Church, state fight over home for troubled children

RONALD SMOTHERS

St. Petersburg Times

LUCEDALE, Miss. - For the last week a red brick courthouse in this southeastern Mississippi town has been the scene of a dramatic confrontation between state welfare officials and a home for troubled children.

The conflict concerns charges of abuse and neglect at the home, and what is at stake immediately is the fate of some 70 children removed from it by the state authorities.

More broadly, however, the battle reflects a tug-of-war pitting a number of states seeking to exercise control of such shelters against some fundamentalist Christian churches that run homes and are determined to avoid any regulation.

These churches, unaffiliated with any major national organization, say their authority to operate comes from a power higher than the state, and maintain that the separation of church and state exempts them from government review.

The confrontation in this town of 2,400 people began June 10 at the 28-acre compound of the Bethel Baptist Church and the Bethel Baptist Home for Children, which the church runs.

Welfare officials, accompanied by state police officers, took custody of 64 children that day after the home had defied a court order to cooperate in the state's investigation of abuse charges.

Some of the children fled, however. Several were seized Monday when the police stormed the church, although it is unclear whether all are in state custody. The Rev. Herman Fountain, the 38-year-old minister who runs the home, was arrested on contempt and obstruction of justice charges; seven other staff members were also held. Late this week, Fountain was released on bail.

Virtually all the children at Bethel, whose ages range from 8 to 17, are from states outside Mississippi, sent to the home by parents who could not cope with their drug abuse or behavior problems.

The state charges that Fountain told the children to run away rather than go with welfare officials and that he incited and manipulated others to resist violently.

In court this week, the minister has sat mute, refusing to respond to charges as Judge Robert Oswald holds individual custody hearings for the children.

The courtroom has been hushed in often poignant testimony. Some of the children have told of discipline that included ''getting licks'' with a switch, hair-pulling, being forced to run laps in the early morning hours and often being restricted to their rooms for long periods.

One 17-year-old girl said she had been called names by school staff members in what she said was a process of ''breaking our pride.''

Yet the girl's mother told the court that the Bethel home was run by ''caring, loving people'' who had helped her deal with both her daughter and her son ''when they had just run amok.''

Similarly, some children said they did not feel their treatment amounted to abuse and would prefer to return to Bethel rather than to their families.

The Bethel Home is just one of an unknown number of unlicensed homes run by fundamentalist churches that have resisted state licensing of their centers or state inspection where required, said Betsey Rosenbaum of the Washington-based American Public Welfare Association, the nation's leading organization of child welfare professionals and administrators.

Neither the Bethel home nor the others are affiliated with mainstream religious groups like the Southern Baptist Convention, which, she said, have have complied with licensing requirements that exist in ''the vast majority of states.''

In addition, she said, all but New Jersey, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico subscribe to a compact among state child welfare agencies that requires that placement by public agencies of children across state lines be in facilities that meet some minimum standards.

Still, while the trend is toward an increasing acceptance of licensing, some fundamentalist groups continue to resist.

It is hard to know how many such homes are operating, but in the last month alone, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana have taken action against homes that maintain that, as religious institutions, they are exempt.

''I don't think what is happening here is a harbinger of a change in this trend, but it is an important message to those religious groups which try to evade some sort of licensing,'' Rosenbaum said of these recent enforcement actions.

Fountain has called the state's actions ''a conspiracy against fundamentalist homes,'' which he said believe in strictness, spankings ''with love, when necessary,'' and a biblically oriented instruction. What the court sees as abuse, he said, is not abuse but the upholding of Christian values in guidance and training.

''These people are the liberals who want to control us,'' Fountain during a break in the court proceedings.

''But we don't want any of their humanistic learning. We believe in the separation of church and state, and that's why I won't cooperate with them.''

This was not the first time that the Bethel home has come to the state's attention. In 1980, officials removed 38 children from the home after receiving allegations of abuse, but it continued to operate, said Dr. Thomas Brittain, the state welfare commissioner.

The next year, in a similar case in Hattiesburg, state officials removed 117 children from the Bethesda Home for Girls, which has not reopened.

The current investigation of the Bethel home began, said Mark Maples, county attorney here, after a runaway from the home told of instances of abuse.

Maples sought other former residents, who corroborated the runaway's story, and state welfare officials began to try to get records of children and responses to the allegations from Fountain through court hearings last month.

When he would not cooperate, Judge Oswald noted that the court had ''uncontradicted and incontrovertible evidence of physical and emotional abuse and of medical neglect'' of many of the children. In most of the hearings he has returned the children to the custody of their parents, but taken the unusual step of forbidding their return to the Bethel Home.

Throughout the days of hearings, Brittain, the state welfare commissioner, and his staff have brought the children 120 miles from a segregated facilities at a state mental hospital to the courthouse where they are held in a basement room awaiting their cases.

Parents, most from out of the state, have been streaming into Lucedale to pick up their children, and some have unsuccessfully tried to testify in Fountain's behalf.

''You're not talking about kids who won't go to bed when you tell them or eat their vegetables,'' said Christy Muller, who came here from Pensacola with her daughter, Valerie Badon, a former resident of the home, seeking to testify on Fountain's behalf.

''These kids are out of control, like Valerie was when she was into drugs and alcohol. I chose Bethel because it's my personal belief that only the word of God can change lives, and Valerie is okay now. She survived. If the state regulated this home it would water it down.''