An Alexandria teen confined to a Massachusetts shock-therapy clinic was a victim of a cruel practical joke that left him hooked up to electro-shock machines in the middle of the night, The Examiner has learned.
The boy, 16, whose identity was protected by state and federal privacy laws, was a ward of Alexandria’s social services agency and his plight has raised disturbing questions for the city’s child welfare officials.
He was pulled from his bed in the Judge Rotenberg Center in the middle of the night last summer after a runaway from the Canton, Mass., clinic called and pretended to be an official. The runaway ordered the boy and two other residents at Rotenberg hooked up to shock machines.
The incident, first reported by The Examiner, has led to a criminal investigation of the Rotenberg Center, one of the few schools in the country authorized to use electro-shock and other “aversive” therapies on mentally ill and disabled students.
Massachusetts investigators’ notes obtained by The Examiner show that the boy was shocked at least two dozen times. He was one of three Alexandria children housed at the Rotenberg Center, a source told The Examiner. A tape of the “sessions” has since been destroyed, sources said. Alexandria has since pulled all of its children out of Rotenberg, city Human Services director Debra Collins said.
“We’ve definitely stopped doing business with Judge Rotenberg,” she said. “And we will never place children in there again.”
Alexandria children were first sent to Rotenberg in 2002 and city welfare officials visited the clinic every month, Collins said. City officials were aware that Rotenberg was a shock-therapy school but had no inkling the children there were in any danger, Collins said.
“Hindsight is 20-20,” she said. “It’s something that’s not predictable. We want to make sure nothing like that happens again.”
New York lawyer Ken Mollins, who has been one of the leading critics of the Rotenberg Center, said Alexandria’s efforts were too little, too late.
“If they checked this place every month, then they would have determined that there were numerous deficiencies,” Mollins said. He cited a scathing 2006 report by the New York Department of Education that blasted Rotenberg for unsafe conditions.
Only a handful of Alexandria children are sent to residential clinics, Collins said, and all but three of them are in Virginia. The city looks at all such placements as temporary because city officials believe a child’s best hope lies in “a family, not a facility,” she said.
Rotenberg has won tens of millions of dollars from cities and states for decades, but suddenly finds itself besieged by children’s rights advocates from all over the country. Center officials say they are saving children from their infirmities without relying on debilitating psychotropic drugs.
But critics dispute that.
“A place like that shouldn’t be allowed to exist,” Mollins said.
The center has been home to dozens of D.C. children for more than a decade. Currently, D.C. officials are scrambling to find other places to put their children.
Alexandria’s mentally ill or disabled wards
» 20 children/wards in residential clinics
» One each in clinics in Georgia, Florida and Massachusetts
» Placements cost $2.3 million per year
