Boarding Schools

As a young woman living in Southern California, Kelly Boss never thought much about boarding schools. They were a mystery or at most a cinematic fancy embodied by Brookfield of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" or the Welton Academy of "Dead Poets Society." That changed when her daughter Mackenzie learned about the Thacher School in Ojai and its horse and outdoor program. Although she would never have imagined her daughter there, the Bosses came to view it as the perfect fit.

Police in Montclair removed more than two dozen youths from a private military-style boarding school Tuesday, after a former employee and several former residents accused operators of administering abusive punishment. In an early morning raid, 26 youths were taken from an apartment complex used as a residence by the Ministerial Christian Academy. Investigators with search warrants confiscated handcuffs, shackles, computers, financial records and other documents, police said.

A Pomona boarding school that had been raided by the police amid allegations of child abuse and fraud was under investigation by the state for operating without a license, authorities said Thursday. Montclair police removed 26 students from the Ministerial Christian Academy last week after former students and a former employee alleged that children were beaten, handcuffed to beds, locked into bathrooms and forced to lug large rocks across a field in 90-degree weather as punishment.

Three weeks after a Montclair boarding school was shut down by police amid allegations of abusive punishment, its owners were cited Friday by the state for operating without a license. Officials from the state's Community Care Licensing Division said that Otis and Doris McIntyre ran the Ministerial Christian Academy as a group home without obtaining proper approval. The citation does not carry a penalty but the McIntyres could be fined $200 a day if they reopen the facility without approval.

At first, Dedra Waggener couldn't imagine sending her only child away to learn. She believed boarding schools were for kids who were rich or bad. "My son," she said firmly, "is neither." Waggener's opinion of boarding schools changed when she visited the Thacher School, a 350-acre campus in the Los Padres National Forest near Ojai. Here, every freshman receives a horse, and students learn Chinese and political philosophy in classes of no more than 11.

Travel-trailer magnate Johnnie R. Crean was a roughhewn candidate for Congress who was so unpalatable that after winning the Republican nomination in 1982, GOP activists successfully backed a write-in candidate. Today, Crean is under fire again, this time from parents and faculty revolting against his 10-year chairmanship of the Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad, California's only private military boarding school.

The six Hare Krishna temples in California, along with several other Krishna organizations here and in West Virginia, took steps Tuesday to identify minors who may have been sexually abused or mistreated at boarding schools during the 1970s and 1980s.

Voicing fears about clogged roads and a cluttered landscape, about 40 residents of Mountain View Estates in Calabasas testified Wednesday against a proposed boarding school at a packed county hearing on the project. The Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission is considering whether to grant Mesivta of Greater Los Angeles permits to build a Jewish Orthodox boys' school on Mureau Road in unincorporated Calabasas.

Two weeks after staging a protest against a proposed boarding school in Calabasas, residents of a nearby development are planning to attend a hearing of the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission on Wednesday to voice their concerns. The planning commission is considering whether to grant Mesivta of Greater Los Angeles permits to build a Jewish Orthodox boys' school on Mureau Road, less than half a mile from Mountain View Estates, a community of 385 homeowners.

Lawmakers voted to build state-run boarding schools to house and educate children from poor families and troubled neighborhoods. The measure's passage made Minnesota the first state to return to the old-fashioned notion of providing publicly funded orphanages for children who are poor but who have been neither jailed nor removed from an abusive home. Once built, Minnesota's "residential academies," as they are called, will essentially be year-round, 24-hour-a-day boarding schools.