Boarding school ‘builds boys’ through agriculture

By CRAIG SHIRK

For Acres of SW Ohio

The live­stock barns are where stu­dents care for a small herd of hol­stein cat­tle, horses and chick­ens. The facil­i­ties also include meat pro­cess­ing, black­smith, weld­ing and wood­work­ing shops where instruc­tors teach stu­dents the trades.

ST. PARIS – Oper­a­tion Rebirth, a board­ing school and work­ing farm for trou­bled teen boys, has been help­ing fam­i­lies through farm­ing since 1980. Its motto reads, “It’s bet­ter to build boys than to mend men.”

The school opened its doors in down­town Day­ton in 1976 and later moved to a 17-acre field north of St. Paris.

“We quickly found that the (city) envi­ron­ment wasn’t con­ducive to help­ing boys change. It just didn’t work,” said cur­rent Direc­tor Sam Ron­icker. “We bought this prop­erty (near St. Paris) around 1980 and it has had an agri­cul­tural theme ever since.”

Build­ing char­ac­ter in trou­bled boys has been the mis­sion of the school since its begin­ning, start­ing with the efforts of founder and Direc­tor Emer­i­tus James Brian of Shelby County.

After more than 30 years under Brian’s lead­er­ship, Ron­icker and his wife, Teresa, accepted the roles of exec­u­tive direc­tors in 2009.

“Most of the boys here have only played video games and watched TV … We have one boy who’s watched every gory movie ever made, but when he cuts a chicken’s head off he throws up,” said Ron­icker. “There’s a real­ity to it.

“But this is a lot more fun. It’s real. It’s not a video game. It’s not tele­vi­sion. There is no instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. You have to wait, so it really cre­ates patience,” he said.

The major­ity of each student’s diet is planted, har­vested, processed or pre­pared in some way by his own hands. The boys also earn a profit from tend­ing to chick­ens and sell­ing their eggs.

The gar­den is full of corn, peas, green beans, toma­toes and pep­pers, any veg­etable that can be stored eas­ily. The boys also take care of and sell pigs, how­ever, live­stock prof­its have been hard to come by lately.

“We really are poor farm­ers,” Ron­icker said laugh­ing. “The price of feed is so high, we don’t make any money on the live­stock. But, what we don’t eat, we will sell.”

The boys help butcher live­stock and process all meat prod­ucts con­sumed on the farm. Ron­icker said there’s value in know­ing where the cows and chick­ens have been and what exactly they’ve eaten and breathed. In addi­tion, the gar­den is void of poten­tially harm­ful chemicals.

The boys are required to take eques­trian class, start­ing with shov­el­ing horse manure, groom­ing the horses, sad­dling them, clean­ing their stalls and finally learn­ing to ride them. All five full-time staff mem­bers are expe­ri­enced in horse­back rid­ing and the farm cur­rently has two horses.

Bail­ing hay for local farm­ers and cut­ting wood for the dorm fur­nace are other tasks stu­dents under­take. They learn skilled trades such as weld­ing, wood­work­ing, pot­tery, stained-glass craft­ing and black­smith shop.

These trades are taught by both full– and part-time instruc­tors. Some young­sters dis­cover tal­ents and pas­sions they never knew they had.

“I real­ized I was good at it and that it came eas­ier,” said a 14-year-old stu­dent about his wood­work­ing class.

The boy proudly dis­played a recent wood­carv­ing project, an illus­tra­tion of a gal­lop­ing horse. He is fin­ish­ing a gift for his mother, a coat rack made of wal­nut that received rave reviews from his instructors.

He spoke of return­ing home, earn­ing a diploma, a col­le­giate schol­ar­ship and start­ing his own wood­shop. What’s changed most, he said, is his “anger, respect, matu­rity and cooperation.”

“When I was back in pub­lic schools, I was get­ting Cs, Ds and Fs,” he said. “Here I’m get­ting As, Bs, and Cs. I haven’t had an F in over a year.”

Each day starts at 6 a.m. with clean­ing dorm rooms, devo­tions and break­fast. Classes are from 8 a.m. to about 2 p.m. The remain­der of the day con­sists of farm chores and ends with bed­time at 8 p.m. Meals are served with all stu­dents around the table.

“We focus on three things here: respect, rela­tion­ship and respon­si­bil­ity, and the agri­cul­tural aspect is all about respon­si­bil­ity,” said Ronicker.

The school cur­rently is oper­at­ing at a capac­ity eight stu­dents, includ­ing boys rang­ing in age from 13 to 17. The pro­gram has wel­comed boys from Ken­tucky, Indi­ana, Michi­gan and Illi­nois, but most orig­i­nate from south­west Ohio.

“Usu­ally a boy comes to us around the junior high age … and he usu­ally stays with us about two years,” Ron­icker said. “The goal is to get him back to his fam­ily and back to main­stream education.”

The school receives no pub­lic fund­ing. Instead, it is sup­ported by dozens of reg­u­lar donors and more than 100 occa­sional donors includ­ing churches, friends and fam­ily. The school also is sup­ported through the Com­mu­nity Foun­da­tion of Shelby County, which man­ages the school’s endow­ment fund.

Ron­icker and his staff are proud of their grow­ing net­work of Face­book fol­low­ers. The school’s Face­book page has amassed 201 friends and many are alumni.

“It’s an amaz­ing net­work that God has cre­ated,” said Ron­icker. “There are 1,400 or 1,500 peo­ple around the state, around the coun­try really, who pray for us and care for us.”

Ron­icker touts the school’s suc­cess rate as 100 per­cent for those who com­plete the pro­gram. The direc­tor says it’s a chal­lenge to bring back alumni for hon­orary vis­its because of their new-found work ethic and devo­tion to their jobs.

“Sorry, I have to work,’” Ron­icker said he often hears.

OR’s annual oper­at­ing bud­get is approx­i­mately $220,000, but ris­ing costs will require addi­tional income of about $5,000 to $10,000. Cur­rently, the school is long over-due for hay to feed its livestock.

What few may know, said Ron­icker, is that the pro­gram is year-round and requires its stu­dents to return home for roughly one-third of the year dur­ing breaks. Par­ents are required to play an active role in their children’s suc­cess and must pick them up dur­ing those breaks.

A com­mon mis­con­cep­tion is that the school receives court-ordered juve­niles, which is not the case, said Ronicker.

A hand­ful of med­ical pro­fes­sion­als and sev­eral churches can make refer­rals to OR. Dr. Kevin Hor­vath, a pedi­a­tri­cian prac­tic­ing in Tipp City, makes a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of them.

OR is a non-denominational school, though stu­dents attend ser­vices at the Urbana First United Methodist Church and par­tic­i­pate in youth events there.

Roger Phipps, who has been with the school for 35 years, is a full-time instruc­tor and assis­tant direc­tor who han­dles the bulk of the aca­d­e­mic tutor­ing. Mean­while, res­i­den­tial instruc­tors Emilio and Shel­ley live in the dor­mi­tory with their three children.

The stu­dents are super­vised by at least two staff mem­bers at all times. Besides the five full-time work­ers, the school gets help from 10 weekly vol­un­teers and tutors as well as dozens of guest speak­ers and occa­sional volunteers.

Ron­icker said the school’s strict reg­i­men has become a way of life for the staff.

“We tell our­selves, ‘We’re just liv­ing our lives and the boys are here for the ride.’”

(Craig Shirk is a writer for the Urbana Daily Citizen.)

Posted by Tina Murdock on Jan 10 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.