ALASKA
Alaska Dispatch News
Jerzy Shedlock
Alaska State Troopers are investigating public allegations of physical and mental abuse against students of an Eastern Orthodox church school for troubled youths in Kodiak.
Former students of St. Innocent’s Academy have submitted victims’ statements to the website Academy Abuse, which went live in early January.
The website’s authors decided to go public with the allegations after Metropolitan Joseph Bosakov — the leader of the Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Diocese of the U.S., Canada and Australia, who oversees the academy — failed to take satisfactory action, they said through the site. There are currently 15 victims’ statements posted to the website.
St. Innocent’s is an alternative school for “at-risk” young men and women on Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. Its website states many of the students are in need of “secure anchoring” as an antidote to a modern lack of values.
The allegations center on one academy official, who’s accused of physical, verbal and psychological abuse of students, including claims that a young man’s head was slammed against a wall and a girl was forced to drink from a dog dish off the floor. Those and other incidents allegedly happened between 1999 and 2011.
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