A number of cases of reported abuse of special-needs students by teachers and other education staff at schools have cropped up in recent years in Georgia and throughout the nation.
One of the most notable cases involved a 2012 lawsuit by parents who alleged special education teachers at Hopewell Middle School in Fulton County assaulted and battered their son so badly he died.
In Atlanta, there was also a 2008 case involving the North Metro psychoeducational school, where parents, suspecting that their 10-year-old autistic son was being mistreated, sewed a tape recorder into his shirt. As a result of the recording and other evidence, a judge ordered APS to pay the boy’s tuition at a private school.
Earlier this year:
A Cobb County elementary school paraprofessional was arrested Monday on a misdemeanor battery charge after allegedly slapping an autistic pre-kindergartner.
A former Fulton County special education teacher was been granted immunity from criminal prosecution for allegedly isolating disabled students in dark bathrooms, playing back recorded screams into their ears and slamming them into lockers.
According to a recent report released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, students with disabilities represent 12 percent of the student population but 58 percent of those placed in seclusion or involuntary confinement, and 75 percent of those physically restrained at school to immobilize them or reduce their ability to move freely.
Georgia requires no specific training for some of the school staffers who deal daily with severely disabled children.
That lack of training can lead to situations ripe for the kind of abuse allegedly committed by two Atlanta public schools paraprofessionals in videotapes that surfaced this week.
A teacher secretly taped two paraprofessionals at Harper-Archer Middle School in west Atlanta slapping, pushing and manhandling two special education students. One of the parapros no longer works for the school system and one was suspended.
The video shows the parapros lifting students out of chairs, choking them and throwing them to the floor. “There’s absolutely zero reason a grown adult should treat anyone like that who needs an education,” said Terance Madden, an attorney for the two victims. He said the students didn’t appear to have been misbehaving at the time.
“We’re hearing about it more and more often now, about kids in special education being abused,” said Eric Jacobson, executive director for the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, an independent state agency that advocates on behalf of families living with developmental disabilities.
“Unfortunately most of the parapros don’t get a lot of training around how to deal with kids who have different behaviors or (who are) unable to communicate. They’re not really prepared to come into a classroom and deal with the situations that are there.”
The training that does take place typically is left up to individual school districts, and most don’t do enough, according to advocates for children with disabilities.
In Atlanta Public Schools, paraprofessionals who work with special-needs children are supposed to receive training that includes “instructional strategies for students, assistance with their duties and responsibilities as far as feeding some students with more significant needs, toileting, those types of things, and behavior support,” said Vickie Cleveland, APS executive director for special education services.
Atlanta public schools offered the following course — “Starting the Year off Right for Special Education Paraprofessionals” — required for all special education paraprofessionals in August, according to school officials.
One of the paraprofessionals accused of abuse, a woman whose identity has not been released, attended the professional training the school system offered. The other paraprofessional, Alger Coleman III, did not, according to school officials.
Coleman has been charged with first-degree cruelty to children and battery. He is no longer employed by the school district. The woman has been put on paid leave, according to Superintendent Erroll Davis. An Atlanta Police spokesman said that woman is under investigation and has not been charged.
Both are state-certified paraprofessionals, according to Georgia’s Professional Standards Commission.
Paraprofessionals assist teachers in classroom management and aiding individual students. Georgia paraprofessionals typically have at least two years of college education and are placed in classrooms primarily to offer support for teachers and engage students. But the state does not require those who deal with special-needs students to take any special training to be certified. Most must meet certain federal requirements, which can include taking a test, said Kelly Henson, executive secretary for the Georgia Professional Standards Commission.
It’s typically left up to school districts to decide whether to require parapros who deal with special-needs students to take specialized training, he said.
Davis said, “As with all types of incidents, we will figure out what are the lessons. Is it a training issue, is it a leadership issue, is it a classroom control issue? If we believe these are systemic issues, we will change the system. If we believe these are individual issues, we will change the people. We certainly don’t train people to abuse children.”
“I want to understand could it have been prevented? And if so, how and why did it get to this state?”
The teacher who recorded the abuse wants to remain anonymous because she said she fears she might not be able to get a teaching job outside APS. She said she reported to the school principal at least three times that two paraprofessionals accused of abusing students were not doing their jobs – often playing on their iPhones or watching movies.
She said the two became more verbally abusive toward two students in the classroom of six special-needs students. All the children in the classroom are non-verbal and have various severe disabilities, including autism.
The teacher said she set up the camera hoping to catch the paraprofessionals not doing their jobs, but instead discovered to her horror the physical abuse, which happened when she was not in the room. She went to the principal and police after capturing the video in February. “When I saw it (video), I just lost it … I wanted to put the kids in a safer position.”
“Just the guilt of thinking of what happened to them when I wasn’t in the room or when I was off campus at professional development … It’s been really hard for me. I’m in therapy on a weekly basis.”
Curt Decker, executive director the advocacy group National Disability Rights Network, noted that paraprofessionals are low-paying, stressful jobs, which can lead to high turnover — another bad outcome for disabled students.
Abuse of such students is “a very serious problem … These people are not trained. They don’t have a sufficient number of aides. They’re probably in classrooms that are too large. And given kids with some very difficult behavior problems. And it’s a recipe for disaster.”
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