| New Member
Join Date: May 2012
Posts: 1
| Oasis is rocky
My son just left the program and was turned loose with no where to go and nothing to do.
The goal was to get him a paid job before he left.
They got him -- at an additional expense mind you -- a non paid internship.
He was scheduled to leave in May but after Prof. Dianne Zager was demoted,
the wind and empathy went out of the program.
NOT ONE person contacted us about him leaving.
It was if he didn't exist anymore.
I complained in an email and the new director, Dr. Mary Cohen, who is really a very organized and Virgo like administrator and not warm and fuzzy at all -- Which is Dianne -- had the job coach call me. She didn't have the courtesy to pick up the phone and talk to us.
I have to say I was, and still am furious.
Dianne used to call about stuff at least once a week.
She and I would email regularly about what my son was doing.
Dr. Cohen -- nada, zip her secretary would email if they wanted something.
Cohen once got in touch with me because she was fishing around to find out what meds my son was on. He apparently said something about wanting to go off some meds and she made comments to him about it being a lot of meds. Yes Ms. idiot, he's on a lot of meds because he needs them and he's able to function in school as he's on the right mix that has been mixed and matched and changed over 20 years. She encouraged him to get off the meds. I had to go in and see her and listen to her tell me how she works with these kids all the time and knows meds. She knows NOTHING about my son or what he is capable of doing. I refused to let them know the meds he was on because people like her judge by the pills and not by getting to know him.
My son was signed up for two classes a semester which was all he could handle, and the goal, as I said, was for him to have a job so Dianne wanted him to have free time for a job. Once she left, all was kaput.
Often he thought his tutor was going to do something and she didn't, and then I had to help him at the last second.
He would get an assignment from a professor on a Friday through the Blackboard system, and the professor would email, but he didn't look at his emails every day due to connection issues, so we wouldn't see it until Sunday. And then he'd have to scramble to read and write something that wasn't in the class syllabus.
If you do anything, make sure and get your kid's email and Pace passwords so you can keep up with what's expected. Sure my son should have done it, but he didn't. It's all part of his executive functioning issues that we constantly have to work on.
The nice thing about Oasis is that they have clout with the dorm -- if you don't mind paying something like $8,000 per semester. He lived at 55 John St. which is near campus but owned by a service. They supply a flat screen TV with hookups for game consoles, a small desk, wifi/internet hookup, a captain's bed with lots of drawers, a closet, a decent sized refrigerator, a bathroom, a very unsturdy chair with no wheels.
They had him room with another Oasis guy. My son really wanted to help his roommate get more social and take him out to bars and help him get introducted to girls. That just didn't work out. The kid wouldn't go with him so my son ended up coming home every weekend and not being engaged in the Oasis social activity on Friday afternoons. They also promised a Sunday excursion but stopped that because they said the kids didn't want to go as a big group together. Well, then they didn't do anything at all.
The last semester they finally swapped my son's room. I should have known there was a reason this other kid wanted to switch so badly. Not sure which of them got the worse deal. Here was another kid that only watched TV and didn't leave the room on the weekends, and didn't want to go anywhere with my son, but also never showered or cleaned up after himself. My son, who is a slob himself, was grossed. The parents also moved him entirely out of the room without cleaning up or telling us towards the end of April -- long before the end of the semester. So I came up to get a few big items one weekend and he'd moved out. I had to clean the whole room that day as I had a good parking space, and decided I didn't want to pay for a garage the following weekend to come back and clean again. Its like $115 ticket if you park in the wrong place near the dorm.
FYI The meal plan also didn't cover the food. We had to keep refilling the card.
Then the social interaction guy that came on after Dianne left supposedly had a weekly meeting with my son that we didn't find out about until May when I asked him about moving out issues. He told me my son never came to the meetings. Duh, neither of us knew about it (maybe my son knew and forgot but the the kid with a title of professor by the way, never emailed my son to say, hey, you missed the meeting or called or emailed me to say he's not showing up, let's figure this out. So there is also a lack of followup as to what they are doing and what you are paying $5,000 a semester for them to do. Yes, the kid emailed every week about a list of activities that someone could do in the city, but so what?
If your child can handle the school work, and the classes are very intense, they should be ok. My son was in a community college upstate which had zero work (while at the Gersh program) and then was at Mercy College also, and I can assure you, Pace is on a whole other level!
Many of the classes have a lot of writing.
My son was taking Environmental Studies classes and took one class in which he had a paper every week, and sometimes two, and had to read 25-page U.S. Supreme Court decisions and other documents that were intense, really way over his head.
The Oasis people do know the professors and know which ones are kinder to the students. His Oasis tutor actually sat in on some of his classes with him and the teacher ccd her on the emails about schoolwork.
Overall, the nurturing parts of the program died once Dianne left. She really knew what every kid was doing, was in touch with them (they all had her cell phone) and was in touch with the parents.
This one -- forget it!
I hope that Pace figures this all out and that Dr. Cohen gets her act together and realizes she's not the best fit for the program. It's different than what we signed on for. Maybe it's better for some because she's an administrator overseeing the people that are tutoring and doing the social interactions, etc.
Would I have signed up with her? Probably not. Way too cold a fish for me. Would have also saved about $100K that would have supported my son when he is old and grey.
The parents group is staying on top of the situation and they are probably mad at me because I'm burning bridges but they are all afraid of retribution for their kids who are left there while mine is out.
I have now been in touch with a program that some of the Oasis former staffers formed and are providing after college job coaching. This is what he needs now, and what he needed right along.
Last edited by XOasisParent; 05-25-2012 at 06:23 PM.
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