with behavior health care. She learned about it from Calo. She and other Illinois parents told AP that they thought the state had checked the program because it paid for many kids at Calo.

That agency and the Illinois State Board of Education both say Calo is one of the programs they pay for. In the last 10 years, the two Illinois agencies have spent more than $35 million to send kids to Calo, AP data says.

Last year, the Board of Education paid more than $1.6 million for 13 children to get special education. Healthcare and Family Services spent $1.2 million for 19 children. Some families used money from both.

Melissa Kula said that Illinois and Missouri do not run Calo every day or control the facility, and that they use the Missouri government for Calo’s licenses and approvals.

The Illinois State Board of Education said the state does not have a direct role in placements. It only pays school districts back. The education department said it has never been to Calo’s campus. The law only says visits are needed if the facility is within 50 miles (80.47 kilometers) of Illinois state lines.

Healthcare and Family Services came for the first time in May 2024, after many reports that children were badly hurt, including the girls from Illinois and New Hampshire.

The Illinois team of five nurses and officials came to Calo, and the report of what they found there is very bad.

Calo leaders said they had to go to a new worker training class, and the team was very surprised by what they saw, the report said: It “was only a drum circle,” they wrote. “There was no explanation of how the drum circle was about therapy or why it was used to train new workers.”

To reporters, the company said the drum circle was a "good activity."

The Illinois investigators said they were watched closely, and were not allowed to see much of the staff and property, including records and training lessons. The team worried there was “an effort to stonewall” their inspection.

"This, and seeing the drum circle's training for new staff, made the reviewers think there is no training plan," the report said.

Calo says investigators were not kept out of its campus, but there was “a disagreement” about records they could not see. Its employee made “an error in judgment” that the company said was fixed quickly, and Illinois investigators were later given full digital access.

The Illinois team did not trust the school’s words about its therapy methods. They said staff was “not aware of any research” that showed they worked. They found the school did not seem to understand serious mental health problems children may have, like bipolar disorder. Instead, Calo said the children’s problems were always seen as a sign of adoption trauma.

Embark is Calo’s parent company. It talked about changes. The Illinois investigators later said they thought the company would do the "commendable" fast changes it promised. These changes included paying more and having fewer people until it could hire more staff.

“At the end of the visit, we saw we talked in a wrong way about our clinic services — something we fixed by talking more with the evaluators,” Calo wrote in a statement.

Former teachers like Dustin Wood said he worked at Calo for six years as an English teacher before quitting in 2024. He said that when he tried to tell company leaders about his worries, Calo leaders stopped asking him to parent retreats and started writing him up for things like calling parents to talk about their children’s progress.

Wood said all workers got the same small training, whether as a teacher, cook or “coach” who watched the children all day and night. They were told all the kids had something called reactive attachment disorder, but they were not told how to help them, he said.

Calo said it gives 40 hours of training. It said it looked at and fixed the concerns from Wood and another teacher that company officials "thought were valid."

Wood said Calo took more kids. Sometimes younger children were with older teens. There were not enough adults to watch them. It got very chaotic, he said.

"There was not one kid," Wood said about the students he worked with, "who left in better shape than when they started."

One day last June, Amos Pierce woke up from a nap. He heard his Ford F-150 start. He ran outside and saw a girl hiding in the truck.

He lived near Calo for many years, and thought she was from there, because he was used to loud screams, escapes, and damage, he told AP.

Pierce said he tried to help the girl, who was screaming and crying, out of the truck. He had a daughter about her age, he told her. He was not angry and would not hurt her. Come out, he said, and we can call the police.

"I saw that girl was very scared. She wanted to do anything to get away from what made her so scared," he said.

He watched her drive away. She drove over his plants when she backed out of the drive. She almost went into a ditch. She was too young to drive.

“I had tears in my eyes,” Pierce said. “I was sad, and I was very scared for that child, more than I was worried about my truck.”

The girl ran away from Calo and met the police. It was scary and sometimes dangerous.

The police saw the truck and followed it. Their lights and sirens were on. Two other police departments came. They put spike strips across the road to stop it.

After she got out of the truck, one officer pointed a gun at her. The girl climbed over the middle of the road to run across the highway, and ran into a swamp as officers chased her. She breathed hard and cried as officers arrested her face-down on the side of the road.

Did anyone know who she was? One officer said simply: “Calo knows. She is from Calo.”

The chase was also on the TV show “Ozark Law,” which said she was 15 years old and going 70 mph.

Sheriff Chris Edgar said the incident changed him.

For years, deputies often went to Calo for people who ran away, injuries, vandalism and assaults. When reporters asked about 17 reports of serious incidents in the last five years, Chief Deputy Colonel Scott Hines of the Camden County Sheriff’s Office said most were not true.

The Missouri Department of Social Services is also called Calo. Baylee Watts, a department spokesperson, did not talk about one case because the records are closed and private. She said its job was to answer every report and help the police.

Hines said Calo has never been looked at for bad things.

But Edgar, who started work in January 2025, said after the girl stole the truck, he wanted Calo officials to do more.

"They did not give witness statements. They did not talk to the police. This made it hard for us to look into things. That was one thing I had a problem with," he said.

Edgar said he would put them in jail if they stopped officers from going inside or talking to kids and staff.

“They have the child, so I think they must take care of it,” Edgar said.

Calo said it had a good relationship with Edgar’s office, and sent a photo of a letter on Edgar’s letterhead saying their business was good.

Edgar’s son worked at Calo. Edgar did not send the letter to AP. He gave another statement. It says his office and Calo work better together now, and deputies can go there freely: “I know things were not like this in the past, but this is nice to know everyone is working together.”

He did not answer the questions.

Calo said its place is open and not locked, a place where "students can move around the campus and not stay in their rooms or one building." The girl who stole the truck, it said, was later sent to a place with more care, including locked doors, because she ran away many times.

"In this case, a neighbor left his keys in a car that was not locked and had its doors open. A student who ran away took the car," Calo said.

Pierce, the neighbor, told the sheriff’s office he did not want to charge the girl, but wanted Calo to be responsible.

Pierce’s daughter used social media. She said Calo should be looked at because she thought the children there were not safe.

Pierce said a Calo worker told him and his daughter not to post it and asked him to take it down. He was told to watch his child more.

Pierce was very scared. He said he was not worried about his own kid. He was worried about theirs.

He was a reporter.

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