Academy at Ivy Ridge
Parents paid for a boarding school in upstate New York. Students say it was a lockup.
New York · 2001–2009
The abandoned gym at Academy at Ivy Ridge, Ogdensburg, New York. Katherine Kubler returned to this building for The Program.
The story
Academy at Ivy Ridge opened in Ogdensburg in 2001, tied for most of its life to the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools. Katherine Kubler was sent there in 2004 after another school caught her with alcohol. She says two strangers handcuffed her and drove her north. She stayed about 15 months. In 2024 she went back with former classmates and filmed the empty building.
What happened
Former students describe being cut off from their families and, in some accounts, assaulted by staff. A staff member who quit after a month told Kubler’s series the students were treated like prisoners. New York also looked at the academics. In 2005, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced tuition refunds and a stop to unauthorized diplomas. The state later refused to register Ivy Ridge as a school. The $1.5 million figure on the Stories of Justice card is the public penalty and refund exposure from that case, not a survivor damages award.
Katherine Kubler
“To do that in the program, you literally just had to be a robot.”
Katherine Kubler, to TODAY
Watch
The official trailer for The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping. Two minutes. The full series is on Netflix.
What changed
Ivy Ridge closed in 2009. The campus was sold and did not reopen as the school. Kubler’s series put the gym and the dorms back on camera, and the Associated Press reported a new round of scrutiny. A documentary is not a conviction. The public record is the closure, the diploma case, and a survivor who filmed the rooms.
Why this story is here
Institutions outlast the children in them, until someone makes the building impossible to ignore. That is why Ivy Ridge sits beside Vista Maria. The sources are below.