Clara Bates
Reporter, Missouri IndependentClara Bates covers social services and poverty for The Missouri Independent. She previously wrote for the Nevada Current, where she reported on labor violations in casinos, hurdles facing applicants for unemployment benefits and lax oversight of the funeral industry. She also wrote about vocational education for Democracy Journal. Bates is a graduate of Harvard College and is a Report for America corps member.
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The Stockton-based boarding school faces mounting allegations of staff physically and sexually abusing students, but its doors have remained open even as the Missouri Attorney General and local prosecutors pursue criminal charges. -
House Speaker Rob Vescovo is calling for the U.S. attorney’s office to get involved because he believes local officials ‘either turned a blind eye to, or helped to cover up’ abuse at Agape Boarding School.
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Judge David Munton initially ordered Agape be shut down last week at the request of the state Attorney General and Department of Social Services. The state’s petition claimed that an Agape staff member had been placed on Missouri’s child abuse and neglect central registry for physically abusing a student.
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The injunction came in response to a request from the Missouri Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Social Services for the Christian boarding school to be closed, but the order remains on pause until a hearing Monday.
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The Christian reform school in Stockton faces mounting accusations of abuse, lawsuits and calls for its closure by former students, who described being physically restrained, sexually abused, starved as a form of punishment and taken off prescribed medications while reassured that “God would fix them.”
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The federal government requires states to process Medicaid applications within 45 days. But in Missouri, roughly four in every five applications took longer to process than that, eight times the national average.
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Advocates praised the law, which prevents underaged survivors from being charged with prostitution and requires law enforcement to immediately report suspected cases to the state, as a step in the right direction.
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Former boarding school students are making noise about politicians and elected officials with connections to unlicensed religious reform schools, state-contracted youth residential facilities and summer camps that have faced allegations of abuse and neglect.
