Friday, September 18, 2026 • Wear sunscreen at the fair! 97. ☀️

We received 162 votes on the Thursday poll, “What’s the best part of the Oklahoma State Fair?”

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ The food 🌭 (47)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The rides 🎡 (2)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ The exhibits & animals 🐮 (44)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 The people-watching 👀 (69)

New poll question at the bottom of today’s newsletter. (You can also suggest a poll question by emailing me at [email protected].)

By Ashlynd Baecht, The Frontier
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Mary Baerg believed there was only one way out of her Christian boarding school.

She waited until after dark one night in September 2024, took off her ankle monitor and slipped out a back door. She ran into the woods surrounding New Lifehouse Academy in rural Delaware County, carrying only her program-issued Bible. Baerg found a piece of glass in the roadway and cut her forearm five times. She told first responders she couldn’t handle everything going on in her life.

Baerg didn’t want to die. She just wanted relief, she said.

Her adoptive parents sent her to New Lifehouse after a previous suicide attempt, believing she would get the help she needed. Baerg said the school meted out punishment instead of offering support. She said staff physically restrained her for having emotional outbursts, talking too much, and not adhering to the strict rules.

“I just figured the only way out was maybe running away,” she said.

When the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office found her, she said she was sitting on a large rock. An ambulance took her to a hospital in Vinita, where she received stitches, according to medical records.

Mary said the nurse asked why Baerg had run away and tried to hurt herself. She told the nurse she didn’t feel safe at the boarding school. Soon after, a New Lifehouse staff member arrived and sat in Baerg’s room, answering questions from hospital staff, she said. A staffer took Baerg back to New Lifehouse after the incident. She said the school placed her on suicide watch, which meant she had to sleep on the living room couch.

New Lifehouse Academy markets itself to parents of teenage girls facing emotional and behavioral challenges, but is not licensed to provide mental health treatment.

The boarding school is operated by Adult & Teen Challenge of Oklahoma, part of a network of more than 200 Christian recovery programs across the United States that promote studying the Bible to cure addiction and trauma.

Baerg and 23 other former students who attended New Lifehouse over the past decade told The Frontier that the program relied on control and isolation. Former students said punishments included physical exercise, food restriction, outdoor labor, and writing Bible verses. Some former students described staff pushing or punching them. Others said staff would restrain them by holding them down and sitting on them, causing their legs to go numb or making it difficult to breathe. One former student claimed in a federal lawsuit filed in August that she needed help for an eating disorder, anxiety, self-harm, and depression when her family enrolled her from 2014 to 2016. The lawsuit claims New Lifehouse subjected her and other students to violent physical restraint holds and forced exercise to the point of “vomiting, exhaustion, and even fainting.”

Oklahoma Adult & Teen Challenge hasn’t responded in court to the lawsuit yet and told The Frontier it couldn’t comment on pending litigation.

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