Religious Reform School, State Clash

“You must realize that this is very hard for us to admit, that we had failed with our daughter. We owe our daughter’s life to Brother Palmer. God bless him, he gave us back our daughter. We are a family again.”

Those words from a stocky, sun-tanned father whose tear-stained face reflected the emotional trauma he had just described are in sharp contrast to the angry words of a former student at Victory Christian Academy.

Said Blackbird Willow, the former student: “Student? I was a victim at Victory. They tried to take control of my mind. They shut me up in a little room and played tapes of preaching all day long. I tried to die. After two weeks, I gave in to them. I played their game. I smiled.”

Victory Christian Academy on the outskirts of Ramona is a fundamentalist Baptist boarding school for about 75 girls aged 13 through 17 who have broken away from their parents’ control to become “behavioral problems”--truants, drug users, runaways.

For years, the California Department of Social Services has been trying to force Victory’s operator, Pastor Mike Palmer, to license his school as a community care facility.

On Feb. 14, state investigators raided the grounds, taking away copies of the students’ private case histories and interviewing some of the girls about their treatment at the school.

Tom Hersant, head of the state agency’s San Diego office, confirmed that an investigation is under way. He said state lawyers are studying the evidence seized in the search and Willow’s statements and those of other former Victory students to map a strategy for bringing Victory under state control.

He declined to elaborate further on the state’s investigation.

Palmer, who founded the school almost nine years ago, is just as convinced that Victory Christian is a church school that meets every criterion for exemption from state licensing.

Both state and school officials agree that the question of Victory’s status will probably end up in the courts. The overriding issue, they say, will be the doctrine of separation of church and state.

“I welcome it,” Palmer said of the pending court battle. “We have nothing to hide here. They are trying to close us down, but God is on our side.”

The school that Palmer heads sits on a knoll off California 67, up a rutted dirt road that ends at a sturdy 12-foot-high wire fence topped with electronic sensors. The gate opens only for those who have been cleared to visit.

Inside the compound, neatly manicured lawns and colorful flower beds soften the austere landscape. A cluster of buildings includes a chapel, schoolrooms, dormitories, an office and a home of the pastor. All are neat and clean. The smell of cooking--on this day, spaghetti and meatballs--permeates the complex.

Teen-age girls move in lines or in pairs, speaking only when spoken to, attaching a “ma’am” or a “sir” to their short replies.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, a group of parents and their children, selected by Palmer, gathered in the chapel to tell their stories of frustration and fear that had brought them to Victory.

“I had to bring her here because she was running away,” one father said. “She beat up on my wife and I had to hold her down ‘til the police came and rectified the situation.”

Another father, a law enforcement officer, admitted that on his job he had talked with countless parents about their wayward offspring, only to feel as frustrated as any of them when his own daughter went from being a popular school cheerleader earning A’s and B’s to “a dirt bag” who ran away.

One parent, an attorney, told of his initial suspicions about the school: “I had the resources and the contacts. I picked up the phone and I checked and checked, and I checked again before I put her in here. I kept on checking after she was here. I had heard all the rumors. I found nothing.”

Many of the adults told of spending thousands of dollars on teen drug programs, hospitals, psychiatrists, counselors, all to no avail, before they came to Victory and Palmer for help.

The teen-agers all readily admitted that they had “hated it here” when they first arrived, some in handcuffs.

“Where were they when we needed them?” asked one teen-ager of the authorities now investigating the school that she felt should have helped to keep the teens out of trouble in the first place. “They don’t care about us. They don’t understand.”

Other students described the panic that invaded the school when Department of Social Services investigators, local Child Protective Services workers and deputy sheriffs armed with a search warrant raided the campus on Valentine’s Day.

The minister pledged to rally an army of parents and teen-agers to fight the state’s attempt to control Victory Christian Academy or shut it down. He also pledged to muster 800 voices to belie the statements made by a former Victory student, Blackbird Willow--a name she chose when she emancipated herself at age 16. She is now 19.

She left the school four years ago, after staying there for 11 months. She said she has taken her complaints to various authorities but that little was done. She now has decided to publicly describe what she considers “brainwashing” at the Ramona school--which she recently did in a television interview on an Orange County public access station and by speaking to the The Times.

Willow’s allegations center on what she calls mind control. She has not accused the school of any physical abuse.

Willow was placed in Victory after she had run away from home when she was 14.

At Victory, new girls are first subjected to isolation, she said. No television, no radios, no magazines, no telephone calls, Willow said.

Willow said that when she arrived at the school, she was put in a small room and kept away from the other students for two weeks. She said she saw no one except when her meals were brought in to her and when staff members took her out for showers.

“All the time there were religious tapes playing. I couldn’t turn the damned thing off,” she said. “They force-fed me when I wouldn’t eat. Baby food. They gave me ice-cold showers. They wanted me to stop being listless,” she said.

When Willow gave in to the school’s system and was allowed to move into a dormitory with the other girls, she began keeping journals of daily events, only to have them confiscated and destroyed, she claimed.

“I finally decided to write home about what went on and hope my parents would save the letters,” Willow said. “They did and I have everything documented.

Willow said the daily routine at Victory consisted of schoolwork, Bible study, sermons, singing and testimonials by the girls. She estimated that seven to eight hours of each day were taken up with religious indoctrination of some kind or other.

Although Willow went through the motions, she did not submit to the religious fervor she saw about her, “except for the singing,” she said. “That’s where I felt myself getting into the spirit. The beautiful music. The chance to feel something. It was charismatic.”

Palmer shook his head when he was told of Willow’s statements and called them lies.

All that Victory uses to convert girls with behavioral problems into respectful young ladies is God and love, Palmer said. “And God is love.”