Agency sues Wake schools

Abuse of autistic students is claimed

A disability rights agency looking into claims that autistic students were abused at Carroll Middle School in Raleigh sued the Wake County school board Tuesday.

In a lawsuit in federal court, Disability Rights North Carolina claims the district is blocking the agency's investigation by refusing to disclose information, while the school system said federal privacy laws prevent the release of student records to the group.

Parents of autistic students at Carroll told Disability Rights lawyers that their children were improperly restrained and were encouraged to wrestle one another and other school employees in a vacant classroom called the "WWF room" to "release their aggression." The "WWF" refers to a professional wrestling organization.

Parents told Disability Rights they complained many times to the classroom teacher, the school principal and to the special education services staff, but did not receive satisfactory answers.

The school district began investigating allegations of improper treatment in the Carroll Middle School classroom on Aug. 26, when it heard from Disability Rights, said Michael Evans, the Wake schools' spokesman.

"This stuff is just sobering to us," he said. "We want to make sure whatever happened, we get to the bottom of it."

One parent said her son was afraid to go to school after seeing his classmates mistreated.

"He had nightmares about it," said Betsy Johnson, who said her son, Stone, then 12, saw a teacher wrestle a classmate to the ground and another adult place handcuffs around the student's ankles.

"He did not feel safe at school," she said.

Johnson said she spent a day in the classroom and saw the teacher threaten students by telling them they would have to repeat the grade. She said a teaching assistant shook her son's desk and called him a moron because he did not understand a math problem.

Johnson took her son out of Carroll on the advice of his doctor and enrolled him in private school. She moved to Greenville last month, she said, for a school system that would treat her son better than Wake did.

The lawsuit names the Wake school board and special education services director Robert Sturey as defendants. It cites the handcuffing incident and reports from another parent that a student suffered bruises on his arms, apparently from being grabbed and held down in class.

Disability Rights wants to investigate the complaints, and asked the school system for names and addresses of parents of children in the class. The agency hopes to ask parents to release their children's education records.

The agency also wants to monitor the class and talk to staff about the students.

Disability Rights said it is entitled to the information under the federal law that gives agencies like it the authority to protect the rights of disabled people.

"It directs we should have unrestricted access to the classroom to interview students and staff if abuse and neglect is taking place," John Rittelmeyer, the agency's lawyer, said in an interview.

The courts have found that the federal law giving Disability Rights access to the class trumps a federal privacy law Wake schools are citing to keep the agency out, Rittelmeyer said.

The school system is resisting "having an independent authority look over their shoulder," he said.

Ann Majestic, the school board's attorney, said the problem is that Disability Rights had asked for the names of the students.

She said if the group had asked for the names of children's guardians, the system might have been able to accommodate the request.