Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [9]
A few months went by and my mom told me that a new school was opening up and most of my friends from Apple School would be going there. I had to take a bunch of tests, and if I passed, I could go to this new school. Mom took me to this place on Wilshire Blvd called Applied Scholastics. I did the tests and it was looking good. Applied Scholastics was filled with Scientology books and stuff and I could tell that the guy giving me the tests was a Scientologist because he used all the lingo. He told me this new school was going to be a very “upstat” school and if “my ethics were in” I would be able to attend. Total Scientology lingo. “Upstat” meant up statistics, which means you produced more than you did the week before. For kids, “upstat” meant being good, not throwing tantrums or upsetting your parents too badly. “Downstat” was bad and if you were downstat, you did not get any ice cream or treats. No one wants to be downstat, now do they?
I remember thinking that going back to a Scientology school could be a drag. I had gotten used to not having to do all of the Scientology study stuff and now I would most certainly have to do it again if I got into the new school. Well, all my old friends would be there, so maybe it was worth it.
Months went by and the new school finally opened. It was called the Delphi School and it was awful. All the things we had to do at Apple School were nothing compared to this new place. EVERYTHING we did was Scientology-based. Every subject we did was written by Scientologists and had checksheets. We had to do another course on how to use Scientology Study Technology: The Learning Book Course. After we finished a course we had to do an exam and hold what looked like soup cans and be asked questions on a Scientology E-Meter. We started school at 8:30 a.m. and went until 5:30 p.m. every day. We even had to clean the school classrooms and do work for the school as part of our schooling.
All the teachers were Scientologists, and some, it seemed, had been in Scientology forever. The school’s headmaster, Henning Heldt, was a certifiable prick. I remember him talking and everything out of his mouth was “Out-Ethics,” “Misunderstood Words,” “Off-Purpose,” “Overts,” “Withholds”. It was as though this guy did not know any words besides Scientology ones. I never liked him and it felt like his job was to make sure the students were miserable.
Most of the other teachers were not much different. It was weird, because most of them seemed to know each other real well, but they hadn’t worked at a school before and had not been teachers. They were hardcore Scientologists.
Delphi also had an “org board” just like at any other Scientology organization. The school had a lot of the same post titles you would find on a Scientology Organizing Board. It was on a huge blue Formica chart with tons of Dymo tape labels giving the post titles and names of the people that held them. I had seen the exact same type of boards at the local Scientology orgs in Los Angeles.
In 1985, my parents could no longer afford to send both my sister and I to Delphi. One of us had to go back to public school. Guess who the lucky one was? Me, of course!
By this time, my mom was living with a boyfriend in a house out by the beach in Venice. We had to drive 90 minutes each morning to get to Delphi by 8:30 and I was not going to be missing that!
I would be attending the local public school in our district in Venice. Turns out that we lived right on the district border and if we had lived one block further north, I would have ended up at a