Scandals surrounding the Circle of Hope Girls Ranch are resurfacing on social media as people re-discover the TikTok campaign to get it shut down.
Back in 2020, the Circle of Hope Girls Ranch went viral on TikTok after Amanda Householder, the daughter of the school’s owner used TikTok to expose her father’s ranch.
What is the Circle of Hope Girls Ranch?
The Circle of Hope Girls Ranch is a religious boarding school in Humansville, Missouri run by Boyd Householder.
It opened its doors in 2006 and aimed to: “Help young ladies who were destroying their lives through poor choices and behaviors and change their future.”
The school went viral in 2020 after it was exposed on TikTok.
Amanda Householder exposed her father’s school on TikTok
In mid-2020, Amanda Householder made a TikTok profile where she sought to expose her father’s school after feeling disturbed by allegations of abuse at the Circle of Hope.
NBC News reports that Amanda received a Facebook message from one of her father’s former friends saying that he was disturbed by what he had seen on a recent visit to the school.
She then took action and began raising awareness of these abuse allegations, setting up a now-deleted TikTok account with the bio: “My parents own an abusive boarding school for girls. This is my page exposing it.”
Amanda gathered stories from girls who had attended the school and began posting them on her TikTok. Her videos got millions of views and led to an official investigation into the school.
The Circle of Hope Girls Ranch is now closed
After the TikTok videos went viral, The Cedar County Sheriff’s Department and the state Department of Social Services opened an investigation.
The investigaton is still ongoing, but in August 2020 the state removed over 20 girls from the ranch.
This essentially closed the ranch, and the owners then decided not to reopen their school.