When Ashlea Belcher looks back on her conversations with young people about Agape Boarding School and Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch, “what set those cases apart was not chaos,” she said. “It was the structure.”
Belcher, a former forensic interviewer and now director of the Children’s Center of Southwest Missouri, said young people who attended the two unlicensed Christian boarding schools described being pinned down using pressure points by their peers as staff members watched, food being withheld as punishment and meals rationed according to the color of their shirts. Brown shirts, she said, meant cold canned beans.
She told lawmakers last month that this abuse was possible because the young people were isolated.
“These were consistent, detailed disclosures given in a forensic setting, disclosures that aligned across interviews,” Belcher said. “That is how systematic abuse reveals itself, and it happened in facilities that operated without meaningful, consistent external oversight.”
Now, five years after a Kansas City Star investigation substantiated abuse and neglect at multiple unlicensed Christian boarding schools in the state, Missouri lawmakers are considering a bill that would create a path to make it easier for unlicensed Christian residential facilities to receive state placements of foster children.
Under the bill, those facilities would not need to obtain a license from the Children’s Division, the arm of the Department of Social Services that oversees foster care placements and investigates child abuse. Instead, they could register with the Missouri Association of Christian Child Care Facilities, a faith-based group whose website says members “choose to be accredited by their Christian peers.”
That would mark a shift from current department policy. Although faith-based facilities are exempt from the state’s licensing requirements for children’s residential facilities, the department says children in the state’s custody can only be placed in facilities “licensed and contracted with the division for residential treatment services.”
The proposal comes after Missouri lawmakers responded to the widespread allegations of abuse in 2021 by imposing new requirements on residential facilities, mandating for the first time that they submit limited information about their operations to the state and conduct background checks of employees.
Chad Puckett, president of the association and director of Show Me Christian Youth Home in La Monte, says the bill can help solve the problem of “too many children and too few homes” in the state’s foster care system.
“I believe in all hands on deck in a crisis situation, and that is what we intend to do,” Puckett told The Independent. “We are just tired of kids falling through the cracks. The foster care system is being overwhelmed.”
The bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Jamie Gragg of Ozark, would establish a new “Child Protection Board” to oversee facilities registered with the association. The board would consist of a member of the association’s leadership, five representatives of faith-based child care agencies, a teacher, a nutrition specialist, two foster parents, a guardian ad litem and two members of the Missouri House.
Puckett expects the bill to be amended to reduce the number of representatives of faith-based agencies and add the director of the state’s social services department to the board, as well as a faith-based liaison designated by the department. Those changes would have to be approved by a committee to become part of the bill.
The division would retain its ability to investigate allegations of abuse in registered facilities, Puckett said, and respond to substantiated allegations by revoking a facility’s registration.
“We want to weed out bad actors,” Puckett said. “They exist in the private system. They exist in the public system. And I will join forces with anybody that wants to weed those out.”
But lawmakers and advocates for children questioned whether a board dominated by people tied to faith-based facilities could provide meaningful independent oversight. They pointed to abuse in boarding schools run by former members of the association, including Agape and Wings of Faith Academy, and asked why the association didn’t do something to stop it.
Gragg said the bill was, in fact, designed to protect kids from abuse.
“I would not want to be the man who presented a bill that made it to the governor’s desk and [got] signed that put children in harm’s way,” Gragg said.
And Puckett argued the residential facilities in his association can’t seek state licensure without being pressured to yield on their beliefs that “biological male and biological female are an important part of who we are” and in a “biological male, married to a biological female, as the head of our household.”
Eyes and ears
Puckett said he was unaware of abuse at Agape when he removed the school’s director, Bryan Clemensen, from the association’s board. Clemensen does not appear on the association’s board of directors after 2007, according to state business filings.
“I’m not sure when these abuse allegations even started coming out, but we had parted ways long before that,” Puckett said.
Clemensen is listed as a member of the association’s board of directors as early as 1999, and his father, who founded Agape, was a founding member of the association.
Puckett and Clemensen overlapped as board members between 2003 and 2007, when Puckett became association president.
Puckett said he and another board member removed Clemensen due to noncompliance with association standards but “nothing related directly to the abuse of children.”
The department in 2022 said it had substantiated five preponderance of evidence findings against Clemensen — one count of child neglect and four counts of physical abuse. The state’s Child Abuse and Neglect Review Board upheld the department’s findings after an independent review at Clemensen’s request.
Former students told The Kansas City Star in 2021 that Clemensen was known for his “Jurassic elbow,” a reference to his penchant for hitting students in the backs of their heads or between their shoulders.
During a hearing on the bill in February, Democratic state Rep. Jo Doll of St. Louis said it was
“concerning” that the association didn’t pick up on the abuse and that her experience serving on a school board had shown her the importance of oversight.
“If a teacher does something that is abusive, they’re going to get caught,” she said. “It’s going to be reported, because there’s eyes and ears everywhere, watching and willing to report. And I think in schools like Agape, that wasn’t the case.
“I’m guessing that probably would not be the case again if we let this bill pass.”
Two other former board members, Bud and Debbie Martin, ran Wings of Faith Academy, where reporting by The Kansas City Star showed students were “whupped” with a seven-layer leather paddle and then made to recite Bible verses.
Bud Martin was listed as treasurer and a board member of the association as recently as 2020.
Jessica Seitz, executive director of the Missouri Network Against Child Abuse, told The Independent that these cases went undetected because faith-based children’s residential facilities were invisible to the state.
“Missouri was a haven for these facilities,” Seitz said. “But all the while, there was an association claiming to be [exercising] oversight…. My concern is, what kind of safety practices were in place then?”
‘Let’s expose the evil’
Puckett pointed to allegations of abuse within the state foster care system, saying his association and the department should work together to root out child abuse wherever it exists.
“Our goals are aligned in the fact that, ‘Let’s weed out the bad actors,’” Puckett said. “If they’re within my system, if they’re within the public system, let’s expose the evil of anybody that abuses a child.”
As allegations against the unlicensed boarding schools mounted in 2021, legislative hearings on the state’s response broadened in scope to encompass lawmakers’ ties to the schools, as well as the department’s possible underreporting of substantiated cases of abuse and neglect.
The division investigates and reports abuse and neglect within the foster care system. In December 2025, only 236 of 4,585 reported incidents of neglect or abuse were substantiated, according to a monthly report from the department. According to a quarterly report, between July and September 2025, 74 Missouri counties — about 64% — met a federal benchmark of 9.07 incidents or fewer of abuse or neglect per 100,000 days of foster care.
The number of children in foster care in Missouri has begun to grow after several years of consistent decline. There were 12,209 children in the division’s custody at the end of February, according to the department. That’s 14.4% less than September 2021, when the number of foster kids reached a peak of 14,265.
But it’s 10.6% more than a five-year low of 11,041 a year ago
Asked what might account for this change, a spokesperson for the department indicated in an email in January that monthly numbers are “point-in-time measures” and that “a single snapshot does not capture the full movement within the system.”
“Decisions to request removal of a child are never made lightly, and only occur when safety cannot be assured in the home, through a [temporary placement], or through providing in-home services to mitigate the safety threat,” the spokesperson said.
Foster children have in recent years been housed in hospitals and mental health facilities because there was nowhere else for them to go.
In February 2025, there were 85 foster children housed out of state due to a lack of placement options in Missouri.
A department spokesperson told The Independent that 27 youth in the foster care system were placed out of state as of March 3. The spokesperson said the department does not track how many youth are living in hospitals beyond medical necessity.
There are currently about 6,700 foster homes and kinship placements for children in division custody, according to the spokesperson.
During the legislative hearing on proposed changes to facility oversight, adults who were placed as young people by their parents at Show Me Christian Youth Home, the residential facility run by Puckett, recalled finding solace there.
Grace Brodersen, 26, said that after years of abuse in the state foster care system, at Show Me she “finally had the chance to be a child” — riding horses, playing sports and participating in game nights.
“I had plenty of times I stumbled as I walked into adulthood,” Brodersen said, “and Show Me didn’t shut the door as soon as I turned 18.”
Puckett said he wants to be able to provide homes to kids, while maintaining the ability to operate without a license.
“My point is that we once were a useful part of the foster system,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how we can get back to that.”
Democratic state Rep. Gregg Bush of Columbia said Missouri’s current laws are already designed for facilities that want to participate in the foster system.
“There’s a collection of rules and regulations and statute that will accommodate all of that for you,” Bush said. “We’ve created a framework…. What this bill is doing is opting you out of that framework.”