Boarding schools fleeing abuse claims in other states find ‘Promised Land’ in Missouri
Aaron Rother was 16 when the leader of his boarding school announced they were packing up and moving again, to their third state in a little more than a year.
But this time, in the mid-1990s, Agape Boarding School was moving away from the “nonbelievers” in Washington and California and heading east. To a place with “good Christian people,” no government scrutiny and where leaders could feel free to run their school the way they saw fit.
“It was the feeling like we were going to the Promised Land,” said Rother, whose father dropped him off at Agape in Othello, Washington, when he was 15. “Kind of like, ‘This is where the Christians can go to not be messed with.’
“When we got to Missouri, they announced to us that they had found THE place. Like this is our new home. … The state followed God’s law, that’s the message they told us.”
It’s a message that seemingly has been heard across the country for decades as schools have made their way to the Show-Me State, where a nearly 40-year-old law allows faith-based residential facilities to operate without a license, any scrutiny or interference from the state.
From Washington and California to Michigan and Mississippi, the schools come to Missouri, where no one is watching or keeping tabs.
The Star found that at least seven schools moved here after being investigated or shut down in other states for abuse or neglect. Four more started up in Missouri, inspired by some of those that moved here.
One school, Master’s Ranch Christian Academy — which has had a facility in southern Missouri for more than a decade — opened a new location in the Pacific Northwest last year. But it closed this year amid a sheriff’s investigation that included allegations of boys being physically restrained and shot with paintballs. Some of the students were sent to Missouri.
And while his Washington location was under investigation, Master’s Ranch owner David Bosley opened yet another facility in southern Missouri, this one for girls.
The state keeps no records on these unlicensed boarding schools. It doesn’t even know their names, where they are, how many there are or how many students they house.
The Star found at least 13 in southern Missouri alone. Three were started by former Agape staff and a fourth — Wings of Faith Girls Academy — reportedly was encouraged to come here by Agape owner James Clemensen.
Of those 13 schools, five — including Agape — have at least one substantiated report of abuse or neglect from the Missouri Department of Social Services, the Star found as part of its ongoing investigation of unlicensed faith-based boarding schools.
Two schools had multiple substantiated reports: Master’s Ranch, with two reports of neglect; and Circle of Hope Girls Ranch, which had four — two for sexual abuse, one for neglect and one for physical abuse and neglect.
But even after reports are substantiated, the state still has no authority over the operation of the schools.
While other states across the nation like Alabama have clamped down in recent years and implemented tougher regulations, Missouri has not.
In fact, when Alabama made changes in 2017, one school quickly packed up and relocated to southwest Missouri and opened under a new name, The Star’s investigation showed. (That school later moved to another state.)
At least six states exempt faith-based residential child care facilities from licensing, according to a review by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Several of those, however, mandate that unlicensed schools register with the state, undergo inspections or meet certain child welfare, health and safety requirements.
Missouri is one of just two states — South Carolina is the other — that require no additional regulations or licensing to operate these boarding schools, according to the NCSL review.
So instead of a place to learn and grow, the schools become more like a prison. Dropped off by parents or swept from their homes by private transport companies in the middle of the night, the kids wind up hundreds and sometimes more than 1,000 miles from their families.
Missouri has become a safe harbor for unlicensed facilities that often settle in rural and secluded parts of the state where they can fly under the radar. It’s where former students say they were stripped of their dignity and privacy, sometimes forced to shower or go to the bathroom while staff members watched.
They describe being deprived of basic human needs, often restricted to just four squares of toilet paper, given a limited amount of food and water and cut off from regular communication with family and the outside world. Some recent students say they didn’t even know we are in the midst of a global pandemic.
“The state of Missouri is a breeding ground for these places,” said Charles Kennedy, a retired Alabama police captain who has investigated numerous boarding schools, including the one that fled his state and reopened in Missouri. “It’s a hotbed. There’s no oversight, and they try to hide behind the First Amendment.
“This must be stopped. It’s ridiculous that in this day and age we’re still having children being sent into camps like Charles Dickens wrote about in Oliver Twist.”
Indeed, Missouri’s lack of oversight has created a generation of former students who say they’re forever changed. They say that five, 10 — even 20 — years later they still suffer from the trauma of physical and psychological abuse inflicted inside the locked compounds.
Tragan Campbell, 38, said because Missouri’s law is so lax it gives schools “permission to do whatever the hell they want … and no one is there to stop them.”
He was at Agape from February 1997 to June 1998 and said the psychological toll those 16 months took is immense. Even now.
“There has not been a day since I left there that I don’t think about that place,” said Campbell, who now lives in southern California, as his voice broke. “One of the lessons that I learned from that place, if you have the sufficient ability to control a certain person’s existence, you can make them do, feel, think anything.”
Agape leaders have refused multiple requests for comment for this or other articles. David Bosley, owner of Master’s Ranch, did not respond to a request for comment.
Boyd and Stephanie Householder, who owned the Circle of Hope Girls Ranch, told The Star in September that abuse allegations were made up by former students intent on revenge after their lives didn’t turn out like they’d hoped.
Aimee Groves attended two girls boarding schools in Missouri from 2001 to 2006, the last several months as a staff member. And she later briefly worked at Circle of Hope, one of four faith-based facilities in Cedar County.
“They took pride in not having to register with the state,” Groves, of east Texas, said of the schools. “They would always say, ‘We live by God’s law. That’s above the laws of man.’”
A legislative hearing last month in Jefferson City — called after a Lee’s Summit lawmaker read The Star’s first story on reform school abuse — focused on Circle of Hope, where former students said punishment included physical restraining and withholding food and water. The school is now closed and a criminal investigation is underway.
Experienced child advocates are hopeful that change can finally happen now that leaders across the state are aware of what children say they have suffered for decades. Bipartisan bills prefiled earlier this month for next year’s legislative session would for the first time give the state some oversight of these schools.
“Our system in Missouri, our lack of registration, is a glaring hole that bad actors and predators can get through to hurt children,” said Emily van Schenkhof, executive director of the Children’s Trust Fund, the state’s foundation for child abuse prevention. “We haven’t done our job to make this state inhospitable to people that want to hurt kids.”
In fact, she said, the state has become “very hospitable” to those who want to hurt the most vulnerable.
“The last thing I want is for predators and bad actors to move to the state of Missouri because they think they can hurt children here,” van Schenkhof said.
But the way the law is now, there is nothing to keep that from happening. The state doesn’t even know how many of these schools are here.
“The department really has no knowledge, nor would we have any way to know the number of unlicensed facilities,” Caitlin Whaley, director of legislation and communications for the Missouri Department of Social Services, told lawmakers at last month’s hearing. “We don’t have any knowledge of these facilities... These facilities are not required to present themselves to our department in any way.”
The department also does not conduct background checks on the employees, Whaley said.
Rep. Sheila Solon, R-St. Joseph, asked if government agencies make safety or health inspections of the facilities.
Again, Whaley responded: “We have no interaction with these facilities.”
Legislators at the hearing were surprised. So even if an exempt boarding school is found to have numerous substantiated allegations of abuse, Solon asked, DSS can’t review its exemption?
“That is not provided for in the law,” Whaley said.
Allen Knoll was sent to Agape in 1999 at age 13 after spending more than two years at Bethel Boys Academy in Lucedale, Mississippi, which closed in 2007 following a series of investigations and lawsuits.
“The thing is, we don’t even know all the places because they change their names, they move around and in some states they don’t have to license,” said Knoll, of Seattle. “They’ll get a bad reputation somewhere, reports will come out, so they change their name so nobody knows. And when you don’t have to license or register because you’re hiding behind the religious exemption, we don’t even know about half these organizations.
“We’ll know in 10 years when these kids grow up and start speaking out.”
A welcome mat in Missouri
Reports of abuse inside some of Missouri’s faith-based boarding schools trace back to the 1980s. And they have resurfaced through the years.
Among the consistent allegations: Hours of exhausting manual labor, excessive swatting, beatings, restraints and mind games that caused feelings of isolation and humiliation in young children.
The state has never required any of these schools to be licensed, or adhere to any regulations that would have addressed health or safety concerns.
All because of a law passed in 1982.
That law required state regulation of child-care residential centers. But it allowed exemptions for certain facilities, including those run by religious organizations. The statute also said that DSS cannot require those claiming an exemption to prove that they should be exempt.
Despite many attempts to change it, that loophole has remained sacred for nearly four decades.
“We have such a strong sense of ‘if it’s religious it must be good,’ and that religious-affiliated organizations should be beyond the reach of any kind of secular regulation,” said Ruth Ehresman, who worked for Citizens for Missouri’s Children in 2003 and was one of the key players advocating for more oversight. “That they need to be free to do what they want by their own rules.”
But like a beacon, that exemption sent a signal to religious boarding schools that the welcome mat was out in the Show-Me State. The schools head this way to take advantage of the state’s laissez-faire philosophy that allows them to operate unchecked.
“We knew that we were a welcoming place,” Ehresman said. “That these places were attracted to Missouri.”
As former Rep. Barbara Fraser, a St. Louis County Democrat who sponsored a bill that year calling for religious boarding schools to be licensed, put it: “Missouri provides more oversight over dogs and other pets than it does those who are supposed to be caring for the children in these facilities.”
Some of the first abuse and neglect allegations came to light just a few years after the law passed in 1982. Those reports came from two schools — one for boys and the other for girls — that set up shop in Kansas City after being run out of Texas in 1986.
And they sounded like something out of a horror movie.
A teen showed up at a hospital with a broken wrist, the result of being beaten after trying to escape, according to media reports at the time. A boy had part of a testicle surgically removed after being kneed in the groin and denied medical treatment for days. Another was forced to lick his own excrement as punishment for having an accident in his pants.
The schools, Rebekah Home for Girls and Anchor Home for Boys, were known as Roloff homes, affiliated with Lester Roloff, the late independent fundamental Baptist pastor seen by many as a pioneer in the effort to deliver wayward teens to Jesus. The schools left the area in 1987, days after a story about the allegations appeared in The Kansas City Times.
That and other incidents prompted attempts to tighten the state law. But those efforts fizzled in Jefferson City.
The fight started up again in 2003 after other high-profile cases. And it soon became clear that regulating these schools would be a tough, if not impossible, sell.
One big obstacle that child advocates and lawmakers faced: many in the state simply refused to accept that the allegations were true.
They had a hard time believing that extreme abuse, manual labor or psychological damage was being inflicted inside these religious schools full of troubled young people. Even today, after allegations surfaced about Circle of Hope, one Missouri lawmaker vouched for the owners’ integrity and said the kids at these schools can be “master manipulators.”
Others dismissed the urgency to step in because families willingly placed their kids in these reform schools when they could no longer handle them. Some of the schools even had parents sign contracts in which they consented to a specified number of swats their child could be given in a certain time frame.
Advocates didn’t buy that argument.
“How can you look at children and imagine that these young people go through those terrible experiences and say it’s all right, their parents put them there, their decision,” Ehresman said. “No, that’s wrong.”
Opponents of the change insisted that the state didn’t need any more authority over faith-based boarding schools. They argued that the legislation would interfere with religious freedom and that the law already allowed the state to investigate reported allegations of abuse or neglect.
One vocal opponent, the Rev. John Stormer of Heritage Baptist Church in Florissant, Missouri, argued at the time that if a pastor of a school accepted state licensure, “he would be acknowledging that the state is over the Lord’s church” — and “this no Bible believer can do.” Such a concession would lead to the state licensing all church ministries, including the pulpit, said Stormer, who passed away in 2018.
Much attention focused on Heartland Christian Academy, a school in northeastern Missouri that became the subject of national headlines in 2001 after a call to the state hotline reported students being forced to stand in ankle-to-chest-deep cow manure as a punishment.
Several months later, after two more allegations of abuse were lodged against the facility, authorities raided the school and removed 115 children, prompting a series of lawsuits and challenges that took years to wind through the courts. In the end, felony child abuse charges against five employees were either dropped or the staffers acquitted. Owner Charles Sharpe and his school also were cleared of any wrongdoing and the state settled with Heartland, agreeing to pay extensive attorney fees and court costs.
At the legislative committee hearing last month, Woody Cozad, a former lobbyist for the late Sharpe, said there’s no need for the state to further regulate schools. The state should have learned from the Heartland case, he said.
“We were abused,” said Cozad, who served as Missouri GOP chairman from 1995 to 1999. “We were the victims of an abuse of state power. So we have a hard time believing that the state doesn’t have sufficient authority. They can come into an unlicensed facility if they get a complaint that abuse or neglect is going on.”
To this day, the Heartland case continues to have a chilling effect on those hoping to do away with the exemption for religious schools.
Fraser’s 2003 bill to require licensure for religious-based residential treatment centers never received a hearing.
Sen. Pat Dougherty proposed a less stringent bill that would have required exempt facilities to be accredited and register with the state.
Under that bill, exempt facilities would have been required to register with the Department of Health and Senior Services and comply with sanitation and fire standards established by the state.
A committee held a hearing on Dougherty’s bill at the end of the session, but took no action on it.
Dougherty, a Democrat who represented St. Louis from 1979 to 2007, said he and other lawmakers spent years pushing for more state oversight for those schools.
“We all tried to get the religious ones regulated, at least minimally,” Dougherty told The Star. “Fought tooth and nail.”
But every time a bill was brought up, he said, some religious groups swarmed the Capitol “and basically talked about the separation of church and state.”
Advocates and lawmakers tried from the beginning, he said, to address safety concerns and low staff-to-student ratios at the schools.
“Those types of things,” he said, “which no way in God’s green earth were attempting to tell a religious group how to run their ministry.”
‘Satan is the government’
After authorities shut down Agape Boarding School in Othello, Washington, for code violation issues in the mid-1990s, students who didn’t go home went wherever the staff leaders took them, Rother said.
At first, they stayed at the school, moving out of the dorms and onto the campus basketball court in the gym and trying to stay a step ahead of state social workers.
Agape staff leaders “believed that Satan is the government in a way,” said Rother, who attended the school in all three states it has operated in. When leaders thought the state workers were coming, they’d say, “’You guys need to come with us. We’re going to the park,’” Rother said.
“And we’d play sports all day.”
Only about 30 boys were left at that time, Rother said. And those still there knew they couldn’t run.
“When we were being hidden from CPS (Child Protective Services), if you tried to escape, that would literally be like me trying to seek the devil,” Rother said. “And that level of visceral retribution that would be brought to you after that, you didn’t want to go there. It was fear.”
After finally leaving the Agape campus, the students and staff hid out in a Baptist church for days, Rother said. Then it was time for a change.
The message, Rother said, was: “We’re leaving the state, no way we can stay here and keep hiding.”
James Clemensen, in The Othello Outlook newspaper in 1995, said the problems he faced in Washington may force him to “relocate to a friendlier location.”
Just last month, in a service honoring Clemensen on the Agape campus in southwest Missouri, family and former staff told stories and joked about the early days of the school. The service was live-streamed on YouTube.
His son, Bryan Clemensen, said that his dad and family in the beginning wanted to bring God into the lives of troubled boys. He said they were looking to do something long-term, and “something where the state wasn’t running it.”
At the service, he read a letter from a former staff leader about moving the boys around.
“I remember our days ‘running from the wrath of the state government,’” the employee, now a pastor in New York, wrote.
When staff leaders left Washington they took the students back to California, where Agape had started years before. Then after several months living in an old Christian summer camp, the big move happened.
It’s a move that eventually transformed Agape into what many now consider to be a national powerhouse — a place to send troubled boys to get them right with God and family.
Campbell, who was at Agape in the late ’90s when he was 15 and 16, said the psychological abuse, for him, was the worst. And it started from the moment he arrived at the school.
He wrote a letter home “conveying sadness,” and calling his new school a “hell hole” and was quickly put on “suicide status” and given a robe to wear and over-sized tennis shoes with the laces taken out. Staff leaders, he said, also put him on “no talking” for three months. Once he could talk again his vocal chords actually hurt from not having been used for so long.
“Why do you have to have a license to cut somebody’s hair but not to take care of children?” he said recently. “Missouri not having any kind of requirements to open up a school allows the worst to go there. It’s a black hole.”
Since September, The Star has spoken to more than 30 former Agape students. The vast majority said they knew that a lack of regulation and oversight was why leaders chose Missouri as the school’s new — and permanent — home.
“I remember hearing when I was there that Missouri is where the government can’t get involved in what they’re doing,” said James Griffey, a student at Agape from 1998 to 2001, then a staff member for a year after that. “They made it sound like the government’s out to get the religious institutions and to take God out of things. They really turned the government into this terrible entity.”
In November 2002, James Clemensen told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he came to Missouri specifically because of its lack of regulation. And, he said, he would leave the state if he was required to be licensed.
Niles Short, who attended Agape from 1999 to 2002 and then later briefly worked as a staff member, said he was roughed up his first week at Agape. That’s when the staff member running the boot camp-style orientation slammed him into a sand pit and rubbed his face in it because Short stood up to an older student who threw a ball at his head. He said he saw plenty of other students get restrained, punched in the face and pushed around.
His memories of Agape weren’t all negative — he matured a great deal there, he said, and made some good friends.
“Yes, the school helped me. I needed it,” said Short, who is from the Chicago area. “But I didn’t need hands to be put on me, and I didn’t need to be seeing what I saw at the time.
“At this point in time, do I think they need to be shut down? I mean, honestly, yeah, I do. It’s just gone on too long.”
The closing of Circle of Hope in September amid an investigation into abuse, he said, is “a good start.”
“There’s a lot of the schools that are getting away with it,” he said. “And when complaints are made, the excuses that they always come up with are these are just mad students that are trying to get us in trouble.”
Rother spent a total of 20 months at Agape. A few months of that were at the Missouri location outside of Stockton.
He’d hear staff leaders say multiple times that they came to the state because of the lax laws.
“They think like they are the hand of God, that they are doing the Lord’s work,” Rother said. “Like they are going to bring about some type of righteous youth movement.”
This story was originally published December 27, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
