Last resort school for overweight teens

Teenagers Jonny Dallo, Allison Cole, Shari Lininger, and Cassi Harp have left behind their friends and family and come here to Central California to the Academy of the Sierras— AOS for short. It's the first residential high school for overweight teenagers, and a place of last resort for kids who are dangerously obese.

"Dateline" will follow them on a five-month journey as they try to lose the weight that’s threatening their lives, and to confront the painful reasons for their obesity. For these kids, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Jonny Dallo: The rebel 17-year-old
Jonny Dallo from San Diego weighs 365 lbs. and is worried if he doesn’t do something soon he’ll reach 500 lbs.

Jonny was actually close to getting a gastric bypass surgery. “We were actually about to plan a day where I was going to go and get the surgery done. I was getting tired of looking in the mirror and feeling ashamed.”

At AOS, his goal is to lose 100 lbs. over the next five months. He’s spending his senior year at AOS because he’s embarrassed by being so big — like the time he couldn’t squeeze into an amusement park ride.

“I went on to the ride and they couldn’t close the lap/chest thing over me, because I was so big. They had, like, five people trying to push it down.”

Difficult feelings that have taken their toll on Jonny. “Most people don’t understand what it’s like to be overweight because they just think, ‘Why don’t you just stop eating or something?’ It almost feels like people think of you as like not even human,” he says.

He’s failing at school, gotten a pile of speeding tickets. He’s lived by his own set of rules and managed to talk his way out of everything. Jonny, the rebel, won’t be able to do that at AOS.

Allison Cole: The actress 
17-year-old Allison Cole from Virginia Beach, Virginia weighs in at 323 lbs. Her goal is to drop at least 50 lbs. in the next five months. Like Jonny, she’s come here for her senior year of high school, wanting to make a new start when she begins college in the fall. Mostly, she wants to change how people see her.

"I want to go up to people, or like go places and be paid attention to," she says. Like if I walk into a place like you start a topic with somebody and they’ll just kind of blow you off a lot of the times. Like, ‘Oh, you have nothing important to say, you’re fat.’”

Ironically, the only place she seems to feel comfortable, is on the stage, where she can adopt a character. But Allison the actress is beginning to understand that won’t always work for her in real life.

Cassi Harp: The perfectionist 
16-year-old Cassi harp from Bentonville, Arkansas weighs 245 lbs. and wants to lose 60 while she’s at AOS.

She loses her breath just walking up the stairs, but that’s not the only thing that’s exhausting her: Cassi the perfectionist is always trying to please people and food eases her anxiety.

“It’s really hard to hold that image up that you’re fine and nothing bothers you at all,” she says. “It gets really stressful after a while and hard to balance everything.”

Shari Lininger: The singer
And the youngest, 14-year-old Shari Lininger from Yuba City in Northern California would not reveal her weight. She wants to lose 60 lbs. at AOS. But her ultimate goal is bigger: “I think that I need to lose at the least like 100. It’s like a whole person.”          

“It’s an unreasonable goal to expect myself to lose 100 pounds while I’m here.  My goal here is to learn the lifestyle, learn the eating habits, and go home and live like this for the rest of my life,” says Shari

Shari is a singer, and she worries she won’t make it to a stage some day unless she makes it at AOS.

They all have goals for losing pounds. What they don’t know is that they can’t lose them unless they are willing to uncover the hidden emotional weight they’re also carrying.

In the next 5 months, one of them will become a homecoming queen, one will star on the stage, one will be expelled. They will all have setbacks. Each has a unique story to tell, and none of them knows what’s in store.

The Academy of the Sierras
Dr. Dan Kirschenbaum is the one of the architects of the program, and he says if the kids continue to gain weight, they won’t survive.

“I’ve worked in this field for over 30 years and I’ve seen people in their teens and early 20s who died from heart attacks,” says Kirschenbaum.

Kirschenbaum put this program together with Ryan Craig, the AOS director.

What makes AOS unique is that every waking moment is scheduled with rigorous exercise, intense emotional therapy, and a strict code of conduct.

The kids willing to endure all that because the situation is so critical for them.

At AOS, the school tries to keep some of their time as teenagers the same, but the philosophy of the school is that the weight is a mask that you use to hide something.

A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS Obesity epidemic — In the last 10 years, obesity rates have increased by more than 60 percent among adults. — Since 1980, obesity rates have doubled among children and tripled among adolescents. Of children and adolescents aged 6–19 years, 15 percent—about 9 million young people—are considered overweight. — More than 60 percent of young people eat too much fat, and less than 20 percent eat the recommended five or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day. — More than a third of young people in grades 9–12 do not regularly engage in vigorous physical activity. — Unhealthy diet and physical inactivity play an important role in many chronic diseases and conditions, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, breast cancer, colon cancer, gallbladder disease, and arthritis. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Each of teenagers are hoping AOS will be the place that will be the answer to losing the weight that has plagued them since they were children.

At the start of a typical day at school, 7 a.m. is time to be up and exercising. It’s one of the three hours in the day when teens exercise: One more in the afternoon, and another in the evening.

The students also keep track of their steps. Everyone wears a pedometer and 10,000 steps a day is the rock-bottom minimum. There’s no telephone, no TV, no surfing the net, no video games. There’s not much time for sitting, except in the classroom.

AOS is an accredited school run by a for-profit corporation. Kids are in class from 9 to 3. But the heartbeat of the place is in the cafeteria.

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