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Schools Close Amid Discipline Questions
JIM SUHR
Associated Press
ST.
LOUIS
- 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 Florida, 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 killed at Mountain Park
by two other students in 1996.
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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