NEW YORK, Jan. 1 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of people who say they suffered physical or sexual abuse at two state-run reform schools in Florida are in line to receive tens of thousands of dollars in restitution from the state, after Florida lawmakers formally apologized for the horrors they endured as children more than 50 years ago.

"At its peak in the Jim Crow 1960s, 500 boys were housed at what is now known as the Dozier School for Boys, most of them for minor offenses such as petty theft, truancy or running away from home. Orphaned and abandoned children were also sent to the school, which was open for more than a century," The Associated Press (AP) reported Wednesday.

In recent years, hundreds of men have come forward to recount brutal beatings, sexual assaults, deaths and disappearances at the notorious school in the panhandle town of Marianna. Nearly 100 boys died between 1900 and 1973 at Dozier, some of them from gunshot wounds or blunt force trauma. Some boys' bodies were shipped back home. Others were buried in unmarked graves researchers recently uncovered.

Ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline, the state of Florida received more than 800 applications for restitution from people held at the Dozier school and its sister school in Okeechobee, attesting to the mental, physical and sexual abuse they endured at the hands of school personnel. Last year, state lawmakers allocated 20 million U.S. dollars to be equally divided among the schools' surviving victims.

"Allegations of abuse have hung over the Dozier school since soon after it opened in 1900, with reports of children being chained to the walls in irons. When then-Governor Claude Kirk visited in 1968, he found the institution in disrepair with leaky ceilings, holes in walls, no heating for the winters and buckets used as toilets," noted the report.

Florida officials closed Dozier in 2011, following state and federal investigations and news reports documenting the abuses, it added. Enditem

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