The phone rang. “You don’t know me,” the voice on the other end said to Lisa Williams, “but do you have a child who was a special-education student at Hopewell Middle School?”
She did, and that July 2009 conversation with Judy Marshall was the beginning of a relationship forged in pain. Williams and Marshall believe their sons, and others in a special-education classroom at the Fulton County school, were abused by their teacher. And investigators hired by Fulton County Schools and from the state’s Professional Standards Commission agree.
They concluded, independently, that Melanie Pickens screamed at students, hit, kicked and cursed at them, sprayed them with disinfectant and passed gas in their faces.
“To think we were sending our kids to school to be abused is heartbreaking,” Williams said.
The Marshall family has filed a lawsuit against Pickens, as well as the principal at Hopewell and another special-education employee who worked at the Milton school. The suit, which asks for unspecified damages, alleges that the principal, employee and others in the school knew of the abuse, yet did nothing to stop it. The case is pending.
The Williams family is scheduled to attend a preliminary hearing Monday at the State Office of Administrative Hearings on their request to have Fulton County pay for Alex Williams’ private education until he turns 22.
“Her inappropriate behavior and treatment ran the gamut from being too rough with special education students to sheer meanness,” an investigator wrote in his report to Fulton Schools.
Investigators also criticized Frances Boyd, Hopewell’s principal when Pickens taught there. Boyd, now retired, initially failed to investigate reports of Pickens’ alleged abuse, according to the report by Professional Standards Commission, the agency charged with overseeing the conduct of certified teachers.
Fulton County Schools officials declined to discuss specifics of the case because it is the subject of a lawsuit, but said the district acted promptly when it heard reports of abuse in Pickens’ class.
“We will not tolerate the mistreatment of our children,” said Linda Schultz, president of the Fulton County Schools Board of Education.
‘What happened to you?’
The Williamses and Marshalls say the abuse began in 2003 and continued to the end of the 2006-07 school year, when Pickens resigned.
Pickens, whose teaching certificate was later revoked, did not respond to interview requests. Boyd also did not return calls for comment.
Lisa and Doug Williams’ son, Alex, has cerebral palsy. Now 18, he cannot walk or speak well.
Judy and John Marshall’s adopted son, Jake, 19, has Angelman syndrome, a neurological disease that left him unable to talk. He can barely walk and is profoundly mentally impaired.
Chris Vance, a lawyer for the families, said the school system failed to protect Pickens’ students. Vance said teachers and their assistants, principals, a custodian, special-education officials and bus drivers knew that Pickens harmed her students during four years she worked in the system.
“How could so many people know and not care?” she said.
The school system’s report, as well as the one from the Professional Standards Commission, focuses on May 21, 2007. That day, Jake soiled himself after being strapped to a chair and left alone, reports said. Pickens and an assistant cleaned the boy.
One teacher, in an interview with the Professional Standards Commission, said she went to Boyd after she smelled the stench on the hall where Pickens taught. The teacher said she’d go over Boyd’s head if the principal didn’t take action. Boyd, as required by law, contacted a school system social worker to investigate.
Meantime, Jake’s mother said her son still smelled when he got home. Then she looked closely at him. He had clumps of waste in his hair, under his fingernails.
“Jake,” she asked, “what happened to you?”
She got the answer two days later when she visited the school. Marshall said the social worker told her about the chair, the darkened room, the isolation.
“I was so shocked that someone would lock him in a room,” said Marshall. “I couldn’t imagine that someone would do that.”
Marshall also became worried. Jake had been in Pickens’ classes since 2004.
Investigation begun
Fulton County schools contracted with a Smyrna investigation agency to learn more about the May 21 incident. The report, containing testimony of more than a dozen people, came out in July 2007.
Pickens, it concluded, was guilty of “willful and neglectful treatment” of Jake. It didn’t stop there. The report named two other students.
“The ... May 21, 2007, incident was the most recent occurrence in an extensive pattern of inappropriate and possible criminal conduct,” the report said.
Boyd, the investigator wrote, didn’t want to handle complaints about Pickens. The report repeated a statement attributed to Boyd: “If it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen.”
Judy Marshall got a copy of the report. That summer, Marshall learned about her son’s three years with Pickens. A year earlier, according to the report, Pickens had hit her son on the head with a camera, giving him a bruise that she blamed on a fall from a chair. One teacher in the report recalled Pickens “roughing up” Jake. Another said Pickens had repeatedly locked Jake in a darkened bathroom.
Furious, Marshall contacted Fulton County Schools Police, asking that Pickens be arrested for assault. An officer, she said, noted that Pickens had lost her job and asked if that wasn’t that enough.
“Well, no, it’s not enough,” Marshall said.
In 2009, angry with Fulton schools, Marshall began calling parents of youngsters in Jake’s class. One of those calls reached Williams.
“I have a document I think you should see,” Marshall said.
Williams had promised her husband that she wouldn’t look at the report until he got home. But she pulled into a parking lot at North Point Mall, set the report on her lap and started reading. She called her husband.
“Oh God, Doug,” she said. “This is about Alex.”
In the fall of 2006, Alex Williams went to a new school, Hopewell. Lisa Williams met her son’s teacher, a pleasant young woman named Pickens. Williams hoped for the best.
But by the end of the year in 2007, Alex, who’d been so happy to go to school, had become withdrawn.
That summer, unknown to the Williamses, Pickens resigned.
Alex continued attending Hopewell, and Doug and Lisa Williams worried about their son’s progress. They recalled an incident on the first day of school in 2008 when Alex refused to enter his classroom, which had dimmed lights to ease the students’ entry into a new environment.
“Lights on!” he yelled. “Want lights on!” His parents didn’t understand.
It wasn’t until a July afternoon in 2009, sitting in her car at a mall parking lot, did Lisa Williams began to understand. Pickens, she read, locked students in the dark.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Lisa Williams. “This wasn’t supposed to happen in a school.”
Certificate revoked
The Fulton and commission reports sketch out Pickens’ short career as an educator.
She was hired as a special-education teacher at Holcomb Bridge Middle School in 2003, according to the commission. Investigators who took statements about Pickens noted that her peers at Holcomb complained that she yelled and cursed at her students.
In 2004, she was sent to Hopewell. Pickens would spend three years there until she resigned in 2007. In 2008, the standards commission revoked her teaching certificate for three years.
Pickens could reapply to the commission for her certificate to be restored, “but that hardly ever happens,” said John Grant, the commission’s lead investigator.
The commission also sanctioned Boyd for not acting to get rid of Pickens sooner, records show. A longtime educator, Boyd contested the decision. In 2010, she surrendered her certificate and retired before the issue was resolved.
Today, Alex is at home, not attending school. Williams said her son is shy, not the ebullient kid she remembers. He carries a blanket wherever he goes. He gets nervous if his mother leaves his sight. “He’s damaged,” his mother said.
In a response filed with the administrative hearings office, Fulton schools denied the Williamses’ allegations that Alex didn’t receive appropriate instruction during the year he was in Pickens’ class and every year afterward.
The Marshalls settled out of court with Fulton schools, agreeing not to divulge the amount. They moved to another county so Jake can attend school in another district.
The Marshalls have filed suit against Pickens. The allegations include abuse and battery, sexual abuse, cruelty to a child and abandonment. She’s denied them.
The suit also alleges Boyd and Paula Merritt, a liaison between special-education teachers and the principal, also failed to report abuse. Both deny the allegations.
The suit says the three engaged in fraud and cruelty to a minor, discriminated against a disabled child, and committed conspiracy and battery.
Merritt is now an assistant principal in Cherokee County. She did not return calls seeking comment.
Meantime, Williams and Marshall, two women who once were strangers, now finish each other’s sentences. Each knows what the other has suffered.
What of the other students in Pickens’ classes? Perhaps, they say, the parents of those students will step forward. “We’re not the only ones,” said Lisa Williams.
And, always, they worry about Alex and Jake. No report, they believe, can adequately describe everything that happened.
And their sons cannot tell them.
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