WA schools are failing students with complex disabilities. It’s happening in Tacoma, too

Sometimes you learn of something so jarring and indefensible that it stops you in your tracks. Sometimes an injustice is revealed, and once you’ve seen it, there’s no looking away.

A recent investigation from the Seattle Times and ProPublica delivers several such moments. Written and reported by Lulu Ramadan, Mike Reicher, Taylor Blatchford, Manuel Villa and Alex Mierjeski, the series describes, in disturbing detail, how some of the state’s most vulnerable students — a small number of kids with complex disabilities who require service beyond what can be met in traditional public school settings — are shipped off to publicly funded private schools that fail to meet their needs.

As a journalistic endeavor, Invisible Schools speaks for itself. It shines a spotlight on the state’s largest such school, the Northwest School of Innovative Learning — which has three campuses, including one in Tacoma — and details a number of alarming complaints, including allegations of student mistreatment and abuse. Equally important, the series illuminates the disturbing lack of oversight the state maintains over schools like Northwest SOIL, which receive millions of dollars of taxpayer funding every year to serve the kids with nowhere else to go.

As a parent of a child with disabilities, not much shocks me anymore when it comes to the soulless depravity of the system we’ve concocted to provide for them. It’s natural to assume a modern society like ours must have ample resources and safety nets to ensure that kids have what they need. In reality, caring for a child with a complex disability requires constant vigilance and advocacy. It’s a full-time job, and one that quickly makes clear that meeting your child’s needs — in the eyes of the state — often hinges on a cost-benefit analysis.

Still, the Times and ProPublica’s investigation is jaw-dropping in its scope and depth, demanding an answer to the point-blank question: Are we really OK with putting dollar signs on the heads of vulnerable children while abdicating our responsibility to for-profit entities? Because that’s a big part of our current approach, whether we want to admit it or not.

Meanwhile, for Tacoma Public Schools it raises an equally uncomfortable question:

How long can the district stand by and be complicit in a system that so clearly needs to be blown up and reimagined?

For the uninitiated, here’s how it generally works. The law requires public school districts to meet the needs of special education students. If the district determines it cannot, it is authorized to contract with one of the dozens of what are known as nonpublic agencies approved by the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction to provide such services. These needs tend to be intensive — like providing various therapies or contending with significant behavioral issues — necessitating an educational setting outside of the traditional classroom. Local school districts like Tacoma’s have long prioritized integrating special education students as much as possible, but sometimes the needs of the student are too much to contend with in a standard classroom or school building. For various reasons, most notably a lack of funding and trained staff, local school districts simply aren’t equipped to provide the care some children need.

It’s that conundrum that creates the supposed need for for-profit schools like Northwest SOIL. Instead of requiring individual districts or the state to come up with a way to meet their obligations to severely disabled students in-house, it allows the work to be outsourced to someone else, while the job of oversight falls largely on individual districts.

What could possibly go wrong?

Last week I asked Tacoma Public Schools spokesperson Tanisha Jumper about the district’s reliance on nonpublic agencies like Northwest SOIL. According to the Times and ProPublica investigation, Tacoma schools used, by a wide margin, more funding between the 2016-2017 school year and the 2020-2021 school year than any other district in the state to send students with complex needs to the for-profit school.

Jumper said the district does everything in its power to place students in the least restrictive environment possible, and utilizes nonpublic agencies only when absolutely necessary, based on the service needs outlined in a child’s individualized education plan, or IEP. The decision to send a child to such a school is always made after careful consideration and conversation with the family, Jumper added.

This year, TPS has fewer than seven students enrolled at Northwest SOIL, Jumper said. While a direct comparison wasn’t immediately available, in previous years it’s been more than 30 enrolled in nonpublic agencies altogether, she said.

Asked specifically about the Seattle Times and ProPublica investigation, Jumper told The News Tribune: “To our knowledge, none of the instances (of alleged mistreatment or abuse) were TPS kids.”

Broadly, Jumper said that TPS has long supported efforts to increase the amount of state oversight exerted on nonpublic agencies like Northwest SOIL. As evidence, she pointed to a letter the district sent state officials calling for just that, prior to the Seattle Times ProPublica investigation. The district simply can’t — and shouldn’t — be providing the kind of services nonpublic agencies are designed to deliver, Jumper contended.

Until there’s a better option, Jumper said, the district will be forced to make do with the system that exists. The district continually monitors the progress of students enrolled in nonpublic agencies and stays in close contact with families, she said.

“If there was a way to ensure that every kid could get what they needed in the absolute best environment possible, there’s no person within this district who wouldn’t want that,” Jumper told The News Tribune.

“Obviously, until we have other options, we just have to manage those relationships (with nonpublic agencies), and we’ve got to make sure that our kids are safe and getting what they need.”

That’s an unsatisfying answer, to be certain.

As a state, it’s up to all of us to demand something better.