OKEECHOBEE — On July 1 a slew of new laws took effect in Florida, but for victims and survivors of the Okeechobee School for Boys, one law stands out above all the rest.

HB 21 introduces a compensation program for victims of both the Dozier School for Boys and the Okeechobee School for Boys. The law creates a mechanism for the state to compensate men who were confined to the Dozier School or the Okeechobee School at any time between 1940 and 1975 and who were subjected to mental, physical, or sexual abuse perpetrated by school personnel.

Under the bill, those who were abused at the school during those years can submit a compensation application which includes the applicant’s name, date of birth, mailing address, phone number, and, if available, e-mail address, the name of the school in which the applicant was confined and the approximate dates of the applicant’s confinement.

The Dozier School for Boys opened in 1900 in Marianna as the State Reform School, with the Okeechobee campus opening in 1959 to handle overcrowding at the first school. Initially, the schools were set up as a place to reform troubled kids, with education and training intended to mold them into productive citizens. But, in the place of real reform, the state instituted a system of child labor and corporal punishment

The School for Boys in Marianna already had a history of abuse by the time the newer satellite campus opened. When some staff members transferred to Okeechobee from Marianna, it appeared they brought the abusive practices with them.

“They say Marianna was tough, but I think Okeechobee was tougher,” said Marvin L. Mike in a 2009 interview with the Okeechobee News. Marvin spent 18 months at the Okeechobee campus in 1961.

“They would make boys run away just so they could beat them,” continued Marvin. “It would make you cry if you saw what went on.”

Frank Zych, the former superintendent and deputy superintendent of the Florida School for Boys in Okeechobee, would administer corporal punishment himself.

“When you walked in there was a desk, and chairs in front of the windows where you sat and waited for the whipping,” explained Marvin. “You look to the left and there was Mr. Zych’s office and to the right was a small room. It was just big enough to get in there. In the room was a bed, like an old bunk bed, with a pillow. There was blood, vomit and slobber on it. They didn’t wash it, they would just wipe it off.”

Marvin, who was 12 years old when he was first sent to the school, said the leather strap used by Mr. Zych was smooth and about 4-to 5-inches wide. But the strap used by the school superintendent W.M. Sult was the most damaging.

“Mr. Sult would use a strap that had holes in it,” he said. “When he beat you with that one he intended to tear your hide up. It would pull the hide from you.”

Marvin also described the time Mr. Sult issued a frightening warning that stuck with him throughout his entire life.

“He said, ‘if you keep running your little black mouth you’ll end up like your friend,” Marvin recounted.

Marvin’s friend, a boy named Tony, had disappeared one day. Tony would run away because when he was whipped they would also hit him in the face.

“The last time they caught him, he was so messed up he couldn’t sit down,” Marvin recalled. “He disappeared. They said he ran away. When they found him he was inside the sewer plant. He drowned in all that waste.”

“But Tony could swim,” Marvin added, his voice quieter. “He was a good swimmer.”

Records indicate that Florida Governor Claude Kirk toured the facility in 1967 and labeled conditions there as “deplorable.”

According to the book “Private Prisons” by Charles H. Logan, the state had sought to close the Florida School for Boys in Okeechobee but found it could not afford to do so.

“For years it allowed the facility to deteriorate, with no money budgeted for physical improvements. Conditions were bad and led to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other groups charging “cruel and abusive conditions and confinement,” wrote Mr. Logan.

Instead of closing the school, state officials opted to privatize it.

In 1982, the school was taken over by the Eckerd Foundation and became known as the Eckerd Youth Development Center. Then in 2009 the non-profit Eckerd Foundation lost the contract to operate the youth offender facility to G4S Youth Services, a for-profit provider. In 2020, the Okeechobee

In 2015 the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office conducted a search of the property with six cadaver dogs for long rumored human remains said to be at the former Florida School for Boys, but none were found.

In 2017 G4S Youth Services was renamed TrueCore Behavioral after being bought by BHSB Holdings Inc. for $56.5 million. BHSB Holdings itself was acquired by the Minnesota-based investment group Spell Capital Mezzanine only a month prior in March 2017.

In 2020 after TrueCore’s contract for the facility expired, the state chose not to pursue further services at the site.