For Profit Special Education: A Report From The Seattle Times
Age of Autism's Anne Dachel has been writing about the explosion of special education and its crushing weight on schoool districts around the world. She has catalogued 1000s of stories at Loss of Brain Trust. Yesterday, ProPublica, The Seattle Times and others exposed how one organization is profiting off of the never ending flow of students who need special education. We continue to ask WHY there are so many kids requiring special education. Not completely rhetorical.
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How a billion-dollar corporation exploits Washington’s special education system
By Lulu Ramadan, Mike Reicher and Taylor Blatchford
Seattle Times staff
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network and The Seattle Times, with support from Investigative Journalism Fund and Education Lab. Sign up for Seattle Times newsletters and alerts and ProPublica’s Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Donna Green hit her breaking point last summer, six months into her job as the top administrator at the Northwest School of Innovative Learning.
She had grudgingly accepted when her request for classroom computers was ignored and a furniture order for what she called an “embarrassingly barren” campus was answered with plastic folding tables. She’d worried that her staff was inexperienced but had figured her decade in special education would help fill that void.
But then her corporate bosses told her to cut the hours of staff already struggling to serve high-needs children.
To Green, it meant that Northwest SOIL, Washington state’s largest publicly funded private school for children with disabilities, would fail to deliver on the promises it had made to school districts that send it more than 100 students and millions of dollars a year.
So she sat at her desk after classes let out for the day in August 2021 and typed up a resignation letter to the school’s owner, effective immediately.
“It is truly like living in the dark ages,” she wrote about the school, detailing its cost cutting at the expense of students. “I cannot ethically or morally be a part of this any longer.”
Northwest SOIL’s corporate owner, Universal Health Services, has for years skimped on staffing and basic resources while pressuring managers to enroll more students than the staff could handle, an investigation by The Seattle Times and ProPublica has found. The psychiatric hospital chain touted its first acquisition of special education schools in 2005 as a “comfortable fit” with its businesses, and Northwest SOIL staffers said they saw the profit motive drive day-to-day decisions.
School districts pay programs such as Northwest SOIL, called nonpublic agencies, to provide specialized instruction for students whose needs can’t be met in traditional public schools. But dozens of complaints filed with the state and school districts in recent years, along with interviews with 26 former administrators, teachers and assistants, show that Northwest SOIL received public money without providing the services or education that its students needed — or that taxpayers paid for.
Northwest SOIL collects about $68,000 in annual tuition per student — more than triple the average per-pupil cost for a K-12 student in Washington — while a student with the highest needs can bring the school as much as $115,000 a year, all paid for with taxpayer dollars. READ MORE HERE.
Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (Children’s Health Defense)
A guide for the times—breaking down the lies about COVID-19 and shedding light on why we came to believe them.
Anonymous I seriously did think old parent dribble would loose currency but noooo!!
My feelings summed up
Paris Tuileries Garden Facepalm statue.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paris_Tuileries_Garden_Facepalm_statue.jpg
Pharma For Prison
MMR RIP
Posted by: Angus Files | December 06, 2022 at 02:34 PM
Angus Files, how many people still blame old sperm/old eggs for autism? Where was all the ASD from old parents back then before 1986/1990? It wouldn't explain why there's so many ASD/C.I.* children conceived by young healthy parents/parents below the age of 30 or even below 25. Or why there's healthy non-ASD children born to old "lousy" parents.
*Chronically Ill/C.I.
TPH/Prepared Homestead is finally paying SOME attention to the diversity and inclusion movement's push to normalize and "accommodate" more and more disabilities, and I invite AOA readers to inform him about what Anne Dachel is saying and her news website L.O.B.T. and what is happening in the UK.
Posted by: Anonymous | December 06, 2022 at 11:25 AM
I think people still think sitting to close to TV, drinking wine, older parents, B.S. is still to blame but nothing to do with vaccines the Pharma puppet .GOVS are sure offit..Feeding the unfortunate kids worse than animals via tray slots in doors.
Autistic people are being locked away in institutions. A radical change is needed
Not many people have to worry that their children will be forcibly removed or locked away from society. Yet this is something I do worry about. My autistic son, who also has a learning disability, experiences the world differently. I am often in awe of his perspective, and he has inspired my more than 40 years of professional and voluntary effort advocating for better understanding, care and support.
When people like my son go into crisis there is a high chance they won’t be supported at home – not because they can’t be helped to live full, valuable and meaningful lives in their communities, but because our “system” doesn’t allow for it. Instead, they may be removed and taken, sometimes miles away, to an unfamiliar inpatient setting designed to treat mental illness, even though many are not mentally ill and do not need to be in hospital.
There are currently more than 2,000 people with learning disabilities and autistic children and adults in such settings in England and Wales.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/27/people-with-autism-are-being-locked-away-in-institutions-a-radical-change-is-needed
Pharma For Prison
MMR RIP
Posted by: Angus Files | December 06, 2022 at 02:41 AM
School districts are out sourcing special education services?
Posted by: Benedetta | December 05, 2022 at 11:49 PM
And the ASD therapy industry, particularly the corporate OT industry, is failing those with regressive and severe ASDs. There is/was a lack of focus on OT and SLP appropriate for those older ASD peoples who struggle with daily life skills because all they were taught alongside atheist corporate education, was how to tie shoelaces, speak simple words, and write in a neat manner - but no real-life skills beyond that for many. As millions of Americans worship Japan and East Asia as magic solutions to Uncle Sam's massive moral and cultural crises, the nation's children (increasingly the non-whites/"children of color" and poverty stricken families) are disintegrating mentally and developmentally via "safer smaller real" vaccines even without the SADS shots.
Sadly that "grumpy old troll" .50Cal and his swearing-filled toiletbowl mouth has returned to Strange Sounds and he's cussing like a sailor as usual. I don't dare call this cussing clown a "Christian". He has called the SADS shots a "fake vaccine" and I invite ASD victims families to correct his ignorant comments.
https://odysee.com/@JesusSaves:4/never-has-there-been-a-safe-vaccine:5
Posted by: Anonymous | December 05, 2022 at 08:09 PM