‘God’s will.’ Girls reform school left three states before finding a home in Missouri
When Eliza Lamm was summoned to the office during class at Beverly Hills High School in 1999, she was surprised to see her parents standing there with a stranger and a suitcase.
“I thought the suitcase was his,” said Lamm, who was 15 at the time. “Turns out, it was mine.”
Her parents left with her school bags, and the stranger escorted her straight to the airport. They flew to Nashville, Tennessee, where they took a bus to Knoxville and then a cab, “out in the country down a very long, almost empty road.”
By day’s end, she had become one of the first students to attend Refuge Independent Baptist Girls Academy, a Christian boarding school in Clinton, Tennessee, for troubled girls.
Over the next five years, the school — run by Bud and Debbie Martin — would relocate to at least two other states and go through multiple name changes before landing in Cedar County, Missouri, as Refuge of Grace Academy.
Today, after another name change, it’s called Wings of Faith Academy.
The school’s history offers an example of why so many like it wind up in Missouri, a state with no oversight of faith-based facilities.
Lamm, whose mother was an actress, said she was not on good terms with her now-deceased parents when she was sent to the Martins’ school. She was, she told The Star, “headed down the wrong path and getting into bad things.”
But she’s certain neither parent was aware that Bud Martin had a criminal record, charged in Florida in 1982 with the sale or purchase of heroin. Records show he was sentenced in 1984.
Lamm’s new residence in Tennessee was a single-wide trailer where she and a half-dozen other girls lived and attended the Martins’ school.
“We pulled the desks out of the hallway every morning, and we lined them up and did our school work in the living room,” she said.
Punishment included what Lamm, now 37, referred to as “whuppings.” The girls would have to bend over with knees locked, she said, then recite Hebrews 13:17 from the King James Version of the Bible.
Then, Lamm said, Debbie Martin would administer three to five whacks using a thick leather paddle.
“Debbie would brag — literally brag — about her paddle,” Lamm said. “She would smile and laugh while she told us that Bud had to make her a seven-layer leather paddle because she kept breaking the wooden one over the girls.
“She would hold it with both hands, then take a hop and swing it at us like a baseball bat.”
Things got dicey one day in early 2000 when a student bolted after church, Lamm said, then made her way to a neighbor’s and called her mom and the police. A week later, a social worker showed up and demanded the names and phone numbers of the girls’ parents, she said.
“Debbie’s freaking out, and I’m sitting there praising the Lord,” Lamm said.
Soon, she said, Bud Martin told the girls that their attorneys had advised them that if the girls wanted to go home, they needed to let them leave. Lamm chose to go. And while she was back in California, she said, the Martins pulled up stakes and moved the school to North Carolina, calling it Refuge Independent Girls Academy.
Lamm’s parents sent her back to the school after several months — their classes now held in a church — and she stayed until she turned 18 in 2001. After about a year in North Carolina, she said, the Martins moved the school to Michigan.
The move to Missouri
In 2004, the Martins relocated again — this time to Stockton, Missouri, where they opened Refuge of Grace as a sister school to Agape Boarding School a few miles down the road.
In an interview with the Bolivar Herald-Free Press that year, Bud Martin said they’d decided to move to Stockton after friends at their Michigan church told them about Agape. They visited and prayed about it “and decided that this was God’s will,” Martin said.
The two schools are closely connected. The girls attend church services at Agape, and Agape founder James Clemensen is listed in Refuge of Grace’s corporation documents as vice president of the board.
Today, about 20 girls attend the school, which has an annual budget of $652,500, according to its 2018 tax return, the most recent available. Tuition is $3,200 a month plus enrollment and “startup fees” of $3,400, both due on arrival.
Rules are listed in the school’s parent handbook. Among them: “All incoming and outgoing mail is read...any offensive or negative mail may not be delivered. The student is not allowed to lie in her letters.” Discipline comes in many forms, the handbook states: “Essays, standing against the wall, jumping jacks, running, memorization, and work details. We do not spank.”
The Martins did not respond to The Star’s requests for comment. In a brief phone call Tuesday, Debbie Martin acknowledged that she had received an email sent a week earlier with detailed questions about the school and the allegations.
“We did, but we won’t be answering it, thank you, per our legal,” Debbie Martin said before abruptly ending the call.
In testimonials on the Wings of Faith website, parents and former students sing the school’s praises.
“I call Wings of Faith Academy a miracle school because God answered our prayers for our daughter through the school,” one mother said. “Before we enrolled her in Wings of Faith Academy she had stopped listening to us and was going on a troublesome path but the staff at Wings of Faith have helped to restore our family relationships and even our daughter’s relationship with God.
“They provided the discipline and structure, preaching and teaching, love and grace through Christ that was needed in our daughter’s life.”
Students dole out discipline
Aimee Groves was among the first students to attend the school when it first opened in Stockton as Refuge of Grace. She was sent there in May 2004 when her boarding school — Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy near Patterson, Missouri — was shuttered after years of abuse allegations, multiple lawsuits and a 1996 murder.
At Refuge of Grace, Groves said, discipline for breaking a rule included excessive workouts, restraining, standing against a wall for hours on end and bans on talking.
“They would let students dole out discipline,” Groves said. “They would turn us against each other.”
There was no TV allowed, and any music that had a beat was prohibited, Groves said.
“If it had a beat, a drum or anything like that, then it was worldly,” she said. “And it supposedly would make you want to act carnally and dance, so we weren’t allowed to listen to anything like that.”
Groves left Refuge of Grace in January 2006 when she was 18, working on staff the last several months. She said she worries about the girls currently at the school — now Wings of Faith — because of its close ties to Agape. Since September, The Star has spoken to dozens of former Agape students whose time at the school spans nearly two decades, all of them alleging abuse.
The Missouri Department of Social Services told The Star that Agape has had one substantiated allegation of sexual abuse. Wings of Faith has had no substantiated abuse or neglect allegations, DSS said.
The Star also has interviewed several recent Wings of Faith students in the past month, including one who got out just before Thanksgiving. All described disciplinary tactics similar to those detailed by students who attended years ago. They said girls aren’t spanked now but that restraining appears to have replaced it as a punishment.
Vali Souray said her parents sent her to Wings of Faith in 2016 when she was 12. After eight months, she said, she returned to her California home but her parents sent her back five months later. She spent two years at Wings of Faith the second time and got out last year.
Now 17, Souray said girls who were “on discipline” had to wear gray shirts. Those girls, she said, received smaller portions of food each day.
“If you were a gray shirt, all you had was plain food, and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner every night,” she said. “Sometimes, you could hear their stomachs growling, they were so hungry. It was really intense.”
Souray said the girls had no privacy, from being monitored when they showered and dressed to having their letters screened.
“If there was something they didn’t like, if they thought you were exposing the school, the letter would be ripped up and you would have to write again,” she said.
Callie Braxton, a 15-year-old from Louisiana, left Wings of Faith just before Thanksgiving after spending 15 months at the school.
She said Debbie Martin restrained her about 3½ months after she arrived at Wings of Faith. It happened at Agape Baptist Church, home of Agape Boarding School.
“We were not supposed to look at or talk to the boys,” Braxton said. Shortly before the service started, she said, she was ordered to sit by a staff member after she turned around when some boys called her name.
“I didn’t move, and then Debbie came over and picked me up by my arms,” she said. “She threw me on the floor and sat on me and put my arms all the way up to my head. It hurt so bad.
“And everybody was watching — all these boys, all the staff. And so she finally picks me up and I’m tripping because she’s walking really fast. And she pushes me and I fall on the floor and then she throws my Bible. She’s like, ‘Here.’ It was very humiliating.”
Stories like that sound all too familiar to Groves. Now, like many other former Missouri boarding school students, she’s pushing for a change in state law that will require more regulatory authority over such facilities. Two lawmakers recently proposed identical legislation that would increase oversight by the state.
“The state can’t turn a blind eye anymore,” Groves said. “Children are getting abused physically, mentally and sexually in the name of God. Can you imagine something any more horrible?
“We don’t want other children to have to fight for their sanity like we have.”
This story was originally published December 27, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
