Researchers at the University of South Florida are fighting with the state over access to the grounds of a now-closed reform school.

For decades, the Dozier School for Boys was notorious for the harsh treatment boys received there. Now, a forensic anthropologist and her team want permission to exhume dozens of bodies they found in unmarked graves, but are meeting resistance from state officials.

Meredith Tise, a graduate anthropology student at the University of South Florida, measures the depth of a trench dug at the site of the cemetery last May, as the university looks for signs of unmarked graves.
Image: Edmund D. Fountain/MCT/Landov

White House Boys

They’re called the White House Boys — a group of men, many now in their 60s and 70s — who were sent to the Dozier school when they were children. They take the name from a small white building on the school grounds where boys were beaten. Jerry Cooper was sent to the school in 1961. He says guards beat the boys using a leather strap.

“These were not spankings. These were beatings, brutal beatings,” Cooper says.

Cooper and other White House Boys say they know of children who died from the beatings. A few years ago, the state investigated and said it found no evidence that staff at the school had been responsible for any student deaths.

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