A group of teenage outcasts believe they are being sent by their parents to an OutWard Bound type boarding school. They come to realize that their parents have decided they would rather have them dead and the “teachers” are out to get them. Coming together, they attempt to cope with this fact and escape their fate.
This is definitely The Grounding of Group 6, by Julian F. Thompson. (Love it!)
This sounds like a book that I read when I was a kid. The Grounding of Group 6, by Julian Thompson.
The Grounding Of Group 6 by Julian F.Thompson.
“Arriving at what they believe is an exclusive boarding school, five sixteen-year-olds are unaware that they have been sent there to be exterminated and that their teacher is a murderer for hire”
I think you might be looking for The Grounding of Group 6, by Julian Thompson (1983). Five teens (Coke, Sully, Marigold, Sarah, and Ludi), seen as embarrassments by their wealthy parents, are sent to Coldbrook Country School – allegedly an elite boarding school – to be killed.
As explained by Dr. Simms, the school’s headmaster, “We take them off their hands, those lemons. Once and for all. Quick and neat and clean and utterly untraceable. We have those limestone faults quite near the school-these fissures on the surface of the planet. Some of them seem almost bottomless. Drop a lemon into one….we never hear it hit. We call that ‘grounding’, Mr. Rittenhouse. A natural and wholesome term, I hope you will agree. At Coldbrook, we are definitely….organic.”
Nat Rittenhouse, who has agreed to poison the children to pay off a gambling debt he owes to gangsters, bonds with the group instead, and the six of them escape to a cabin in the woods where he teaches the group survival skills. Meanwhile, the gangsters who had provided Nat to the school send another assassin after him, while two faculty members go out with rifles to hunt down both Nat and the children.