The D.C. Council should summon every single person involved from the beginning in the decision to subject local mentally ill and disabled children to literally shocking treatment at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts. This summons should go to everybody from the D.C. Public Schools employee who “lost” special-ed students’ records and missed administrative hearing deadlines, all the way to the private lawyers who pocketed fat legal fees. Then, having summoned them, the council should demand a full public accounting — under oath — of the millions of tax dollars paid to this tax-supported hellhole over the last decade. Every person in District governance who had a role in this disgrace must be identified and held to public account. To date, no one has been.
Incredibly, four D.C. children are still enrolled at Rotenberg, which uses electroshock as a means of behavioral modification and is under a state criminal investigation for alleged phony billing, unlawfully referring patients to unlicensed clinicians as psychologists, and destroying surveillance tapes that were ordered to be preserved. City taxpayers are still paying to warehouse vulnerable District children in a place that rivals St. Elizabeths for casual cruelty.
DCPS officials claim they didn’t know Rotenberg uses “aversive therapy” until The Examiner’s Bill Myers reported last summer that a runaway patient posing as a supervisor ordered middle-of-the-night electroshock treatments on three youngsters — including a 16-year-old Alexandria boy — as a practical joke.
But that could only have been due to willful ignorance. Students at Rotenberg are routinely subject to punishments such as “hot saucing” and food deprivation, and many are required to wear backpacks containing the electrical apparatus used to inflict the electrical shocks.
Even if they missed the obvious signs, District authorities dealing with Rotenberg had to be aware that Massachusetts officials have been trying to shut down the facility for years.
Yet DCPS still pays $227,000 per student to an institution where, one former employee reported, an autistic boy was repeatedly shocked for merely saying “hello” to his fellow classmates and where a 14-year-old D.C. boy’s arm was broken last year by orderlies, who refused to give him a new cast when the old one fell off in the shower.
The $4 million Rotenberg was paid by the city over the past three years was supposed to be used to educate these children, yet DCPS special education executive director Marla Oakes could find no certified teachers on campus during a visit last fall.
Apparently, there is no need for real teachers at a “school” where lessons are too often taught in amps and volts.
