From The Associated Press, 5/31/04:
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/florida/MGBP7N6RVUD.html
Boarding Schools Close in Missouri, Florida Amid Questions on
Discipline
By Jim Suhr Associated Press Writer
ST. LOUIS (AP) -
A religious boarding school questioned for its strict disciplining of
troubled teens has shut its doors, ending a run recently marked by
dwindling enrollment and legal problems.
Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy in southeast Missouri closed
last week, along with its sister school, Palm Lane Academy in Arcadia,
Fla., officials said.
"It is just time," Mountain Park Principal Sam Gerhardt told the Wayne
County Journal-Banner recently.
"We've been in some battles for the last couple of years. It is just
time for us to do something different."
A woman who answered the telephone at Mountain Park refused to comment
Saturday, and calls to Gerhardt's home Saturday night went unanswered.
The school's Web site has been deactivated.
"I just don't know what the situation is," the school's lawyer, John
Oliver, said Saturday.
"I'm not privy to any of those decisions."
Mountain Park students already have returned home or been transferred
to similar reform schools, the Journal-Banner reported.
The school and its property have been put up for sale, the newspaper
said.
The school had seen enrollment drop from more than 150 teenagers to
about 40 this year, according to recent testimony from school
officials.
Mountain Park and its Florida counterpart relied on Christian
fundamentalist teachings, strict discipline and corporal punishment to
work with teenagers with behavioral problems.
But the reform school, which opened in 1987, has long attracted
critics, particularly after a Florida teen was stabbed and beaten to
death at Mountain Park by two other students in 1996.
The two students received life sentences for the killing of William A.
Futrelle of Boca Raton, Fla.
Last month, a federal jury awarded a former student $20,000 for
allegedly being shoved against a sink by a worker.
Jordan Blair alleged he was falsely imprisoned while at the school in
2001, and that disciplining there violated his civil rights.
He also accused Mountain Park of wrongly denying outside
communication, limiting bathroom breaks and letting students sleep as
little as five hours a day.
Oliver has asked for a retrial, and called the allegations "part of a
crusade by a few individuals against fundamentalist Christian
schools."
Mountain Park's founder, the Rev. Bob Wills, previously ran a
Hattiesburg, Miss., school that was sued for allegedly paddling
pregnant teens and detaining a 19-year-old against her will.
A settlement required changes at the school, but Wills closed it and
relocated to Missouri in 1987.
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