More than a dozen former students of the private Hyde School in Bath have contacted the Press Herald in the week since the paper published an investigation detailing claims of abuse and mistreatment to say they had similar, negative experiences.
A handful of other students and parents, meanwhile, have reached out to defend the school and counter that Hyde provided a transformational educational experience.
The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram published a story last Sunday after speaking with eight former students who detailed how the school’s nontraditional practices had long-term negative impacts on their lives. The allegations included varying levels of physical, emotional or sexual abuse at the school’s campuses in Maine and Connecticut, and many spoke of a culture of shame and blame.
Two days before that story was published, another former student, Jessica Fuller, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court seeking class action for students who attended Hyde, alleging they were subjected to forced labor and emotional abuse at the school. The suit was filed by the firm Justice Law Collaborative, which has been working with about two dozen former students, as well as Maine-based Island Law Justice.
The school — founded in 1966 by Bowdoin College graduate Joseph Gauld, who previously worked as a teacher and administrator — has denied the claims.
A longtime attorney for Hyde, Martha Gaythwaite, called the recent allegations “difficult to read,” and pushed back against the suggestion that the school is part of the “so-called profit-driven Troubled Teen industry,” referring to therapeutic schools and institutions that have come under increased scrutiny in recent years.
In a statement, the attorney challenged media outlets to “responsibly shed light — not just heat — on these allegations.”
The lawsuit names the head of school, Laura Gauld, her husband, Executive Director Malcom Gauld, and several other members of the Gauld family as defendants. Malcom’s father, the school’s founder Joseph, died in 2023.
No hearings have been scheduled, and the suit could take years to resolve.
According to the complaint and accounts that former students shared with the Press Herald, those practices included a discipline system of forced labor called 2-4, “attitude trips” to a property in the woods or an island, shame-based group attack therapy and a system called “brother’s keeper” that required students to report when their peers broke a rule, or face the same punishment themselves.
Those same allegations were repeated this week by more than a dozen former Hyde students and parents, who were not featured in Sunday’s story and not yet a part of the lawsuit.
Some attended the school as far back as the ’70s and as recently as 2014, and said they, too, witnessed or experienced physical and emotional abuse during their time at the school.
HARSH PUNISHMENT
Pat W. said she reluctantly sent her son to the school’s Bath campus in 2005. She lived in Brunswick at the time, and said her ex-husband thought the boy, who was bright but bored with school, could benefit from the structure. Instead, his mother said, his time at the school damaged his self-esteem for years.
Pat, who asked not to be fully identified to protect her son’s privacy, said he quickly joined the school’s cross country program. After Hyde lost at a meet, she said, the whole team was required to run sprints up and down a hill in the pouring rain as punishment for their loss, during which her son slipped in the mud and dislocated his pelvis.
Later in the semester, she said, her son returned to his dorm building late at night to find all of his dormmates out in the snow — some money had gone missing, Pat said, and staff went student-to-student, asking them to confess to the stealing, then made them take off a piece of clothing when they didn’t.
Her son called home first thing the next morning, and Pat said she came to pick him up and unenroll him from Hyde.
“I was absolutely livid,” she said. “I’d had enough of this place.”
Nathan Brostoff spent his junior and senior years at Hyde’s Connecticut campus in 2013 and 2014, where he said he was frequently put on a work crew because he struggled with the “brother’s keeper” expectations. He said those weeks-long interruptions in his learning left him feeling unprepared for college, and his mother was never informed when he was pulled out of class to work as punishment.
Brostoff said Hyde was much more difficult for students who were independent thinkers or had learning disabilities or mental health issues and were often systematically punished with labor. He said he eventually ingratiated himself with faculty and became a student leader, at which point he was tasked with supervising peers who had gotten in trouble.
“I watched teens, forced to plank for long periods of time, their bodies physically shaking, and if anyone dropped, the entire group was forced to start over, all while the person whose body could not handle the load had a fully grown adult inches from their face screaming at them to get back up,” he said. “As a ‘leader’ I was expected to help enforce these policies and practices, and I am ashamed to admit that I did, as it was a hell of a lot easier to be on the faculty’s good side, rather than one of the 2-4 crew.”
Nicole Babroski, who spent a semester at Hyde’s Connecticut campus in 2014, said she was mostly assigned to a work crew rather than attending class. She said she had been doing drugs and struggling with her mental health when she arrived at the school, but said that only worsened at Hyde.
“It might have been my doing that landed me at Hyde, but the adults there did not treat us correctly,” she said.
Babroski said she’s still affected by things staff members told her: “That I was a coward, that I would never amount to anything, that I wasn’t capable of having a normal life,” she said.
FOR OTHERS, HYDE WAS WHAT THEY NEEDED
While many people have shared negative experiences, other former parents and students have contacted the Press Herald to defend the school, writing that its character-based program had a positive and transformative impact on their life.
School officials also said in a statement Monday that “since the news broke about the lawsuit, we have been encouraged by an outpouring from parents, alumni and people knowledgeable about Hyde.”
Alumni like Ian Brooks, who went to the Bath campus for three years beginning in 2001, said from his perspective, Hyde was a place that helped him improve his attitude. He attributes his academic and career success to the school.
“If it weren’t for Hyde, I don’t know where I would be,” Brooks said. He read the lawsuit, and said some of its claims feel bizarre to him; he said 2-4 felt like appropriate chores, not forced labor, and that what the suit characterizes as attack therapy was more like a community conversation.
Emily Smart attended the Connecticut campus in 2010 and said she has a relatively neutral view of her experience. She persuaded her parents to let her attend Hyde because she wanted a change from her public high school. She said the school’s daily structure was valuable to her, and that several faculty members had a lasting positive influence on her life.
“I definitely needed people to call me out on my behavior,” she said. “Having people be like, ‘Hey, come on, get out of bed, go do your stuff,’ that was really important, because when you struggle with mental health, having that ability and people holding you accountable; you might hate it at the time, and I definitely did. But looking back, I definitely needed my peers and my teachers to be like, ‘Go get your butt to class.'”
Smart said she understands that other students have had uniquely negative experiences, and that the Hyde approach wasn’t beneficial to everyone. But she said the way some of the school’s practices, like group therapy, are characterized in the lawsuit feels unfair.
“I could see how it could be perceived as that, but we did have the opportunity to walk out,” she said. “You weren’t really forced. You weren’t trapped in that way. There were consequences, but it was manageable.”
