“O ut of sight, out of mind” may be the operating principle behind D.C. school officials’ decision to send special education students to a Massachusetts facility that administers electrical shocks as therapy. But to keep doing so weeks after Chancellor Michelle Rhee ordered the practice halted demands a thorough investigation. As The Examiner’s Bill Myers reported, e-mails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that two local children were sent to the Judge Rotenberg Center outside Boston two weeks after Rhee’s directive. More than a month later, special education director Marla Oakes was still referring to the now-forbidden center as an “approved vendor.” Incredibly, some District school officials would rather ship these unfortunate youngsters to hell houses than provide them with suitable nurturing and a pain-free environment.
Council Chairman Vincent Gray angrily called electroshock treatment “inhumane.” An October 2007 Mother Jones magazine article referred to Rotenberg as “the only facility in the country that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons.” Taxpayers from eight states and the District of Columbia pay Rotenberg $227,000 annually to care for each autistic, mentally ill, retarded or emotionally disturbed child. Many of these children are forced to wear 10-pound backpacks with battery-powered electrodes that make it easy for staff members to zap them into submission. Since the center provides no psychiatric counseling or psychotropic drugs, this primitive system of inflicting pain on disturbed children as young as 9, even for such minor transgressions as getting out of their seats, is the core of executive director Matt Israel’s behavior modification program.
Recommended Stories
According to Mother Jones, at least two students have died while in restraints. One retarded 19-year-old woman who, besides shocks, endured abusive spankings, pinches, and forced inhaling of ammonia for “misbehavior” died from untreated internal bleeding. Israel — a Harvard-educated psychologist — admitted giving a disturbed 12-year-old 5,000 electrical shocks in one day! Nine District special education students currently live at the facility, far from home and community, with no ready access to parents, guardians or advocates, enduring what could well be years of intentionally inflicted pain for conditions over which they have no control. Cold-blooded killers are treated better than this.
