Sent Away · APM Reports, KUER and The Salt Lake Tribune

6: This Is the Place

April 5, 2022·31 min·2 clips

A journalist recalls singing Utah's 100th birthday song as a child, now realizing its lyrics reveal how Mormon family values created fertile ground for the teen treatment industry.

A school song opens the door. The narrator remembers singing for Utah's 100th birthday, with mountains, Brigham Young, Mormon settlers, and family all folded into one civic story. Years later, the song lands differently. It starts to sound like a clue to how tightly Utah's public identity is tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Pioneer Day lingers nearby. Lindsay Hanson Park, who runs an independent nonprofit that studies Mormonism, says Mormon values are family values. The episode stays with that idea and asks what happens when a culture built around parents, children, reputation, and family becomes a good home for youth treatment programs. The industry did not stop after deaths. One source says both could have been prevented, and the transcript is blunt that neither those deaths nor the regulations that followed stopped the expansion. Utah had a lot the industry could use: a clean reputation, an eager workforce, and laws that gave parents unusually strong authority over their children. The California comparison does a lot of work. A 12-year-old in California could leave a program. The same child sent to Utah could not leave without a parent's agreement. Then came the 1990 law. Programs could get state approval, which gave the industry a formal route to legitimacy while the field kept spreading. The numbers are hard to shrug off. Stetler remembers licensing roughly 32 youth programs when he started and 168 by 1996. One person was driving the state alone, checking whether programs followed the rules as the field expanded across Utah. Asked if it grew too fast, he says no. That answer hangs there beside the increase, the deaths already named, and his faith in the oversight. Later, the office added staff. Stetler left for a while, came back in 2002 to run licensing, and the story moves into what oversight meant once he was in charge.

As heard by us

A sober look at how Utah's clean image and parent-first rules helped the industry grow.

Sent Away opens with a Utah school song and uses it to map how state pride, Mormon culture, and family values meet in public life. From there, it broadens into Utah's teen treatment industry and the oversight around it, using interviews and archival detail to trace how the…

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Why you'd press play

You want to hear how a school song opens into Utah's Mormon-shaped self-image and teen-treatment oversight.

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