For former Agape Boarding School students: the memories — and pain — can last years
He was at the Agape Boarding School for just five or so months as a teen. But for Joshua Pirro, the impact from those days has lasted into his mid 30s.
Not being able to talk — to have any long or meaningful conversations with his peers — was one of the toughest things.
“I’m a very social creature,” said Pirro, now 35. “Instead of being able to express myself outwardly, I had to go inwardly, and that’s where people start to lose reality when they are coping.
“It was lonely. … I don’t think they wanted people to form bonds, strong bonds, obviously.”
Growing up, he struggled with what he described as controlling Christian parents. He remembers telling his mom and stepdad: “Send me to a boarding school.”
They picked Agape, and the couple went to southwest Missouri to see what it was like.
Soon, Pirro, “a tiny 15-year-old,” was alone at the school. It was Dec. 28, 2000.
Within days he realized just how strict and “puritanical” this new school and home was. On New Year’s Eve, the boys were able to watch on TV as the ball dropped in New York City. But as soon as it did, the show was over for the boys.
“We had to turn it off,” Pirro said, “because everyone was kissing on New Years.”
Each week, boys had to memorize five verses from the Bible, Pirro said.
“You had a week to do it,” he said. “On Friday, everyone had to spout it off to somebody. If you didn’t do that .... or you just couldn’t, then they would stick you on the wall.
“If you were on the wall for more than two days and you still hadn’t memorized it ... then that was seen as a direct disobedience to them and so then they would swat you.”
When his mom and stepdad came to visit after he had spent three months at the school, Pirro could not tell them everything he was experiencing. If he did, he knew he would be punished.
But when they went to leave, he reached out to his mom the best he could.
“I begged and screamed, ‘Please, get me out of here,’” Pirro said. “I was hugging and pleading with her. … I told her, ‘Don’t tell them I told you this, because I will be punished.’”
Pirro stayed at Agape. And within two weeks, his life changed.
Another student, who was older, performed a sexual act on him, Pirro said, and then that student went to staff leaders. Pirro is still not sure what the student told them, but that boy went home.
And Pirro, who describes the act as sexual abuse, was left behind to deal with the aftermath.
“They just started treating me different,” he said. “Students started finding out (about the incident). It was a nightmare.”
He was taken to a leader, who “basically said my mom had given him permission to swat me for my sin of homosexuality.”
Before long, Pirro left the school. His mom and stepdad eventually divorced. He went to therapy to get through that period, he said, but never got counseling for what he endured in the months at Agape.
He would have nightmares after he left the school “where I’m trying to get out of somewhere.” And up until a year or so ago, he’d dream he was back at the school.
“I would always dream they were going to send me back.”
The youngest, and ‘the first to get spanked’
Robert Lepido had two distinctions after arriving at Agape Boarding School in Othello, Washington, in the early 1990s.
“I was the youngest in the group,” he said, “and I was the first to get spanked.”
It’s likely he also had traveled the farthest. Lepido was sent to the school from Florida by his single mom, who was working three jobs and just couldn’t handle the youngest of her three children. A friend through work told her about the Christian reform school, which at the time was based in the Pacific Northwest.
“I was told there was going to be like horseback riding, and it was going to be like a fun camp and all that stuff,” said Lepido, now 39. What he encountered, he said, wasn’t even close.
“There were six people to a dorm room, and I was the smallest,” said Lepido, who was 12 when he arrived. “My first night there, I was crying.” A staff member came in and angrily told him to stop.
“And he was like, ‘If you don’t knock it off, I’m gonna shut this door and whatever happens to you, I don’t know anything.’ I might have mouthed off a little bit. He shut the door, and those kids beat me for like a half hour. It was a full-on beatdown.”
After that, Lepido said, he became a target of both students and staff.
“I’ll put it this way,” he said. “I’m no stranger to being behind bars. And that place was rougher than any prison or juvie hall or jail I’ve ever been through. You have rights as an inmate, and you have protocol and stuff. But this was just a free-for-all.”
Within a week of arriving, Lepido said, he was begging to go home.
“And they’re like, ‘Are you gonna run away?’ And I’m like, ‘If that’s what it takes to get home.’ So they took my clothes away and put me in a bathrobe and flip-flops. And I was on ‘no talking’ the entire time there. I wasn’t allowed to talk to anybody.”
Lepido said child labor laws were constantly ignored at Agape. The Othello school was on the site of a former Air Force radar station, and the students did much of the work on the buildings, he said.
“We did all the roofing — a group of 15-year-olds roofed the entire place,” he said. “Around the clock. Forget OSHA safety and all that.”
After corporal punishment was implemented at Agape, Lepido said, he was called into the office one day.
“They told me what I did, had me bend over a desk,” he said. Then a staff member “lifted my feet off the ground with that paddle.”
“Three times. Then they made us pray together, and you ask God for forgiveness and tell him you’re sorry for what you did.”
In 1995, the school was shut down over code violation issues and Lepido was sent to New Hampshire to live with his dad. Agape relocated to Stockton, Missouri, and opened back up the next year.
Lepido said he’s still dealing with the aftereffects of his years at Agape.
“I’m responsible for my own actions,” he said. “But I can say that within two years of leaving that school, I went to prison for battery. They just taught you violence at all different levels.”
Today, Lepido works as a substance abuse specialist in Nashville. Now that he’s an adult, he said, he has a different perspective on Agape.
“When you’re that age and you’re going through it, you just think this is life and it’s your fault because you’re misbehaving,” he said. “But then when you get older and you have kids, you’re like, ‘I would never be able to treat a child like this.’ What were those people thinking?”
Completely isolated from the world
Greg Brown had just gotten his driver’s license when his dad told him they were going to Kansas City to buy him a pickup.
Though they lived in California, the family had relatives in the KC area, so driving that far didn’t sound that odd to him.
“Looking back on it, it’s kind of stupid, because why would you help your kid who’s half-drunk and smoking pot all the time get a car?” said Brown, who was 17 at the time. “But that’s the lie they sold me on.
“All of a sudden we get to this place and there’s a bunch of kids with blue shirts on and buzzed heads. I’m like, ‘Wait a minute.’ Then I figured it out. My dad just turned his back and walked away.”
It was 1996, and Brown was among the first students to attend Agape at its new location in Stockton, Missouri.
His first few months at Agape “were really brutal,” Brown said.
“They smacked people around, took them down to the ground or grabbed their shirt and threw them down,” he said. “When you’ve got 70, 80 pounds on somebody, it’s not hard to do.”
But Brown said the mental abuse was as bad — or worse — than the physical abuse.
“One time, I wrote a kind of angry letter to my mom,” he said, “and they read it in front of everybody. It was humiliating.”
The most disturbing incident he witnessed, Brown said, was during a boxing match. One student had gotten into an altercation with another student who was much bigger.
“They’d make people box instead of fighting,” he said. “They had a little makeshift boxing ring that they made out of plywood. This kid was getting his butt kicked and he just kept dropping down to the ground, and they kept standing him up. And (a staff member) grabbed him and threw him up against the rope. He fell off the ring and wound up breaking his leg.”
Soon after the boy returned to Agape, his leg in a cast, a fire inspector happened to come into the room during class, Brown said.
“And he (the injured boy) said in front of all the students, ‘Hey, man, they abused me.’ And everyone in the class is just taking a deep breath. Then after he left, (the staff member) came back in there and grabbed him out of his chair, threw him on the ground, pinned him down and started shaking him.”
Brown’s parents picked him up in July 1997, after he graduated. He said he told his family right away what he had been through.
“And of course, you’re 18 and you’re full of rage, so I don’t know how much of it they took seriously,” he said. “But once I settled down and got married and had kids and we had the discussion, they finally fessed up and said, ‘That was wrong of us; we shouldn’t have sent you there.’
“After I got out of there, for the first 10 years, I would have nightmares of being in that place and wake up in the morning all shook up. The cheap bunk beds, they had a squeak when everybody got on there, and I’d think I heard that squeak.”
Today, Brown is 41, owns a house and is a superintendent at a construction site. His children are now the ages when some parents send their kids to boarding schools.
He has some advice for those who may be thinking about placing their sons at Agape.
“Do your homework on what it is these people believe,” he said. “They believe in corporal punishment. Make sure you understand that, and make sure you know there’s gonna be violence there.”
‘I was beaten for two hours’
On Aaron Hermanson’s first Saturday at Agape, he says he was “restrained” and beaten for the first time.
Just days before, Hermanson said an off-duty deputy from the Cedar County Sheriff’s department in Missouri had driven to Iowa and picked him up at a youth shelter where he was staying after running away from home. His parents, who were strict and home-schooled him and his six siblings, went to the shelter with the deputy and told him he was going to Agape.
Hermanson had heard about the boarding school for years. When his family lived in Washington, they went to the same independent Baptist church as James Clemensen, the Agape owner. And now his parents were sending him to Clemensen to get straightened out.
On that Saturday morning, after the boys were split into groups to wash cars, Hermanson focused on a set of tires. He used a bucket of soapy water that was closest to a tire. Immediately, a staff member starts “laying into me,” telling him he used the wrong bucket to wash the tires.
Hermanson was taken to another staff member at the school.
“He’s arguing with me, yelling,” Hermanson said. “Some of it was threats. Some of it was like something about my parents sent me there because I can’t listen and how much of a piece of shit I was.
“I stood up and he’s like, ‘You want to fight me?’ He pushes me. So I punch him in the face. And I get tackled.”
For at least the next two hours, Hermanson said he was “restrained” face down on the gravel road behind the main building at Agape. Staff were on top of him, he said, punching him in the back of the head and his back, and kicking him.
“They were full-on beating me and dropping their knees into me,” he said. “I’m face down on the gravel, having the side of my face, back of my head, repeatedly punched. At one point, they were just punching my spine in the middle of my back.”
He thought to himself: “I’m going to die. I’m going to die here.”
When he was let up, Hermanson said he was bloodied, and bruises began to take color across his body. His pants and shirt were ripped open. His face and legs scraped up from being rammed into the gravel.
“When they got me up, I immediately collapsed because I couldn’t walk,” Hermanson said. “And they were like, ‘You’re going to walk or we’re going to do this all over again.’”
The incident was never reported to authorities, and he wasn’t taken to get medical attention. Hermanson said someone from the school told his parents that their son attacked a staff member and was restrained.
He was only restrained one other time during his 2½-year stay at Agape. And that was on his 17th birthday when he demanded to be emancipated so he could flee Agape and Missouri.
Hermanson would be at Agape until three months before his 19th birthday. Because his academic credits from the boarding school wouldn’t transfer to a regular high school, he had to stay and complete the program at Agape. That diploma allowed him to get into community college and later into the University of Northern Iowa.
“They are going to say all these people complaining about them, their lives suck now,” Hermanson said. “I have a four-year degree in engineering, and it took me six years to get this. I had to teach myself things that people learn in high school.
“It’s a cult and they only want you to learn certain things. They only want you to learn what they want you to learn.”
The ‘Padded Palace’
Colton Schrag was just 12 when he witnessed the aftermath of a visit to the “Padded Palace,” a room where the floor and walls were covered in carpet.
Leaders had deemed a fellow student to be out of control, and it was time to settle him down.
“I watched staff members grab him by the shoulders and slam him into the door they were going out, and he hit the floor,” Schrag said. “They took him to the Padded Palace. You could hear the screaming when it went down.
“When he came back down, his face had rug burns from the top of his forehead to his chin, he had bruises on his arms and bruises on his legs. He couldn’t even uncurl his fingers for three or four days, probably from nerve damage from getting restrained.”
Schrag, now 28, did two stints at Agape — the first starting in 2004. He went home after about 18 months but was sent back at 14½ and stayed another four years.
“I’d see kids, from 15 years old all the way up to 17, 18-year-olds get punched in the face or hit in the back of the head with an elbow and slammed by their neck to the ground,” he said. “Slammed against the walls, restrained by four or five staff members.”
Another way the staff exerted control over the students, he said, was to restrict their water intake.
“We would be hauling rocks all day and they would give us one water break in the morning and one water break in the afternoon,” Schrag said. “They would line us up and count to three, and you had to drink as much water in three seconds as you could and you were done.”
Students weren’t allowed to drink any water after leaving the shower bay around 7 each night, he said. Boys would get so thirsty, Schrag said, that they would get up in the middle of the night and pretend they needed to use the restroom.
“And we would take the top of the toilet tank off and take a drink out of the water of the toilet,” he said. “Or we would wash our hands and get paper towels and soak the paper towel with whatever was left over on our hands, take it to our bunks and suck on that so we would at least have water.”
He’ll always remember April 20, a date known as “Weed Day” in the cannabis culture. One of the students had rolled a fake joint in the dorm that night, Schrag said, and was taken out and restrained. Around 10:30 p.m., he said, the “red shirts” — the highest-ranking students — woke him up and took him out to the hall. And there was the other student.
“His shirt is torn, like shredded,” he said. “He’s got a big ol’ black eye, bruises on his face, bruises on his arms, blood dripped from his nose.”
Schrag said he and the other boy were accused of plotting to take over the facility.
“I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why am I out here?’” He said the staff member punched him in the face. Schrag said he swung back and was hit again. And again. Then, he said, staff members slammed both boys to the floor and restrained them in the hallway while others went to get a third student.
“As soon they bring him out, he gets punched in the head and gets a big black eye,” Schrag said. “They slammed him and started restraining us. And it was like a pinball machine. (The staff member) was going back and forth, kicking us and yelling, saying, ‘You guys are terrorists; we should have you put in prison.’”
Schrag said the incident left him with bruises on his face, arms and chest: “If somebody would have seen that, people would be in prison.”
He enlisted in the Army when he was 17 and stayed at Agape until he could ship out five months after turning 18. Today, he works in the oil and gas industry in Texas.
Schrag knows he’s come a long way from when staff members told him, at age 17: “‘We’re wasting our time giving you a high school diploma; you’re not going to make it three months out of here. You’ll end up dead or in prison.’
“Every morning I wake up and I’m like, ‘It’s not gonna be today.’”
‘His head went through the wall’
Sometimes when Sean Markley reflects on his days at Agape Boarding School, the memories seem almost unreal.
“It’s just insane, thinking back about it now,” said Markley, who attended Agape from July 1999 to late 2002. “You watch this kind of stuff on documentaries and you’re like, ‘Wow. How does that even happen? How come nobody did anything?’
“You don’t have the self-realization that that’s basically what we went through.”
Like the time, Markley said, he saw a staff member grab a student by his pants and the back of his neck.
“And he just threw him,” he said. “His head went through the wall. It bloodied him up a little bit and startled him. And I’m sure he’s got emotional scars from it.”
Markley said students were often worked beyond the point of exhaustion. And it took a toll on their bodies.
“They’d put us out there in the snow all day long without adequate clothes,” he said. “No gloves unless your parents bought them. Kids ended up with heat stroke in the summer on work crews.”
One staff member was well known for getting students up at 3 a.m. for military-style training, he said.
“It’d be freezing-ass cold or ridiculously hot, and we’d be out there doing calisthenics,” he said. “We’d do duck walks, crab walks, for two, three, four hours. No drink breaks. And they’re running around like drill instructors screaming at you.”
Markley, now 36, said social workers showed up to investigate Agape just once during the time he was there. A staff member had been wrestling with a new student in the summer of 1999, he said, and “threw him over his back and it broke the kid’s arm.”
“This was a legit goofing-around kind of thing,” Markley said. “But before I got interviewed by CPS, I was coached on what to say. And afterward, I had to write a statement for Agape, telling them everything I said.”
While he was at Agape, Markley said, the method of handling confrontational students changed.
“So instead of just slamming them around like they used to and beating the shit out of them, they just sit on them and hold their pressure points,” he said. “And you’ve got legs and limbs that are numb afterwards, and the kids are physically and completely emotionally scarred at that point. I mean, you go from free will and never been touched like that to where you’re being forced down and being held for hours on end. It’s horrendous.”
Like other Agape students who had no place to go when they graduated and turned 18, Markley became a staff member. Soon after that, he said, they were told that an older teen who was transitioning from student to staff had sexually abused a student with special needs. The abuse, they were told, had occurred in some makeshift showers at football camp in Illinois.
Markley, now a father of three who works for the federal government, said the victim was sent home and the older teen was shipped to Hyles-Anderson College, an unaccredited independent Baptist Bible college in Indiana. He said Agape did not report the abuse.
After he learned what had happened, Markley said, he knew what he had to do.
“I was gone the next week.”
‘You eventually become your environment’
Justin Montgomery wound up at Agape Boarding School in 2001 after he and three others escaped from a Christian reform school in Montana.
“We stole a farmer’s truck,” he said, “out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter.”
They ran away, Montgomery said, because of the abuse they were suffering at the Montana school. They careened through the mountains to the Helena police department, he said, where they reported extreme punishment that included the use of handcuffs and severe beatings along with incidents of sexual abuse.
“Everybody got sent back but me,” he said. “I went to some family friends’ house for a month or two and then they took me to the airport and next thing I know, I’m at Agape.”
Montgomery, now 34 and living in California, was quick to rattle off the forms of punishment he experienced at the Missouri boarding school.
“Taking away how much food you could eat, trying to humiliate you, extreme physical workouts,” he said. “There was a time where I crawled from where the basketball court is to the top of the hill where they have the barn and all the horses, I’ve had to duck walk with a five gallon bucket with rocks in it.”
For some of the staff, he said, “we were their punching bag.”
Many students, he said, turned into abusers themselves.
“You eventually become your environment,” he said. “So much bullshit happened to me that I became abusive.”
The staff loved it, he said.
“So they’d give me kids who were hard to deal with, because they knew I would beat their ass or make them do pushups or stomp them out,” he said. “It’s messed up, but what are you gonna do? You do get life a little better. You might get a couple of extra privileges, or they might overlook a couple of things here and there.”
Social workers came to Agape a couple of times when he was there, Montgomery said.
“One day, some people came to check out the school and they had everybody change into nice clothes. We knew when people were coming because they did that.”
Montgomery, who is Black, said he experienced “blatant racism” at Agape. One time, he said, a staff member sat him down in front of his desk.
“He said, ‘Do you know what a sundown town is?’ He was like, ‘Where I come from, we have sundown towns, and it means, n-----, don’t let the sun fall on you.’ Then he gave me a wink.”
Montgomery said he never fully conformed to Agape’s program.
“And actually, that caused me issues,” he said. “At the very end, before they’d give me my diploma, they made me admit that I was a Christian. They made me get in front of everybody and apologize for being a bad influence, tell everybody I was born again and found Jesus.”
Montgomery left Agape in August 2004, two days before his 18th birthday, then joined the Marine Corps. But that didn’t last long: “I wasn’t used to being free, so I kind of wilded out.”
He joined the Army at 20 and served for four years.
Montgomery said he started speaking out about Agape “since the moment I stepped out.”
“I literally called Child Protective Services at the state level when I was 18, 19, to report all kinds of stuff,” he said. “And it went nowhere.”
