Agapé Boarding School
Boys sent to a Christian ranch in Stockton spent years trying to be believed.
Missouri · Closed January 2023
Agapé Boarding School, Stockton, Missouri. Former students described restraints, forced labor, and years of not being believed.
The story
Agapé Boarding School sat on a ranch outside Stockton, Missouri. It had already been shut in Washington state in the 1990s, then reopened where faith-based programs faced less inspection. Men who were sent there as boys, years apart, described restraints, forced labor, withheld food, and sexual abuse. The Kansas City Star interviewed them across those decades. The repetition is the point.
What happened
David Patterson told the Star he was left there on Father’s Day 2002. Students were not allowed to talk to one another. Months after he got home, he put the uniform back on and stood at his own bedroom door with a Bible. That was when his family understood the school had not ended when he left. Colton Schrag, there from 2006 to 2010, later posted video former students said showed a staff member forcing a boy in a bathrobe to run a boot-camp court. Schrag said it matched what they had been telling lawmakers for two years. Robert Bucklin, there from 2007 to 2012, told KCUR that nowhere else would a teacher charged with sexual or physical abuse stay on the job. These accounts are allegations. Civil lawsuits and state hearings followed.
David Patterson
“I put on my Agapé school uniform and stood by my door with my Bible — in my own home.”
David Patterson, to The Kansas City Star
Watch
A student documentary made with former students. Treat it as testimony, not as a verdict.
What changed
In January 2023 Agapé said it would stop services on January 20, citing money, investigations, and lawsuits. Closure is not a conviction. Civil cases, including a wrongful-death claim reported by the Associated Press, continued after the doors shut. Missouri used Agapé and Circle of Hope to give the state more power over programs that had been exempt.
Why this story is here
Read it beside Vista Maria for the sequence, not the state. Survivors talked. Reporters stayed. The exemption broke. The sources are below.