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DAILY HERALD
NEWS
Rehabilitation
or Child Abuse?
By Sara Burnett Daily Herald
Staff Writer
Posted 7/11/2004
At first, Bethel Baptist
Girls' Academy seemed like a good place for Jayme Bahrenburg.
At 14, the West Chicago girl
had been arrested two times. She was skipping school, had run away
from home and was using drugs. Her dad thought she might try to kill
herself.
Bethel, located in rural
Mississippi, boasted a family atmosphere in which troubled girls are
broken down by discipline and physical training, then rebuilt
through God's love.
The girls would refer to the
director, Herman Fountain Jr., as "Brother Fountain."
He and the rest of the staff
would address each girl as "young lady," according to the school's
handbook. By graduation, they would be "better prepared spiritually,
physically and mentally for life's challenges."
"Welcome to the first day of
the rest of your life," the handbook stated.
But what Jayme Bahrenburg
found at Bethel was a world where girls were physically and mentally
abused, where medical needs were ignored and tactics bordering on
torture were used in an attempt to reprogram them, Mississippi child
welfare officials say.
In May, Mississippi
officials confronted the school and removed 38 girls - including at
least four other Chicago-area girls - because of conditions there.
According to interviews
conducted by the Mississippi Department of Human Services, it was
not unusual for girls to be forced to exercise - sometimes in a
sewage pond - for up to five hours or until they vomited.
In at least one instance, a
girl was forced to sit alone in a room from 5 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. for
eight straight days, listening to audio tapes of Fountain's father,
the Rev. Herman Fountain Sr., preaching.
And Fountain Jr. regularly
referred to his charges not as "young lady" but as "stupid," "freak
show" and "whore," according to reports of interviews conducted by
the investigators.
According to Jayme,
Fountain's name for her was "devil worshipper."
"I'd rather spend three
years in jail than one month in that place," she said in a recent
interview at her mother's suburban home. "I'm so serious."
Jayme's mom, Laura
Bahrenburg, pulled her out of Bethel April 30 - about one month
before Mississippi officials stepped in and removed the remaining
students.
The state's move drew mixed
reviews from parents, some of whom say Fountain and the rest of the
Bethel staff worked miracles with their children.
One of those parents, Jeff
Lashuay of Elwood, just southwest of Joliet, doesn't believe the
allegations.
Lashuay sent his oldest
daughter to Bethel after she started shoplifting and drinking, he
said. She came back a different person.
So when he feared a younger
daughter was heading down a similarly bad path, he sent her to
Bethel as well.
Brittany, who was among the
girls removed May 19, told her father some of the same stories
reported by investigators.
Lashuay says it's possible
the incidents were blown out of proportion by "new girls" who wanted
to go home, and that "one person's perception of abuse may be
different" from another's.
"You have to do something to
get (the girls') attention," he said.
Since the girls were
removed, Bethel has continued to operate. As of late June, two girls
were enrolled.
This week, the Mississippi
attorney general's office said it is working with Fountain to make
changes at the school.
Fountain, whose family also
runs a nearby academy for boys that has been shut down in the past
because of abuse, denies any wrongdoing.
He also says he is looking
forward to having the school filled to capacity once again.
That's a goal Laura
Bahrenburg hopes will never be realized. Though Jayme was at Bethel
for only about 100 days, the harm was irreparable, Laura says.
For that, Bethel should pay
- and not just by forfeiting the roughly $25,000-per-year tuition,
she says.
"I would hope this place is
literally closed down," Laura Bahrenburg said. "These kids have not
been helped. They've been hurt more."
900 miles from home
Once they made the decision
to send Jayme to Bethel, the Bahernburgs paid $3,000 for a couple of
people from the school to come get her, and roughly $12,000 more in
tuition.
Jayme had just been released
from Linden Oaks at Edward Hospital in Naperville, where she had
spent time for depression after running away for a week with her
then-boyfriend.
Her father thought a "reform
school" would be the best place for her. Her mother, who is
separated from Jayme's father, wasn't so sure, but eventually
relented and sent Jayme off with a bag of clothes, a portable
compact disc player and several CDs.
She gave the couple, who
said only that their names were Roxie and Danny, money to return
Jayme's belongings to her once they reached Petal, Miss.
Staff from the school had
explained that Jayme wouldn't get to keep any of her things when she
arrived. She would be issued a uniform - a used skirt and shirt for
school and church, and used shorts and T-shirts for physical
training.
It took about 16 hours to
arrive at the rural school about 100 miles north of New Orleans.
Jayme was angry the whole
way. After she arrived at Bethel and was sitting down to talk with
Fountain about the rules, she lost it.
She said he explained to her
that at Bethel everyone got up by 5 a.m. and was in bed with lights
out by 8:30 p.m. She would have no phone privileges for the first
month and just one, four-minute shower each day.
They would have devotions
and Bible memorization sessions every day and attend church three
days a week.
"I cried," Jayme recalls. "I
just cried."
Fountain was nice to her
that night, Jayme says. He told her everything would be OK, that she
would come to love God and appreciate her life.
But first, he said, they
would have to dye her hair.
Jayme had colored her hair
jet black. It matched the black clothes and dark lipstick and nail
polish she liked.
Fountain said it was too
sinister, so he instructed a staff member to dye it blonde. It took
three applications before the black color was covered up. By then,
Jayme said, her hair was like straw. It fell out in clumps.
According to the school
handbook, each new arrival goes through an orientation period in
which they are to focus on self-discipline through physical activity
and how to be "a proper young lady."
To move out of the
orientation level, girls must read and study the book of I Timothy
and write a 500-word essay, the handbook states. They also must
learn basic kitchen duties and household chores and learn to
cultivate, plant and grow their own gardens.
Once that level is complete,
girls may move up the ladder, through each of three levels named
after women from the Bible.
At the Hannah level, the
girls get uncensored phone calls and more frequent visits with
family. They also must be responsible for dorm cleanups, read the
books of I and II Samuel and learn "intermediate" kitchen duties
like "basic desserts, gelatins, salads and table settings."
At the Ruth level, each
young lady is assigned a new student to whom they are to show "love,
wisdom and friendship."
The highest level is the
Esther level, in which they write two essays, prepare a scrapbook of
their stay at Bethel and are in charge of preparing a whole meal for
the school.
From 8 a.m. to noon and
again from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., the girls attended classes, Jayme said.
Bethel uses a
Christian-based curriculum, so virtually everything was related to
religion, Jayme said. Classes were also much easier than at West
Chicago High School.
For example, in Bible
reading class, girls would fill in blank words missing from Bible
verses. In earth science, they learned that God made it rain for 40
days and 40 nights "because he was mad," Jayme said. In history
class, they learned about Christopher Columbus - a lesson Jayme said
she studied sometime around fourth grade.
The school had one computer,
which each girl used for 15 minutes per week to practice typing.
Almost immediately, Jayme
began writing letters home, begging her mom to come and get her. She
gave the letters to Bethel staff to mail; Laura says she never got
them.
Back home, Larua Bahernburg
felt something wasn't right.
They had received little
information from the school, which had come recommended from a
friend of her husband's who sent his son to the boy's academy.
What information she did get
came on typed pages rather than glossy brochures. She never saw any
photos of the school. The couple who had taken Jayme to Bethel did
not return Jayme's belongings. And when she called the school,
administrators wouldn't let her talk to her daughter.
So in March - about six
weeks after sending Jayme off - Laura drove to Petal, Miss.
She had an address, but no
directions, so she stopped to ask some locals.
They'd never heard of the
school, they said.
She called the Mississippi
State Police.
They didn't know where it
was, either.
She called a friend with a
global positioning system. He couldn't find it.
Eventually she met a pest
control worker. He called some people who thought they might know
where it was.
Hours later, Laura pulled up
Victory Ranch Road to find a long brick building tucked deep in the
woods.
As it turned out, the trip
was for nothing.
Jayme was still going
through orientation, the staff said. She hadn't earned the privilege
of having visits. They wouldn't let Laura look in any windows, much
less see her daughter.
Laura was back in Illinois
just a few more weeks when she got a phone call from someone
associated with the school. Laura has declined to reveal the
person's name, but says the woman told her of specific abuses and
urged her to go get her daughter. Laura left almost immediately.
On April 30, as Jayme sat in
devotions, a staff member came in to say her mother was there.
Seeing her mom, Jayme
recalls, was "like walking in and seeing one of my favorite bands."
As they drove home, and in
bits and pieces over the weeks that followed, Jayme shared more and
more about what Bethel was like.
On May 19, Mississippi child
welfare officials say they found out, too.
Life at Bethel
According to investigators'
reports, the Department of Human Services received a tip May 16
about wrongdoing at the school. Though they won't say who tipped
them off, Fountain has pointed his finger at a former staff member.
The tip included an account
of an incident that occurred shortly before Jayme Bahernburg left
the school.
According to Jayme, one of
the girls who had moved up the Bethel ladder - referred to at the
school as a "leader" - was given permission by Fountain to punish a
newer girl if she misbehaved.
If Monica swore, for
instance, the leader could slap her on the face.
On this particular night,
several girls were awakened about 10:30 to the sound of someone
being beaten outside. The girls determined it was Monica's leader
who was beating her, and that no staff members were doing anything
to stop it.
Jayme claims that the next
morning, staff members overheard the girls talking about the fight.
Staff members called Fountain and told him the girls were planning a
strike, in which they would refuse to work or go to school.
Fountain drove to the
campus, where he confronted the girls.
According to the account he
gave Mississippi officials, Fountain pushed a chair and a table into
a wall.
At least a half-dozen girls,
as well as Jayme, say an irate Fountain threw chairs at them,
overturned the table and called them names.
Fountain denied those
reports, but admitted he sometimes called the girls "freak show,"
but "in a joking manner," the reports state.
The girls' accounts of life
at Bethel extend beyond that incident, according to the reports,
including:
• One girl, who had been at
the academy for a year, said she was forced to do a "bend and
thrust" exercise - essentially lowering her body to the ground,
kicking out her legs, then pulling them back in and standing again -
for five hours because she used the phone without permission.
• Another girl, on crutches,
said she hurt her ankle while exercising and no one took her to a
doctor until a week and a half later. A girl with scoliosis said she
and her dad had asked school officials on two occasions to take her
to a doctor and they did not.
• A girl said a male staff
member hit her upside her head because she didn't want to eat her
food. Later, he told the girl that if she hated herself so much, she
should "just hang herself from the ceiling and that he was willing
to give her his belt," the report states.
• Another girl said one of
the leaders knocked her to the ground and started kicking her. A
staff member encouraged the abuse, she said. When it was over, her
head hurt so bad "she couldn't put her head on the pillow at night,"
the report stated.
Not all the girls had bad
things to say, however.
One girl said the home was
no worse than other homes she had been in - and that she has been in
"several." Another said she'd rather be at Bethel than at home.
Another girl said she loved
Fountain "to death," and that he hadn't done anything to her.
But she also admitted she'd
seen the girls who went on strike be forced to jump in the sewage
pond then walk around in the filth all day. To eat, they had to put
their plates on the driveway and eat "in a stooping position," the
girl said.
Jayme was among those girls.
So was another girl from the Elgin area, who could not be reached
for comment. The family of another girl, from Chicago, did not
return phone calls.
Lashuay's daughter,
Brittany, was at the school at the time of the strike, but he
declined to allow her to speak to the Daily Herald.
Around 4 p.m. May 19, after
a day of interviews, staff members from the Department of Human
Services decided it had evidence of emotional, physical and verbal
abuse at the school and decided to remove all 38 students.
When the girls, gathered in
the dorm, learned the news, they began yelling, according to the
report.
"Some were indicating they
were happy and others were not happy to be removed," the report
states. "Some were simply scared about the unknown."
A staff member came into the
room and said a prayer with the girls, the report states. Then they
were loaded onto a bus, in sheriff's cars and with social workers
and taken to a nearby National Guard camp to spend the night and
await word from their parents, whom the department began contacting
that afternoon.
More than one month later,
the school has accepted two new students. No criminal charges have
been filed against Fountain, and Mississippi officials will not
comment on whether charges are possible.
In Mississippi, private
schools like Bethel must "register" - essentially file their name -
with the state. But they do not have to be licensed or accredited,
as most private and residential schools in Illinois are.
Some lawmakers are trying to
change that in the wake of the Bethel incident, but arguments about
the separation of church and state stand in their way.
Fountain did not return
phone calls from the Daily Herald, but he has told local media he is
willing to work with that state's attorney general's office on some
concerns but that some of the proposed changes - which neither side
are discussing - are "nonsense."
He also has said he and the
staff are looking forward to having the school filled to capacity
once again.
Seeing the school stay open,
both Laura and Jayme say, would be the worst ending to their story.
They already are fighting
with the school to get copies of Jayme's academic transcripts so she
can start at another school this fall.
Laura also is considering
legal action to recoup some of the money the family paid.
But the issue, they say, is
more than that.
"I would hate to see more
girls go back there," Jayme said. "When you're there, they make you
feel so low about everything, that you're nothing. And you believe
it."
"That's not a place," Laura
added, "to get better."
• Daily Herald news services
contributed to this report.
School: Founder hopes to
fill institution with students again
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