The Echo

Chapter Two:

In December 2015, ProRepublica published an article called Unrestrained by Heather Vogell. 

As a journalist Vogell went deep into the world in which AdvoServ operates.  What she found was a stomach churning 40 years of child abuse, covered up in some cases by AdvoServ itself or the agencies that send children into their care.

While evidence of abuse of the disabled has piled up for decades, one for-profit company has used its deep pockets and influence to bully weak regulators and evade accountability

It must have been serendipity that drew Kenneth and Claire Mazik together.  Ken was a clinical psychologist with a graduate degree from Temple.  Claire, psychiatric nurse, had risen to the rank of Superintendent of Nursing at the Delaware State Hospital where both worked.


Ken Mazik had a vision. It stemmed from an encounter with one of his patients at the Hospital.  He shared this story with the New York Times in 1975:

“Then, one day,” he recalled, “I tested this kid, couldn't quite figure out what was wrong and rescheduled him for the next week. In the meantime, he pulled his eye out. I mean it. He actually reached in and pulled out his own eye.

“Well, I couldn't believe any child could be that self-destructive and my guilt was just enormous. So following My usual pattern, I overcompensated. I threw myself into autism.  (http://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/30/archives/filly-winning-a-fortune-for-a-struggling-school-filly-winning-a-for.html)

In 1969 that overcompensation paid off and the pair opened the Au Clair School for Autistic Children in a 28 room mansion with its recognizable steep-pitched roof in Bear, nearer to Kirkwood than anywhere else. With $40,000 the Maziks purchased the fading Standardbred farm formerly owned by a New York physician in what was once valuable Delaware horse country. Today, you'll find far more McMansions there than stables there.  But, the mansion with pitched roof still stands proudly - if only the walls could talk.

Au Clair School became a private school for the children no one else wanted. According the New York Times, Mazik claimed the cost of caring for and educating just one of his patients was $14,000/year.  He admitted the hardest, most severely disabled children who had already been kicked out of other institutions. Within a year, Mazik had 30 boys living at Au Clair, whom he treated with his own severe form of severe intervention.

Some years back I sat with a father whose then-adult son had lived in Au Claire for a while as a boy.  He called Mazik "unconventional," but claimed he was able to make progress for kids where all kinds of conventional interventions had never worked before. I wondered and worried.

Yet, in 1979, the News Journal would run a story chronicling the complaints made against Mazik, such as hitting children with a plastic bat, dunking them in a dirty pool, and whipping a student with a riding crop.

The Riding Crop 

Mazik originally envisioned residents developing vocational skills through farming and raising small animals.  It was a miscalculation. He quickly learned that small scale farming was not profitable and that the farm equipment was dangerous for the population of children he was treating and teaching. 

Ken and Claire set out to find another field to expose their clients to - and settled on harness racing. In 1971, Au Clair began to acquire horses. Claire claimed she wanted a teaching object and the school purchased a trotter named Tug Fire (New York Times.) Tug Fire paid his own bills, but didn't bring in the funding that the Maziks needed to operate the school.  That call was answered by a sleek horse with delicate legs called Silk Stalkings.  The Maziks combined their salary for one year, a total of $20,000, and snatched up the horse, largely written off by more aggressive owners because of those same delicate legs.

Silk Stalkings turned out to be an amazing pacer. "In two years of racing, she has won 22 times, never finished out of the money, earned $351,438—more than many Americans make in a lifetime of work—and Au Clair, the Maziks' school, is struggling no more." Ken Mazik was in heaven, dreaming of selling his story rights and building his newfound wealth. He used the racing profits to pay down the note on the mansion, purchase a nearby 50 acre farm and buy two brood mares.  Silk Stalkings who passed away in 2003 (the same year Claire died) earned her place in harness racing history.  There has never been a more endearing story - a horse turned benefactor.  Sadly, for Mazik, no one ever bought the rights to his story although Claire was featured on a segment of 60 Minutes. If they had, maybe the horror that would become Advoserv would have been adverted.

By 1978, the Mazik's marriage was in trouble. In 1983, the News Journal chronicled their financial battle:

Silk Stalkings was on her way into retirement in 1979 when the Mazik's divorce was finalized. Claire turned to developing an acumen for acquiring and breeding winning horses rather than focus on the Au Clair School operations. That fell to Ken, who also purchased his own stable and Silk Stalkings' first foul.  

As the marriage disintegrated, workers at the school started to question Ken's heavy-handedness with his patients. They brought their concerns to the Wilmington Morning Journal (now the New Journal.) It seemed Mazik had a new purpose for his riding crop - whipping children.  Mazik acknowledged in the story that he had struck the boy, but said it didn’t constitute abuse. The employees who complained were disgruntled, he said.

The New York Times  revisited this incident in 1997:

Mr. Mazik himself, in the late 1970's, acknowledged beating a mentally retarded boy with a riding crop in front of several staff members. That was one of the incidents at Bear that he defended as therapeutic after staff members complained to the Delaware authorities and the local newspaper that he was abusing children in his care. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/04/us/deletion-of-word-in-welfare-bill-opens-foster-care-to-big-business.html.

I hope you're keeping count - that's two unconventional yet therapeutic methods for caring for children with mental health needs:

1. Death
2. Beating by Riding Crop

Next Up - Chapter Three