The District of Columbia’s efforts to pull its children from a Massachusetts shock-therapy clinic have been stymied by recalcitrant parents who don’t trust school officials’ intentions, the city’s top lawyer told The Examiner on Tuesday.
Peter Nickles, the city’s acting attorney general, had promised publicly to have all 10 of the District’s children pulled out of the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., by March. But at least four of the parents have resisted D.C. officials’ efforts to move their children to new schools, Nickles told The Examiner on Tuesday.
“Obviously, there’s distrust,” Nickles told The Examiner. “I think one of the main objectives we have is to establish credibility.”
The D.C. school system will spend more than $300 million this year on special education. Most of it will go to private schools like Rotenberg, where critics say D.C. children will be dumped with little regard to their health or well-being. D.C. school officials had been sending children to Rotenberg for at least a decade but didn’t know that the school practiced “aversive therapy” until news reports surfaced this summer.
Under federal law, school systems have to provide services to mentally ill and disabled students to help them overcome their disability. But D.C. routinely violates its students’ due process rights, allowing parents and attorneys to argue that they should be sent to expensive, out-of-state clinics like Rotenberg. Such “nonpublic” outfits will cost taxpayers at least $210 million next year.
Nickles reiterated Tuesday that the city may go into court to demand that the schools “defund” Rotenberg as an outside contractor. The city is paying at least $227,000 per student per year to house its children in Rotenberg, which is fending off a Massachusetts criminal investigation into its practices.
Domiento Hill, a lawyer for the four D.C. parents whose children are kept in Rotenberg, said Tuesday that his clients have had to fight D.C. officials for so long that they no longer trust the city to look out for their children’s best interests.
“A lot of these kids were waiting for help for numerous years,” said Hill, whose firm has billed taxpayers for tens of millions of dollars in special education litigationcosts over the past decade. “There is a level of discomfort. It’s the fear of the unknown.”
