Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

It has turned out to be the end for Northwest Academy - previously known as Horizon Academy. The owners and one teacher were arrested on various charges related to endangering the lives of the students.

Nevada closes school for at-risk teens after owners' arrests
by Associated Press, February 16 - 2019

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Nevada officials have shut down a boarding school for at-risk teens after its owners were accused of forcing students to drink tainted tap water.

State health department spokeswoman Chrystal Main said Friday that Northwest Academy in Amargosa Valley has closed.

A telephone message to the facility about 90 miles west of Las Vegas was not immediately answered.


Defense attorney Malcolm LaVergne and Nye County sheriff's officials say owners Marcel and Patricia Chappuis (shap-WEE') posted bail to be freed from jail pending a March 18 court appearance.

They're accused of endangering 43 students by failing to provide enough bottled water for drinking, washing and cooking to replace tap water contaminated with arsenic.

Patricia Chappuis also faces two felony child abuse counts.

LaVergne says they'll plead not guilty and fight the charges.

Midwest Academy closed, now Northwest Academy closed, Red River Academy closed. Time for looking into the next school to close. We have been working on a new version of the Egedal SEO system created because the social services in a small town in Denmark took some money, they shouldn't have. Just point to the target and all negative articles ever been put online about a certain place will pop up as some of the first pages on various search engines and the authorities will be worried enough to start an investigation.

Vermont school shooting plot suspect recently left Maine treatment center
By Patty Wight, Maine Public • February 21, 2018

A student who was recently enrolled at York County Community College was arrested in his home state of Vermont last week after threatening a mass shooting at his former high school.

According to Vermont police, 18-year-old Jack Sawyer also attended a residential school near Belfast for troubled teens. York County Community College officials say they have no indication that anyone was at risk while Sawyer was a student.

Last Wednesday the Fair Haven Police Department in Vermont was notified that Sawyer was making threats against Fair Haven Union High School, where he had been a student, but Chief William Humphries says it was a follow-up tip from a friend that led to his arrest. The two had spent time together at Ironwood, a residential treatment school in Maine for teens with emotional and behavioral disorders. Sawyer had texted the friend about the school shooting in Florida.

“He had told her that he had been plotting to do the same for the last two years at Fair Haven High School, he said that he had no problem doing it, that he wouldn’t really have any remorse, that had no problem with ending it early,” says Humphries.

Sawyer had also purchased a gun. During an arraignment in court last week, Sawyer pleaded not guilty to several charges, including attempted murder. He’s currently being held without bail.

Until recently, Sawyer was taking a class at York County Community College. President Barbara Finkelstein says he withdrew earlier this month. After the news of his arrest, Finkelstein sent a letter to the school community, saying there was no indication anyone was ever at risk while Sawyer was a student, and emphasizing that safety and security are on ongoing priority.

“We’ve always been very vigilant,” says Finkelstein. “We have an active emergency response team that does practice drills all the time at the college. We have a number of security protocols in place at the college.”

Both Finkelstein and Vermont police credit the tips from Sawyer’s friends for averting violence, and say it’s a good reminder that if you see something suspicious, say something.

From 1923 to 1961 Danish teenage women were sent to the Island of Sprogoe where they were confined until they were sterilized or lobotomized so they could fit into the Danish society again. A crime could be too many boyfriends.

Some died, some escaped with help from local fishermen (the price was becoming their wives). Other ended up institutionalized for the rest of their lives.

Here is a link to the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBoQFNSb1kQ

‘It’s Like, Who’s Next?’: A Troubled School’s Alarming Death Rate
By Michael Wilson, Sept. 2 - 2018
When four former students from the same school died within months of one another in 2015, it seemed random, a morbid coincidence. Then the number kept growing. At least seven more died the next year.

Their fellow alumni, feeling more anxious with each death, started to keep count. By the time a classmate in Ohio died of a heroin overdose in October, the toll had reached at least 87.

Three weeks later, another fatal overdose in New Jersey: 88. Three more weeks saw another, a schoolteacher in the Bronx found dead in the faculty restroom. Ten days later, No. 90, in Minnesota.

“Damn,” a friend of the last victim wrote on Facebook. “This is outta control.”

All of the dead were alumni of the Family Foundation School, a small boarding academy in rural Hancock, N.Y. Since its opening in the 1980s, the school was an option of last resort for parents who sought help for their teenagers troubled by drug and alcohol abuse or behavioral issues. The students ate and bunked together, were dressed down and punished together. Some attempted to escape together, dashing through the woods to the nearest town and hiding in a McDonald’s bathroom.

And now, alone and back at their respective homes, they were dying, largely of drug overdoses and suicide, their names joining classmates on the list. Again, together.

The school closed in 2014 after a drop in enrollment that followed a self-described truth campaign by alumni telling of abuses there: solitary confinement, so-called “blackouts” of silence and isolation from others, the restraining of unruly students by wrapping them in rugs and duct tape. There were reports of physical abuse in complaints to state officials and the police.

In 2015, a year after the school closed, at least four former students died. The next year, there were at least seven. In a recent Facebook post, a man remembered hanging out with two friends from the school in 2016, following the funeral of another. Both those friends have since died.

Former students sought to find someone to blame, their first target being the school, only to come to terms with a more likely truth, that their dead classmates had been overcome by the sources of despair and addiction that took seed in their youth and brought them to the school in the first place.

It is unclear how many students attended the Family Foundation School over its roughly 30 years in business. A 1986 newspaper article about the school puts its student population at 34. The next decade, a 1998 yearbook — roughly the halfway point in the school’s existence — refers to that year’s graduating class of 30 as its largest ever. The school grew some in the years to come, alumni said.

Emmanuel Argiros, the son of the school’s founders and its former president, declined to comment on the school’s history. “I’m trying to move on,” he said. He has had many conversations with angry former students, he said. “It’s painful to go through it over and over and over again.”

There is no clearinghouse for data regarding mortality rates among secondary schools. Robert M. Friedman, formerly with the Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic and Appropriate use of Residential Treatment, said he was familiar with the Family Foundation School and the push by alumni to close it down. He said the deaths of graduates are not typically tracked.

“Nobody knows how these kids have done, over all,” he said.

In recent months, many of the school’s former students have pivoted to a sort of social media suicide watch, urging alumni on Facebook to look out for one another. The effort is led by Elizabeth Ianelli, 39, an alumna of the school and a former police instructor, who has tallied the death count — now up to 101, all under the age of 50 and the vast majority under 40.

Ms. Ianelli, whose username is Survivor993 for the number of days she spent at the school, created a Facebook community page called ISeeYouSurvivor, and separately posted a video that she made in her home office in Carmel, N.Y.

“What I want you to know is that I see you,” she said, visibly shaken as she spoke. “I see you. I know what you go though and I’ve been there.” She added later, “Our best revenge is living a good life.”

School of Last Resort

Parents who were struggling with troubled teenage children sent them to the Family Foundation School, near Binghamton, where they were promised their sons and daughters would receive a quality education as well as counseling and tough-love discipline.

A special-education teacher, Lillian Becker, heard about a job opening at the school in 1998 and went for an interview. It was her first time on the campus, where she saw a schoolhouse, trailers and a red barn arranged on a hill that sloped gently down to a pond.

“It looked wonderful,” Ms. Becker said in a recent interview. “Very professional, very clean, very neat and orderly and everybody was very friendly. They had a student give me a tour. She just seemed so happy to be there.”

Ms. Becker got the job. On her first day, she saw something strange. She was asked to monitor a timeout room for 20 minutes until a staff member arrived to take over. “A storage room, probably like 6 feet wide by 12 feet long,” she recalled. “On the floor was this student wrapped in a blanket with duct tape to hold the blanket shut. Just the head was sticking out.”

She was told the student was at risk of hurting others or himself.

She settled into her job as a de facto nurse, making outside medical and dental appointments for students and tending to their aches and pains. She saw other practices that, looking back, she wonders why she didn’t openly question.

The school was arranged in “families,” with staff members designated as “Mom” and “Dad” and their “children,” the students, eating meals together before retiring to bunk beds in trailers, separate for boys and girls. A regular occurrence during meals were “table topics,” when students would stand and accuse, or “bring up,” another classmate over some infraction, Ms. Becker and former students said.

“Susie would get up and say, ‘I want to bring up John,’” Ms. Becker said. “John had to stand up. Now it’s time to basically break this kid down. ‘I saw him flirting,’ something like that.” What regularly followed was a tirade of mocking and scolding from other students and adults, she said. “The staff would chop this kid up.”

Sanctions varied, some involving food — a diet of tuna fish on a dry English muffin was a common punishment — or menial labor, with students burying rocks in the dirt one day, only to be ordered to dig them up the next. Others were social in nature, called “blackouts.”''

“If you were on house blackout, you were not allowed to talk to anyone outside of the family you were in,” said Emily Valentine, a student in 2001 and 2002. The most extreme blackout was called exile, leaving the student to sit in a corner, alone, at meals. “You weren’t allowed to talk to anyone or look anyone in the eye,” said Wesley Good, an alumnus from 2009. “You were a ghost.”

Some students reacted physically. “I flipped out and punched my counselor,” said Elizabeth Boysick, who entered the school in 2000. Ms. Boysick said she was placed in a janitor’s closet for the infraction. “Rugs in there, rugs on the wall. Nobody was to talk to you.”

Steve Sullivan attended the school from 1999 until 2002, and went on to serve time in prison years later for burglary and robbery. He said he would fight others at every opportunity, beginning on his first day, when he lashed out at staff members who were trying to search him for contraband. “I was thrown in an 8-by-8 isolation room,” he said. “Lunch and dinner were both tuna. I’d spend days in there on end.” Once, he kicked the door off its hinges.

Former students could remember who watched them while they were bound or locked up: other students, effectively deputized by staff members to serve as jailers.

Some of those accounts are corroborated by the reports of state officials who, after receiving complaints, conducted surprise inspections over the years.

In 2010, inspectors noted “a previous culture of harsh treatment at the facility,” adding, in a letter to the school, “The Family Foundation School has been working to change this culture,” according to documents released by the state’s Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs.

In a written response to the inspectors, Mr. Argiros, the president, denied that the school acknowledged its past as harsh, and said it has always been open to outside agencies and new protocols for “dealing with often incorrigible and oppositional adolescents who have failed to thrive before coming to our school.”

Ms. Becker, the de facto nurse, enrolled her own son, Lee Grivas, at the school. He did well, earning good grades and going go on to study photography. He eventually dated the actress Christina Applegate and moved to California. In 2008, he died of a drug overdose.

Escape by Any Means

Students ran away from the school. Mr. Sullivan fled one day in the winter of 2002, unprepared for the eight-mile journey to Hancock, N.Y.

“I get to town, and I’m frozen,” he said. “I ended up sleeping in a doghouse. I woke up frozen stiff and I couldn’t move.” He walked to a police station. “I tried to turn myself in. There’s no cop there.”

Mr. Good, the 2009 alumnus, was initially brought to the school by force; he said men in a van grabbed him off the street at his parents’ request — an occurrence known as “gooning.” One day, he hurt his elbow and was sent home on a 24-hour pass. Knowing his parents planned to send him back, he ran away from home and hid in a friend’s basement until his 18th birthday some days later, when he was free to leave the school on his own.

He wrote his parents a note, “Hey, I love you guys, but you don’t understand.”

Other students, desperate, saw another means of escape.

“I tried to commit suicide one night in my bunk,” said Walter Huff, now 27 and living in Chicago. “I thought it was the only way out. I took a belt and put it around my neck and put it on the top bunk, and woke up the next morning with the belt. It had broken.”

In 2007, a 17-year-old student died after jumping from an upper floor of the school. Ms. Becker, the former nurse, remembers treating students who she believed had attempted to take their lives.

“A young lady, it was winter, but the pond had a slight freeze,” she recalled. “The girl had threatened suicide and went out and jumped in the pond.” Others brought the student to Ms. Becker, who treated her for hypothermia.

Ms. Ianelli, who calls herself the “crypt keeper” of the alumni, believes that the school left some students more damaged than they were when they arrived.

“We call ourselves an endangered species,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Ianelli said she was repeatedly groped by an employee of the school and then reprimanded when she tried to report the behavior. The experience left her so distraught that she grabbed a plastic jug marked “bleach” and entered a walk-in cooler. She gulped the liquid.

“I was so excited to die,” she said.

Nothing happened. She looked at the jug again and saw another word written on the other side: “vinegar.”

‘Will You Do It With Me?’

James Clemente, 61, of Trumbull, Conn., sent his son Mark to the Family Foundation School in 2002 when the boy was 17; he described it as a last-ditch effort to treat Mark’s heroin addiction.

“I thought it was a great school,” Mr. Clemente said. “He was getting an education, not just going to rehab.”

Mark Clemente left Family Foundation School when he turned 18 and moved to Manhattan, where he lived on the streets for more than a decade, a fixture in Union Square and the East Village until his death in 2017.CreditAndrew Burton/Getty Images
“They had all the tools he needed to use,” Mr. Clemente said of the school. “He just didn’t use them.”

Anne Moss Rogers sent her son, Charles, to the school in 2012 in hopes of treating his depression and anxiety. He left the school in 2014 and killed himself a year later while suffering from withdrawal from heroin.

“When Charles died, there was one before him and one right after. A girl overdosed, then he died, then a child died due to alcohol, a car accident.” She believes the school actually prolonged Charles’ life: “He would have been dead at 17.”

Ms. Rogers, who became a speaker and mental health advocate after losing her son, said the list of dead classmates should be placed in a larger perspective. “These are high-risk kids,” she said. “We’re in an opioid epidemic and a suicide epidemic.”

Jon Martin-Crawford, an alumnus, achieved notoriety among his peers when he testified about the school before a congressional hearing regarding treatment programs for teens in 2008.

“The nightmares and psychological scars of being dragged from your home to a place in the middle of nowhere; restrained in blankets and Duct tape; assaulted, verbally and physically — those scars and that trauma never go away,” Mr. Martin-Crawford, then 28, testified. “For my friends who have since died from suicide because of the nightmares or those who still suffer the nightmares, our time and our voice will not be in vain.”

Seven years later, he hanged himself.

“It’s like, who’s next?” a former student, Sara McGrath Brathwaite, said when contacted by a reporter earlier this year. “Why?”

Thirteen former students died in 2017, among them a nurse anesthetist in Colorado, Suzanne Leffler, who took her life with drugs through an IV from her job. Ms. Leffler and another teen, Lauren Durnin, met at the school in the 1990s and remained friends. “She was always trying to make you laugh,” Ms. Durnin said. “She just seemed like she had it all together.”

In August, the police went to Ms. Leffler’s house and found her on her bed. “She had put herself to sleep,” Ms. Durnin said.

Ms. Durnin said she found herself contemplating her own death.

“All I could think to myself is, ‘You could have called me and I would have been there for you,’” she said. “And at the time, after she died, I thought if she had said, ‘Will you do it with me?’ I would have.”

Tree of Lost Souls

Today, a sports camp stands where the school once did, the buildings on the property under new ownership. Roads once dirt are paved now, but off-season at the camp, they are quiet. There is the pond where the girl dropped through the ice. There is the old barn.

Ms. Boysick, the former student who described the room with rugs on the walls, said she was repeatedly sexually abused in the barn by a teacher. She recently went to the police, after almost two decades, to press charges. The statute of limitations had passed, she was told. Nothing could be done.

A white pickup drove past the property one evening in April. Behind the wheel was Randy Whiting, 64, whose family has owned the property for many years, and who used to work in maintenance at the school. He was an insider and an outsider at the same time, his front-row seat unrelated to education or the school’s cause. News of recent deaths among alumni has found him, too.

“You know some of them, and you hear it,” Mr. Whiting said. He believes the school did a lot of good for a lot of teenagers. “They’re the ones you don’t hear much about,” he said. “There were some of the kids you just can’t reach.”

Some of those apparently beyond reach make their appearances on Ms. Ianelli’s Facebook page, alongside victims of tragic accidents.

In January, an alumnus crossing a busy road in Moonachie, N.J., was struck and killed in a hit-and-run collision. He became No. 94.

In April, reports of more deaths arrived back-to-back-to-back. A 27-year-old man was killed in a scooter accident in Florida. In Saratoga Springs, N.Y., a 35-year-old graduate and medical equipment salesman, Kyle Nelson, learned that his stepfather had died overnight. When he left to go to his grieving mother’s home the next morning, he dropped dead of a heart attack. In July, when some past deaths were added, the list reached, and then passed, 100.

Last year, Ms. Ianelli and others from the school planted a tree near the property in Hancock, beside a Catholic church in Long Eddy. They placed a plaque before it and named it the Lost Souls Tree.

Up close, markings can be read on rocks, remembering dead friends, but in the winter, the tree is bare and slight, easily missed when passing by.

It is not the Utah Cross Creek. It is a Florida school with the same name.

https://www.browardschools.com/crosscreek

That does not mean that they did something good which could have prevented the attack.

Various volunteers are looking at Atlantis Leadership academy located in Jamaica. It is run by a Randall Cook, which could be a former WWASP employee who went by the name "Randy Cook" many years ago. His mother published marketing material for WWASP.

More info will follow on this facility located in a unnamed location at Treasure Beach in Jamaica

Found this article:

Biblical Reform School Discipline: Tough Love or Abuse?
By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES, April 12, 2011/i]

Anne's rebellion against her large Christian family -- she was one of 10 children -- began after she was gang-raped last year while jogging in her Maryland neighborhood.

"Because of that the trauma, she started spiraling in every way possible," said her mother, Jeannie Marie, who did not want their last name made public.

Anne, now 18, said she numbed the pain with drinking and rebellion, which terrified her mother.

Desperate, Jeannie Marie turned to her church for help, learning about a Christian reform school that she says promised to "get right" her wayward daughter.

But neither was prepared for the ordeal they say Anne experienced from November to January of this year at New Beginnings Girls Academy, an Independent Fundamental Baptist boarding school in La Russell, Mo.

The school, according to its website, serves troubled teens so "through Jesus Christ, they can overcome their addictions, mend their broken relationships and get their lives on the right path."

Instead, Anne said she was told the rape was her fault and was subjected to harsh discipline -- ridiculed, restrained and deprived of proper nutrition and adequate clothing.

As punishment for misbehaving she says she was forced to wear a red shirt and stand facing a wall, sometimes for 8 to 10 hours a day with only 15-minute breaks for food. "I was so achy it hurt," said Anne.

She said toilet paper and sanitary pads were rationed, despite Anne's urinary problems after the rape. She also said no one offered to get her medical care.

"We thought maybe Anne would go there and hide out and pull herself together," said Jeannie Marie. "We thought it was a safe place to go and we wouldn't have to worry...We trusted our church."

Anne left the school in January, but said the punitive approach left her with no self-worth and anxiety attacks so bad she cannot breathe.

New Beginnings charges $10,300 a year, according to its admission application. On a signed form, parents agree to "corporal discipline," which is spelled out in their mission statement as up to 15 "swats" with a wooden paddle in each 24-hour period for misbehavior.

The school's mission also prohibits, "bringing civil lawsuits against other Christians or the church to resolve personal disputes."

Submission and obedience -- children to parents, wives to husbands and parishioners to "God's people," pastors and deacons -- are the tenets of Christian fundamentalism, according to Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement."

"These groups know what the outside world thinks of them and that some of it is considered abuse, but they consider it Biblical," said Joyce.

Missouri does not require its faith-based facilities to get a license and the state attorney general, "does not have any authority over them," according to AG spokeswoman Nanci Gonder. If there are allegations of physical abuse, parents are told to contact law enforcement.

Similarly, neither the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education nor the state board of education regulates or monitors faith-based schools under the home schooling law.

The Department of Social Services said the schools were not within their purview and only allegations of abuse and neglect that "meet statutory definition," are investigated.

The federal government, however, has shown concern about teen residential programs -- not all of them faith based -- and has pushed for more regulation.

In 2008, an investigation by the federal Government Accountability Office revealed thousands of cases and allegations of child abuse and neglect since the early 1990s at teen residential programs throughout the country. The report also found major gaps in licensing and oversight.

The report found untrained staff, ineffective management and operating practices in these facilities.

"In the most egregious cases of death and abuse, the cases exposed problems with the entire operation of the program," according to the report.

Congressman George Miller, D-California, introduced the Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act of 2009 to establish minimum health and safety standards, but although the bill twice passed the House, both times it failed in the Senate.

"You can't deprive kids of food and water," one Democratic aide to Miller told ABCNews.com. "You have to treat them humanely."

Just last year in Hiland Park, Fla., police removed 17 children from Heritage Boys Academy, a military school that taught fundamental Christian doctrine, arresting three, including the pastor, and shut down the facility.

Child welfare authorities said the children were often hit with sticks that were "nine fists long," and were sometimes choked or held down and beaten with fists.

The school officials plead not guilty to one charge of aggravated assault and five charges of child abuse, but the case has not yet gone to trial. A motion by the defense to dismiss is being heard on Friday, according to the clerk for the Bay County Courts..

Well-Dressed Girls Testified They Were 'Saved'

Anne's mother said she first heard a New Beginnings presentation at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Churchville, Md. There, according to Jeannie Marie, neatly dressed girls confessed to bad behaviors and cried that they had been "saved."

"They told us it was a place that helps girls grow in their Christianity in a new life with Christ," she said.

She handed Anne over to school authorities while New Beginnings was on a fundraising tour in Virginia. "It really took me by surprise," said Anne, who thought she was going on vacation. "I freaked out and balled my eyes out."

The first night Anne said she slept on a church pew and was punished for cussing when she fell off and hit her head on a hymnal.

But when the group returned to their Missouri campus, Anne said the house was frigidly cold and girls were given only skirts and light sweatshirts.

The food -- often bologna on white bread, watered-down milk and canned eggs -- was either rationed or loaded on the plate, depending on the whim of the staff, she said.

Girls were told to keep monotone voices and never to talk to each other. Phone calls and letters were monitored, she said.

"They said I am bad and God doesn't love me," said Anne. "I was taught the exact opposite of that in the home. It was hard to believe that these people actually cared about me. You had to fend for yourself."

Two months later, after a dispute with school officials about the costs, Jeannie Marie said she withdrew Anne. When she arrived at New Beginnings, she said she was horrified by what she saw.

"She looked like the most pitiful thing standing in the little snow boots I bought her -- mud-covered with a thin skirt covering her knees with dirt on it...Her face was ghostly white, her eyes bugged out and hair was pulled back. My tiny girl had a horrible look on her face...the most awful expression I have ever seen on the face of my children. I gasped and held my breath."

Jeannie Marie said that when she held her daughter, "she was so weak and faint...and her body went limp. There was nothing left to her."

She said her former pastor at Tabernacle Baptist, Don Martin, had recommended the school as successful, but it was not as advertised.

Martin said that a previous pastor had financially supported the school in the past, but he never made such claims to Anne's mother.

"If someone in our congregation did, that's another thing," he said.

"As far as I know, they come highly recommended," Martin said of the school. "I know they have to be strict -- or it doesn't do much good to send wayward ladies to a school. But I don't know how strict or what they do."

He said allegations of physical punishment in these IFB reform schools were "pretty much nonsense" and the family's claims were "fabrications."

"My sense is people send children there and they want them to come back as model citizens, and if something goes wrong, they want to blame the school. I think they tried to help, but that doesn't mean a thing if there is not good support."

William McNamara, New Beginnings' director, refused to answer questions about the program and allegations that it was abusive.

"We love them," he said of the students. "I cannot speak to any of those things -- the truth will be known."

He referred ABCNews.com to his lawyer, Wes Barnum, who did not respond to written questions sent by email or a follow-up telephone call.

New Beginnings began as the Rebekah Home for Girls in Corpus Christie, Texas, in 1968, but was shut down by the state in 1985 after numerous investigations of abuse and its refusal to submit to state licensing.

Under changing names, the school moved temporarily to Devil's Elbow, Mo., before relocating in Pace, Fla., and eventually to its present home in La Russell, Mo.

The school was run by Lester Roloff, an independent fundamental Baptist preacher who broke from the Southern Baptist Convention in 1954 and founded a series of reform facilities, known as Roloff Homes, for what he called, "parent-hating, Satan-worshiping, dope-taking immoral boys and girls," according to a 2000 investigative report in Texas Monthly.

His antidote to these rebellious teens was anchored in scripture and included kneeling on hard floors, physical punishment with paddles or leather straps or the "dreaded 'look-up,' an isolation room where Roloff's sermons were played for days on end," said the magazine.

Roloff died in a plane crash in 1982, but his ministry still exists in adult programs as part of the People's Baptist Church in Texas and other adult facilities around the country.

"We do not tolerate child abuse of any form," said August Rosado, a spokesman for Roloff Homes.

He said the Texas church was no longer affiliated with New Beginnings and now serves only adults who are struggling with addiction.

Some Former Students Report Post-Traumatic Stress
Brittany Campbell, now 25, says she was at Rebekah through its transition to New Beginnings from 2001 to 2005. The school moved to Missouri in 2007.

She showed ABCNews.com photos of the name changes from Rebekah Home for Girls to New Beginnings Rebekah Academy to New Beginnings Girls Academy.

Campbell said McNamara was in charge during that period. When ABCNews.com called him to ask about charges of abuse at the school, he would only say, "I cannot speak to any of those things -- the truth will be known."

Campbell had grown up in foster care, but went to live with her sister, who was a recent IFB convert.

At 15, after rebelling against the Christian household -- listening to secular music and wearing black -- she said she was sent to reform school.

"It was brutally psychologically and physically abusive," she said of both the Missouri and Florida programs.

"The worst part personally was during the first year through the process of breaking you down and getting you to submit to their way of life," she said.

Campbell said the staff pitted girls against girls, often having them pinned down by their peers for discipline -- "a tool to discourage camaraderie."

Cut off from family and friends for so long, Campbell said she had a hard transition back to the real world.

Today, Campbell lives in Massachusetts and is administrator of a Facebook group, NBGA: Proactive Survivors of New Beginnings Girls Academy, which has 65 members and writes a blog.

She is also the administrator of SIA-NOW, an organization that is planning a convention of participants of these boarding schools next year. Campbell said many of them reported post-traumatic stress disorder after their school experiences.

It was websites like those that Donna Maddox said caught her attention three months after she sent her 15-year-old daughter Kelsey to Circle of Hope Ranch in Humansville, Mo., in 2007, then returned to "rescue" her.

Maddox, 42, said she was hesitant to believe Kelsey's claims of abuse at the school, but saw testimonies from former students that scared her.

"We were told everything we wanted to hear, but nothing was as it was portrayed."

She provided ABCNews.com with photos of dirty facilities, beds made only of plywood with a thin foam cover and bruises on her daughter's feet from working the ranch in shoes so old the soles were tearing away.

She said the school charged $300 in uniform fees.

Desperate Parents Look to Church For Help

Previously, Kelsey had been a good student, but was sent away because she began "getting involved in the wrong crowd," according to Maddox.

"I was really scared because my family has a history of abusing drugs and alcohol," she said. "I had seen so many horrendous things and how it tears up a family and I didn't want it to happen to one of my children."

Maddox found the school on the Internet and said a referral agency backed up their claims.

But Kelsey, now 18, said that from day one, she "felt like a slave."

"Every day I would wake up at 4 or 5 and start working the farm feeding animals, picking up the hay in barbed wire and walking five miles so you can make more money. I never did any school work."

Once, she said she was forced to do hundreds of push-ups and failed. As punishment, she said eight girls were told to jump on her and restrain her, smashing her face into the carpet.

After she returned home with her school books, Maddox said only 18 pages had been completed in three months.

"It is unimaginable in America," she said.

The director, Boyd C. Householder, said his lawyer advised him not to talk to reporters by telephone.

"We've been allegated on like most faith-based places and investigations have had no findings to the allegations," he said. "We have nothing to hide. We are up front and open and you are welcome to come to the property."

His lawyer Jay M. Kirksey later responded by email, saying the Maddox family were "bias[ed] and lacking credibility."

"There are unfortunately, disgruntled parents who address the school, instead of their children, in the private sector just as exists in the public school system," Kirksey wrote.

Shortly after Kelsey returned home, she moved away, but her mother said she calls and emails daily.

"This has been a living nightmare," Maddox, who subsequently called the attorney general with her consumer complaints about deceptive marketing.

"We have been trying to mediate (her) complaints," said Gonder, from the Missouri Attorney General Office. "The school has been cooperating in providing information, but their information is different from hers. Our efforts are ongoing."

Troubled teens often don't speak up for themselves, said another activist, Michele Ulriksen Tresler, who wrote a book, Reform at Victory Christian Academy," chronicling her own experience at the IFB school.

"They are called liars because they are labeled rebellious teenagers," said Tresler. "We had drug addicts, prostitutes and alcoholics among regular girls who didn't belong there, dabbling in regular teen rebellion. There were girls with some major issues who should have been in a place that helped them and giving them tools to have social skills. But when they go to the cops, no one believes them."

Tresler died of a drug overdose on March 17, just weeks after this interview. According to her ex- husband, Robert Ulricksen, "VCA was a demon that haunted her for many years."

Victory, run by Roloff disciple Mike Palmer, was shut down by California authorities after a student death in 1991. Palmer went on to run schools in Mexico and Florida that were also shut down.

As for Anne, she said she is now seeing a counselor and said she, too, has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress.

"She is doing terrible," said her mother. "She has no self-worth. They had her say a hundred times that she was the daughter of the devil with the tongue of the devil -- crazy destructive talk at New Beginnings. Now, I think she actually believes it."

Jeannie Marie has stopped going to the church she said "deceived" her.

"I did not lose my faith," she said. "But I know that many of these little girls will be terribly challenged to remember who God is, after this experience."