Miracle Meadows School in West Virginia - raid and legal updates

[Oscar]

Here are articles and comments about Miracle Meadows School which was raided after some 26 years of operation in August 2014:

Abuse Complaints Against Private West Virginia School Released
By John Raby - November 25, 2014

A former West Virginia boarding school for troubled youths was named in more than a dozen complaints of abuse and mistreatment over the past five years, one involving a student who allegedly volunteered a younger sibling to other residents for sex, according to an Associated Press review of state records.

A teacher at the private Miracle Meadows school in Salem was accused in August of choking a young resident unconscious and handcuffing other residents in their rooms to restrain them. The teacher and the school’s co-founder were arrested, the school was shut down and the Department of Health and Human Resources removed the school’s 19 students.

“This seems to be a rogue school,” said Harrison County assistant prosecutor Patricia Dettori.

Since 2009, the DHHR has received 15 formal complaints about West Virginia private schools, including 13 about Miracle Meadows. The DHHR released the complaints to the AP in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Four complaints against Miracle Meadows alleged sexual misconduct. One filed in April said a 16-year-old volunteered his 10-year-old sibling to other residents for sex in order to receive extra hygiene items and other goods from them. The complaint said the teenager made it past the security systems and night security personnel to the floor his sibling was on. The number of residents involved wasn’t known.

Four complaints made in June involved alleged incidents that resulted in the current criminal charges against founder Susan Gayle Clark and teacher Timothy Arrington.

Clark was charged with child neglect resulting in injury, failing to report incidents and obstructing a law enforcement officer during an investigation. Arrington was charged with multiple counts of child abuse.

Such complaints are typically forwarded to the local prosecutor. But substantiating such complaints at Miracle Meadows has been a problem over the years, in part because many students were from out of state.

“Kids would be taken out of school. Kids would recant (the allegations),” Dettori said. “And if a staff member was involved, they would disappear.”

Dettori said many of the Miracle Meadows staff members came into the United States from other countries on religious work visas and “it wasn’t hard for them to just up and leave.”

The latest complaints provided the breakthrough prosecutors were looking for.

“This time the stars all fell into line,” Dettori said. “This has been a mess. It took a long time for it to be substantiated. It’s finally been done right.”

The school, founded in 1988 and operated as a ministry of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, is now in the process of being sold.

A criminal complaint filed in August says Clark knew about the alleged mistreatment of students by Arrington on three occasions since November 2013. Police say Arrington had choked and handcuffed a male student, left another in handcuffs overnight, and locked a third in a room and forced him to strip to his underwear.

In addition, eight students removed from the school were found at or near Clark’s home in violation of a court order, the complaint said.

Clark and Arrington have yet to appear in court for preliminary hearings.

Clark declined to comment on her case. Arrington didn’t have a listed telephone number. Messages left for their attorney weren’t returned.

The Associated Press also reached out to former school employees and former students and their families about the school. Requests for comment weren’t returned.

The DHHR’s legal issues involving Miracle Meadows started two decades ago.

Acting on allegations of physical and emotion abuse of children at Miracle Meadows, the DHHR said in a 1994 lawsuit that the school should be required to obtain a license to operate a residential child care facility. A Harrison County Circuit Court ruled for the school, saying requiring such a license would be a function of the Legislature, not the court system.

In 2000, the state Supreme Court rejected DHHR’s attempt to force Miracle Meadows to produce students’ medical and school records for an investigation after two students alleged a staff member abused them. The court said that while DHHR had a duty to investigate abuse claims, it wasn’t entitled to records of students who weren’t the subject of the petition.

Private schools in West Virginia aren’t held to the same oversight standards as their public counterparts. They must simply report annual standardized test scores to the Department of Education in order to function as a school.

According to a report released in September by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, a lack of oversight of the nation’s charter schools has led to “too many cases of fraud and abuse, too little attention to equity, and no guarantee of academic innovation or excellence.”

The report suggests that charter schools be subject to the same process and transparency rules as traditional public schools.

Yet while leading state lawmakers are aware of what happened at Miracle Meadows, they don’t appear to have private schools on their regulatory radar.

“We have a tendency to let the private sector take care of the private sector,” said Don Perdue, D-Wayne, chair of the House health committee.

[Oscar]

Various comments to the article above:

this is bs i was at mms for three years right up to the point that it closed down i knew every staff and every person accused and i know that this is bs you take the alagtions for truth not knowing the person i know all these people and i know that this is all bull shit i was also at advent home learning centre which also closed down for three years so i know everything and al the people and i say this is bull crap yes it was tuff and it was hard as hell but it was because the people made it that way people wenrt perfect but i know that noone was chocked to unconciouness and if they were it would be handle quick i have more examples that have happned some even to me i mean if you need a witness to tlak none better than me i was there seen everyone and knew everything and i know that all of this is bull please be adults and alnalyize before you just make accusations

I went To miracle Meadows for 6 months starting in May of 2005. Yes there was abuse, however in some instances staff were defending themselves. Some of the kids at MMS are there for violent behavior. This being said, I personally knew of a male staff member having a sexual relationship with a 16 year old female student. I saw a friend of mine put in isolation and denied food until he had written the rules for “social break” 15 times. This happened on another occasion to a female student, who lost a lot of weight, they would not allow her mother to speak to her. Eventually a concerned staff member took her off campus and got her in touch with her mother, at which point it was brought to light that she weighed less than 80lbs. I never saw anyone chocked, but I did see a staff member attempt to defend himself with a piece of 2X4 from a student with a box cutter. The worst thing I saw happen as far as abuse goes was a small child who I thought was to young to be there was constantly accosted by male staff members about his chronic bed wetting problem. The young boy was also not allowed to sleep in a bed, and slept on the floor on a piece of tarp. While at MMS we were not allowed letters that had not been checked first and our letters home had to be approved before they could be sent, anything in your letters that the staff considered a lie would get you in a lot of trouble. On more than one occasion my family sent me supplies, (shampoo,deodorant,etc.) which I never received, and were not sent back to my family as they stated they would do in their mail policy. Some staff are trained councilors,however most were just kids right out of college who as they put it “wanted to get out of Jamaica for a while.” I met Gayle Clark, she was an evil woman, the staff reinforced this ideal, often by telling the students that she made them very uncomfortable. She cared nothing about that school except tuition, or keeping students at her personal home to obtain financial support from the state. Even all those years ago she had been accused of tax evasion, and if you saw her home and farm, horses, and farm equipment, its not hard to believe she was keeping funds for private reasons. I may be a bit biased but I personally saw many lives destroyed by this place and I’ve never been happier to hear about a school closing down. I could write an entire book on the negative experiences at MMS, and those are just my own. Fights ranging from student on student, staff on students and staff on staff were a day to day occurrence. There was no counseling (except “private time” with staff which was usually just staff offering food or candy to students as a special treat), I stole a staff handbook from the boys dorm and found that I was the only one who had actually read it. When I quoted it to staff, they would threaten me with a “social break” or tell me that was none of my business. What really is disheartening to me is that who knows how many other kids who were abused are to scared or embarrassed to come forwards. It was common for staff to tell parents that their children were lying when allegations were made, and since most of the kids were there for their bad behavior, it made it very easy for staff to convince parents everything their child said was a lie. They accused me of not having certain high school credit and were making me retake classes, when I finally got in touch with my parents and was able to convince them I was not lying they asked the school for a copy of the same transcripts sent to them when I enrolled. The school could not produce them, saying they had never received them. My father who had personally sent them was furious, but not enough to take me out. This was a constant struggle and taught students that authority figures can not be trusted. Not exactly a good thing for building self-esteem. While you were at MMS as a student you were a liar, and a thief, and staff made that very clear. You could tell no truth. I’d like to end this with a message to the parents who sent their children to this hell hole, mine included. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF FOR SENDING YOUR CHILD TO THIS PLACE. I’ll sleep better at night knowing Miracle Meadows is no more. Oh one more thing, Gayle I really hated coming to your house to bail hey for up to 10 hours, good luck finding kids for forced labor now.

Don’t worry; Gayle will have to show up to court on May. District Attorney will request the judge to have the case reviewed dated way back to 1993. I went to MMS from 1995-97; if the judge allows it, Gayle Clark is so … screwed: I was the ONLY disabled person at Miracle Meadows School (Deafness) and had no special class for my needs. Non-RID certified interpreter doesn’t count, !