Christian academy's founder presses on, expects growth

BETHEL, Mo. -- A raid, arrests and dogged pursuit from local prosecutors aside, the founder of Heartland Christian Academy isn't budging.

Charles N. Sharpe plans to enroll hundreds more troubled youths at his 20,000-acre religious complex in rural northeast Missouri. He also doesn't budge from his belief that America's youths are falling prey to drugs, sex and violence because public institutions are godless and parents have spared the rod of discipline.

As for those who attack the biblical refuge?

"They are evil," Sharpe told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "There's not another term for it. They hate us."

In the past two years, Sharpe said, he has spent more than $2 million defending Heartland employees against a long list of criminal charges, ranging from forcing kids to work in deep piles of manure to excessively paddling students. Several of his employees have been hauled into court, and investigators temporarily removed Heartland's 115 students last fall.

Today, Sharpe appears to have the upper hand.

His attorneys have persuaded a federal judge to ban all future raids but allow the state to continue investigating individual reports of abuse. The judge even said he was disgusted by how the raid played out.

Also, a jury needed only 18 minutes this spring to determine that working waist-deep in manure isn't child abuse. Other abuse cases appear to have stalled.

Like a mayor

Heartland runs on Charles Sharpe's terms. And Sharpe runs much more than a school and a church.

He acts as a sort of mayor of a city that cropped up in a cornfield -- one with a subdivision of brick duplexes, a hotel, two restaurants, a gas station, a private runway, 3,200 milk cows and one of the largest cattle operations in the state.

All of it was built by money Sharpe made as founder of Ozark National Life Insurance Co.

Since 1995, Heartland has welcomed not only defiant teens, but adults and even entire families who come to work the ranch and farmland while they shed bad habits.

Levi Craig came on a morning in August with his parents. As the 21-year-old recounted a string of drug binges, his mother wept for the times she locked him out of the house or refused to give him money.

Then Sharpe set the conditions of his recovery program. All drugs, even tobacco, are to be abandoned cold-turkey. To enter Heartland, he said, is to commit to at least two years in the program.

"What if I break down and go crazy six months from now and have to leave?" Craig asked.

"Then you leave now," Sharpe said.

With that, Craig yielded up a cup of tobacco spit and surrendered himself to Sharpe's world.

Sharpe openly says Heartland relies on corporal punishment. He recently allowed two journalists from the Post-Dispatch to observe the teen program with no restrictions on who could be interviewed.

Many students offered unabashed praise.

Leigha, a 16-year-old who did not offer a last name, hugged Sharpe when she saw him in the school hallway. She said she's been to numerous programs to treat her uncontrollably violent temper. At Heartland, she said, "I have people here that care about me."

Joshua Melton, 18, resisted Heartland's approach when his uncle, a Heartland attorney, suggested he enroll. Today, he works with other young men on the cattle ranch and feels his life is in order.

"Milking cows and praising God," he said. "It's awesome."