ARCADIA, La. -- For almost 30 years, parents have sent their teen-agers to a Baptist boarding school ringed by razor-wire-topped fences in the rugged hill country of north Louisiana.
Students at the New Bethany school spend much of their time praying and memorizing scripture. Their monthly contact with the outside world is a single, monitored five-minute call to their parents, say former students. They tell of being struck with wooden paddles if they swear or talk about running away.Even so, youths sometimes flee four miles through pine forests and brambles to the local sheriff's department, where deputies let them call their parents and plead to come home. Some escapees allege abuse or neglect by their keepers or beatings by fellow students in the name of God.
But the Rev. Mack Ford, a former missionary who founded New Bethany in 1971, has repeatedly tried to keep child abuse investigators and fire inspectors away, saying state officials oppose the school's fundamentalist religious approach and want to shut it down.
Now Ford is trying to further insulate the school by seeking a federal court order that would make it more difficult for state social workers to make unannounced school visits.
"State bureaucrats are poking their noses into matters which they have no business asking questions about," said Ford's lawyer, John Hodge. "The teachings of New Bethany may be unorthodox to many, but we contend that New Bethany has a right to hold and to teach these matters."
Lawyers for the state worry Ford might win an injunction prohibiting visits by social workers and interviews with students about child abuse complaints.
"We're not harassing them," says Henry Bernstein, an assistant attorney general. "We're just doing what we're supposed to do."
Ford didn't respond to repeated requests for an interview and a tour of the school in rural Bienville Parish.
Kimberly Birch, who was at New Bethany from 1994 to 1996 and is now a 20-year-old nursing student at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, said in an interview she was among students encouraged to beat other young women who disobeyed rules.
"When one girl said she didn't believe in God, we smashed her face into a wall," Birch said.
One teen who tried to escape was forced to wear a dog collar and was led on a leash by another student, Birch said. She also read students' outgoing mail, discarding pages that complained of mistreatment.
"There were just a lot of girls that we did things to that were wrong," Birch said.
New Bethany was billed as a way of redirecting teens whose parents believed they were veering toward drugs or other trouble, and for years Ford promoted the school at churches around the country, traveling with a choir of female students.
Hodge says many complaints from former students are not credible because they come from rebellious teens angry at being sent to New Bethany.
Local officials worry about what could happen if they ever had to respond to an emergency at the compound. Ford has refused to provide a map of the school buildings and grounds and student identities, Raley says, adding, "He says the Lord will take care of them."