By Claire Osborn | Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 01:04 PM

The state has agreed to pay $300,000 to the former director of a now-closed outdoor camp for troubled kids in Bastrop County to settle her lawsuit against several state officials with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

Betty Lou Gaines, the former director of Woodside Trails Therapeutic Camp, had initially sued former state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, accusing her of pressuring regulators to shut down the facility with unproven and false allegations of abuse to boost her political ambitions.

Nine other state officials were named as defendants in the lawsuit.

A judge later dismissed Strayhorn from the lawsuit and Gaines settled with one of the defendants before the trial began Monday in federal court. The state settled with Gaines this morning before closing arguments were scheduled before a jury. A lawyer for the state, which was represented by the Attorney General’s office, declined to comment Wednesday.

Strayhorn’s office released results of an investigation, alleging that a Woodside Trails resident was sexually abused by a camp counselor, but the boy who made the charges recanted them before Strayhorn’s report was made public, according to the lawsuit. State officials revoked the camp’s state license in August 2004. Two state administrative law judges found in 2006 that the Department of Family and Protective Services had no evidence of sexual abuse.

“It’s taken us four years to get here,” Gaines said. She said she now plans to open a trade school teaching environmental skills, such as organic gardening, for foster children who have aged out of the foster system.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/courts/entries/2008/
08/13/state_settles_lawsuit_over_clo.html

Emphasis added by H4K Editor