CHAMBERLAIN, S.D. – If you’ve ever seen one of those pleas for financial help – complete with sad-faced child – and wondered if it was real, this next story isn’t going to ease your skepticism.

The school’s website.

CNN reports South Dakota’s St. Joseph’s Indian School has been sending 30 million pieces of direct mail a year, soliciting donations to support the boarding school.

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The efforts raised more than $50 million last year to fund the operations of the school that serves 200 students. If that is true, the school spends about $255,000 per student.

There’s just one problem: the personal stories used in the mailers are fake. And the names used aren’t pseudonyms to protect a child’s privacy – the children featured are fake, too.

The news site reports:

The boy’s stories are heartbreaking: “My dad drinks and hits me … my mom chose drugs over me … my home on the reservation isn’t a safe place for me to be,” wrote Josh Little Bear. His request seems reasonable — send a few dollars to help St. Joseph’s Indian School to keep “kids like me safe … so we don’t have to live this way anymore.”

A Christmas-oriented letter sent in November told the story of “Emily High Elk.”

It explained how “(y)ou could see the hopelessness she felt in her dark brown eyes” when she arrived at the school and now, “her big bright smile reveals how her life has changed.”

Kory Christianson, the director of school’s fundraising, admitted to CNN that the children were made up, “but the stories are not,” according to a written response.

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Leonard Pease, vice chairman of the Crow Creek Lakota Sioux reservation in central South Dakota, was incensed by the fundraising ploy.

“To me, they make the Indians look bad,” he tells CNN.

Michael Roberts, president of the First Nations Development Institute, was more direct. He called the letters “poverty porn.”

“They are raising money in the name of Indians, using the worst of poverty porn of all Indian country to raise money on all our social ills,” he says.

According to the school’s website, it was started in 1927 to educate Lakota (Sioux) children.