Former students have won a class-action suit against the former Grenville Christian College for the physical abuse, demeaning discipline and humiliation they and others say they endured during the college’s 24 years of operation.

Justice Janet Leiper of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said the college and the estates of two deceased former headmasters will have to pay yet-to-be-determined punitive damages.

During 22 days of hearings this fall and early winter, the court heard the former students’ harrowing testimony of corporal punishment with a wooden paddle, school-wide public humiliation sessions to shame students for such infractions as “being too haughty” or “smiling too much” and degrading work assignments, according to Leiper’s judgment released Thursday.

As discipline measures, students were forced to clean floors with toothbrushes, pick up leaves on their hands and knees under the supervision of a younger student, clean out a dumpster of garbage and a dead animal carcass and cut the grass using small scissors, the court was told.

One student with a prosthetic leg was required to clean the chapel on his hands and knees with a hand-held vacuum. When he asked for a larger vacuum, he was ordered to clean the floor again.

A common disciplinary measure was a wooden paddle delivered to the bare bottoms or through the clothing of students by the headmaster or teachers, the court heard. Students were bruised, sometimes bleeding and sore for weeks, after the spankings by the paddle, which a student described as a 1½- to 2-inch-thick piece of hardwood with a handle like a baseball bat, they testified.

In addition to physical punishments, the former students told of public shaming and humiliation as a disciplinary technique. School assemblies were held five or six times a year to publicly humiliate students who ran afoul of the school’s written and unwritten rules.

“People would cry,” one witness testified in describing the school assemblies. “I could see people looking with big eyes to each other, trying to not be noticed, trying to slump in their seats. It was really scary.”

The school’s philosophy of strict discipline was part of a “tough love” program, as the school’s first headmaster, Alastair Haig, described it to the Brockville Rotary Club in 1973.

Grenville Christian College, which is in Augusta Township just east of Brockville, opened in 1969 as Berean Christian School to offer elementary and secondary education to boys and girls.

The school closed in 2007.

The complaints of the former students start in 1973 when the school adopted new programming from an American Christian community known as the Community of Jesus, or COJ.

The five plaintiffs lived in residence at Grenville between 1973 and 1997. They launched their suit in 2008 and had it recognized as a class action in 2012. They named the college and the estates of former headmasters Haig and Charles Farnsworth in their suit.

In her judgment, Leiper said the school created an “abusive, authoritarian and rigid culture” that exploited and controlled the young students.

“I have concluded that the evidence of maltreatment and the varieties of abuse perpetrated on students’ bodies and minds in the name of COJ values of submission and obedience was class-wide and decades-wide,” Leiper concluded in her judgment.

Leiper found the testimony of all five plaintiffs, including the transcript of one of the students who has since died, as “credible and reliable.”

They described a culture at the college where the teachers and headmaster enforced written and unwritten rules with humiliation, verbal abuse and physical punishments.

“Without any accountability, either by reporting to a board or to written established policy, the headmasters were the absolute masters of the Grenville domain, indulging in acts of petty cruelty and doling out disproportionate physical and emotional pain to vulnerable or less-favoured students,” Leiper wrote.

The rules were legion, the court heard. Students were prohibited from possessing such music devices as radios or Walkmans. Girls had to obey clothing rules about skirt lengths and the type of underwear. (Staff held panty raids in which they rummaged through underwear drawers and punished girls for owning “bikini-style” underwear.)

Boys and girls were told not to touch and stay at least six inches apart and mixed groups had to contain more girls than boys.

“Attractive” girls were ordered to cut their hair and keep their bodies covered so as to not inflame the “lust of boys” for fear of being raped or assaulted, according to the testimony. Girls who dressed or behaved “provocatively” were called “whores, bitches in heat, temptresses, Jezebels, sluts and harlots” by the college’s pastoral committee, the court was told.

Headmaster Farnsworth regarded homosexuality as the “worst sin” and lectured that gays were “damned to hell.” Staff called boys “faggots” because of the way they walked, and Farnsworth had 20 private sessions with a boy he believed to be gay in which he prayed for the student’s soul and asked detailed questions about the student’s prior sexual abuse when he was a child, the court was told.

The students were taught that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuals, the court heard.

At times, the students were taken to the college’s boiler room to be shown the “flames of hell” in the furnace. They were told that if they did not behave, they would go to hell, witnesses said.

“The leaders at Grenville created a community that submitted to these types of corrections,” Leiper said in her judgment. “They applied the same practices to operate the school and mould the behaviour of the students. These disciplinary practices spanned decades. The school has no policy or accountability for these practices. I find this was a systemic practice which fell below the standard of care.”

Leiper ordered the two parties to go before a case management judge to discuss a settlement. If they are unable to agree she will consider written submissions on costs after Mar. 21.

Defence lawyer Geoff Adair told the Canadian Press that his clients are considering an appeal but will decide “in due course.” Adair, who represents the school as well as the estates of the two deceased headmasters, declined further comment.

wlowrie@postmedia.com