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New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv often writes about psychologically complex people — like a Nebraska woman who confessed to a murder she didn’t commit, and a mother from the Philippines who works as a nanny in New York to support her own nine children, whom she hasn’t seen in 16 years.

In “Georgia’s Separate and Unequal Special-Education System,” published Oct. 1, 2018, one of Aviv’s main characters is a teacher who fits that category.  Working in a segregated and dysfunctional special-ed program, she ends up in jail for losing control one day and repeatedly hitting one of her students.

While Aviv likes to center her narratives around such characters, what typically draws her to a story is the way significant moments in their lives intersect with cultural, social and/or political forces. She often saves the toughest questions not for the individual characters, but for the systems beyond their control.

In “Separate and Unequal,” for example, Aviv didn’t portray the teacher as a one-dimensional villain, but as someone who suffered from a system that neglected her as well as her students.

Aviv’s interest in the Georgia schools' story was sparked by two people. The first was a lawyer who urged her to write about a shadow system within the public school system called the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support (GNETS); it is a state-run program, largely segregated by race, that has been operating for decades alongside more traditional special-ed programs. The lawyer suggested GNETS raised some of the same alarms about how our civic institutions handle disability and race that Aviv had written about previously.

Aviv’s curiosity grew after talks with a New York friend, who is white and has a daughter with a disability. Her friend shared how a disabled person’s sense of isolation can be aggravated or increased by cultural and social expectations.

Aviv started to see the Georgia story as a way to illuminate another subject that interested her — the disproportionate number of black men in U.S. prisons. Exploring the experience of black boys in GNETS, she says, was an opportunity to look at “an earlier point in time to see how certain students begin to internalize the sense that they're a problem or that they're bad or they don't deserve to be included with the rest of the kids.”

When she started her reporting, she found a number of children and families she could have built her narrative around — and a tale so grim she still worries how many readers made it to the end. Through months of interviews and public records requests, Aviv unearthed a long list of stomach-churning facts about GNETS —from its lack of qualified staff and resources (some parents described the schools as “ghost towns”) to the fact that black boys were significantly overrepresented, enrolled at about twice the rate they comprised in the state’s other public schools. And while white kids sent to GNETS tended to get out quickly, the black students often were trapped there, even if they were first referred for little more than swearing.

The primary student she settled on for her piece was Seth Murrell, an autistic student who was sent to GNETS as a preschooler. In the roughly two years he was enrolled in the program, he had just one teacher with proper credentials, and she left not long after she arrived.

In writing any story, Aviv works to avoid anything she thinks might cause readers to stop before the end.  This story, in particular, presented a number of challenges to that aspiration.

“There was this accumulation of really dark details,” she told me. “I worried about how to shape those details in such a way that there was still something in it for a reader to keep moving forward.”

Aviv struggled with how to start the story, rewriting the top section several times: “Usually the structure of a story seems fairly obvious or intuitive to me — there are not that many different options that come to mind. But with this story I had more doubts.”

In one draft, she started with a scene at Seth’s house, where his mother helps support the family as an in-home hair stylist; the goal was to help readers better understand mother and son. But Aviv worried readers might think this was just one of the many stories about families raising autistic children.

She also tried starting off at the height of the drama, the moment that Avondika Cherry, the teacher who hit Seth, expressed dismay about losing control. Aviv hoped that lede would signal to readers that they would get “an unprecedented level of access into the classroom” — and that the story was more than just the “dreary downward trajectory of a student placed in a punishing and inappropriate environment.”

But that approach risked leading readers to think the story centered on the teacher, when the primary characters were actually Seth and his mother.

 Aviv felt so torn that she ended up writing two full drafts — something she’d never done previously — and asked her editor, Willing Davidson, to choose.

 One was the version starting with the teacher’s remorse. The other, which Davidson preferred, briefly introduces readers to the family, then quickly moves into Seth’s entry into the special-education system.

Aviv says she agreed the published version “was clearer, chronologically, and more organic.” She also agreed it was best for readers who read to the end, as Davidson was optimistic they would. But Aviv still wonders if a different beginning might have helped more readers stay with the piece, including friends who told her they found it so depressing they set it aside — at least temporarily — after a few pages.

Aviv says The New Yorker doesn’t tell its writers how many people click on their stories. She does know it didn’t end up on the publication’s “top stories” list, although she received a lot of emails from parents and teachers around the country after it ran, underscoring that the problem wasn’t isolated to Georgia.

If she were to rewrite the story again, Aviv says she would be tempted to focus more on Seth’s family, and not just on his mother, Latoya Martin, but on her 11 brothers and sisters.

“I might emphasize even more that this was an incredible family and they went through this experience that, on the one hand, is really extreme and, on the other hand, is a part of raising a child with a disability —- or often can be.”

The annotation:Storyboard’s questions are in red; Aviv’s responses in blue.

A statewide network of schools for disabled students has trapped black children in neglect and isolation.

By Rachel Aviv

Seth Murrell, a four-year-old boy with dreadlocks to his chin, moved with his family to Atlanta in the fall of 2015. On his first day at his new preschool, he cried the whole morning. He wouldn’t sit still in his chair. He’d pop up and snatch the glasses off a classmate’s face, or spit at the teacher. When he was tired, he waved his arms in the air, begging his teacher to hold him. On the rare occasions that his teacher complimented him, he shouted “Yay!” too loudly.

His mother, Latoya Martin, a hair stylist, had moved with her husband and three children from Donalsonville, a rural town in Seminole County, in the southwest corner of Georgia, to be closer to psychiatrists and neurologists who would understand why her son was developmentally delayed. He couldn’t string words together into a sentence. His teachers called Latoya nearly every day and told her to pick him up early, because he was disrupting the class. When Latoya resisted—she was busy looking for a new job—her friends warned her that the school might call child-protective services if she couldn’t pick up Seth promptly. Latoya sensed that the teachers were accusing her of being a bad parent, so she informed the school’s principal that she had never done drugs and that in high school her G.P.A. had been 4.0. Latoya’s sister Anita said, “They kept saying we needed to work with him more at home. I’m, like, we work with him—that’s not the problem. This is part of his disability!”

[annotation q="This story, like a number of your recent stories, introduces us to the main characters before you delve into what happens to them. Why?" a="I just automatically assume that the most compelling and accessible aspect of the story is the person I’ve gotten to know through reporting it. It barely even occurs to me not to start that way. As a reader, I almost always find that it’s a person — their particular characteristics and ambitions and frustrations — who draws me into a larger story."]

After a month, Latoya was told that Seth would be sent to a school twenty minutes away, in the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support, a constellation of schools, known as GNETS, attended by four thousand students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Anita, a public-school teacher in Atlanta for nearly two decades, said, “I was just trying to figure it out in my head—we already have special-ed classes in the schools, so why is there this second system?” GNETS has a ten-per-cent graduation rate, compared with seventy-eight per cent for other public schools in Georgia.

Seth, who at twenty- one months had been given a diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder—a loosely defined diagnosis often given to toddlers when their condition is not understood—was assigned to the Ash Street Center, one of a hundred and seventy-nine sites in the GNETS network. The school is surrounded by a gated fence. Latoya said that the next-youngest student in Seth’s class was nine. The year before, a teaching assistant at Ash Street had been arrested after knocking a fourteen-year-old boy to the floor, choking him, and shouting, “I will kill that little motherfucker!”

Latoya said that, when she walked into her son’s class, “I did not see one white child. All I saw was black boys.” Seth’s “target behavior,” according to the center’s intervention plan, was to “comply with adult directives.” Latoya demanded that Seth be returned to his neighborhood school, but she was told that first he had to meet his performance goals, which included following instructions seventy per cent of the day. “You all know this is against the law, right?” she said to Seth’s teacher. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, passed in 1975, states that children with disabilities must be educated with their nondisabled peers to the “maximum appropriate extent.” They can be removed from their classrooms only if their disabilities are so severe that they can’t learn in a less restrictive setting.

After Seth had gone to Ash Street for ten days, Latoya and her husband, Tercel, who was working at a Toys R Us, returned with their children to Donalsonville, where Latoya’s family has lived for as many generations as they can trace back. Latoya’s sister Yvette, a high-school teacher, said, “She was just praying that a small town with teachers who had grown up around them would know how to take care of her baby.” Latoya tried to enroll all three children in their former school, where she and her twelve siblings had gone. Though black and white students at the school had held separate proms as recently as the nineteen-eighties, Latoya trusted the teachers, many of whom she’d grown up with. Her two older children rejoined their classes, but the school district said that Seth was now classified as a GNETS student. He would have to take a bus to a GNETS school called Pathways, in Bainbridge, thirty minutes away.

[annotation q="Did you consider other main characters for this story besides Latoya and Seth?" a="I talked to several different families, with the thought that each one might become the focus, but the decision actually felt pretty obvious and easy. In my first conversation with Latoya, she relayed what was happening to Seth in a way that signaled to me she was thinking deeply about what was wrong with the education system and how it had changed her view of her own community. There was also the possibility of telling the story through additional angles — there were legal documents and classroom videos, because of the criminal trial — so I felt that Seth’s story allowed for a more comprehensive view of the inner-workings of the classroom."]

Latoya’s sister Sonja, who lived in Bainbridge, occasionally stopped by Pathways in the middle of the day. She described the school as a kind of ghost town. The front office was empty—the secretary and the coördinator had left, and the positions were never filled—and there was no full-time nurse, social worker, resource officer, or behavioral specialist. (The district’s superintendent said that off-site staff provided support to the school.) Sonja said, of the first time she came to the school, “I walked down the hallway hollering, ‘Hello? Hello? Anybody here?’ ” She looked in Seth’s classroom and saw him sleeping on the floor, alone. His teacher was in another room.

There are roughly a hundred students at Pathways, which has three sites in the region, and all of the students are classified by the state as “economically disadvantaged.” In Bainbridge, there was only one other student in the elementary-school class: MaKenzie Phillips, a petite thirteen-year-old white girl who immediately warmed to Seth, calling him her baby. MaKenzie took antidepressants, antipsychotics, two drugs for attention-deficit disorder, and anti-anxiety pills. She was generally calm and said, “Yes, Ma’am,” when addressed, though she also interrupted conversations with vulgar words. She was in the elementary class because she had an I.Q. of 40. She spent much of the day flipping through magazines that she couldn’t read. MaKenzie’s mother, Erica, said that, whenever she dropped by the classroom, “there was no instruction. But I just figured I was coming at the wrong time of day.”

Seth’s class was led by Melissa Williams-Brown, who lived a few blocks from Latoya and had gone to her high school. She was not certified to teach elementary school, and had little knowledge of the nature of her students’ disabilities. “I didn’t get any specialized training,” she told me. “I just winged it.” The students at Pathways had bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, A.D.H.D., autism, or, as one teacher put it, “home-life issues” such as neglect, trauma, or poverty. Williams-Brown didn’t understand why Seth, who was eventually given a diagnosis of autism, couldn’t return to his neighborhood school, where there were more qualified teachers. “There was nothing in place for this young man,” she told me. “I just felt like these students, especially the black boys, were put there, basically, because they intimidated their teachers.”

[annotation q="Who did you see as the audience for this story?" a="I imagined the audience as I usually do: an amorphous combination of my editor, colleagues, advocates/scholars who study these issues, and the general reader of the New Yorker. But I was thinking especially about those who had experiences with disability — either their own or that of family members’."]

The first GNETS school, the Rutland Center, founded in 1970, was once housed in the former West Athens Colored School, whose principal promised to teach the “practical duties of life” to the “inferior race.” The concept for GNETS was visionary. According to a report by researchers at the University of Georgia, the schools, then called psychoeducational centers, would rely on teachers trained in developmental psychology, ready to “face the assault of bizarre behavior.” They were taught that they might be the “only agent for change in the life of a disturbed child.” Mary Wood, a professor emerita at the University of Georgia, who developed the concept, said that she intended for each program to have a consulting psychiatrist, a social worker, a program evaluator, and a psychologist. But as the first generation of directors retired, in the nineties, “the pieces of the mosaic dropped out,” she said.

In the two-thousands, funding was cut, and the psychologists who remained seemed to be given free rein. One mother learned that a school psychologist was planning to subject her daughter, who had post-traumatic stress disorder, to fifteen hours of “experiments” devised to provoke misbehavior. “If I go to a mechanic with my car and my car is not doing the problem that I brought it there for, the mechanic can’t diagnose it,” the psychologist explained, at an administrative trial in 2005. “That’s the same situation here.” Over the years, a few parents became so suspicious of the program that they sent their children to school wearing recording devices. On one tape, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, a teacher could be heard giving a child what someone in the room called a “be-quiet hit.” On another, teachers laughed about how they had put a student in a seclusion room because they needed a break. In 2004, a thirteen-year-old student hanged himself in a Time Out Room, an eight-by-eight concrete cell that could be locked from the outside.

Leslie Lipson, a lawyer at the Georgia Advocacy Office, a state-funded agency that represents people with disabilities, said that she first learned of the GNETS system in 2001, when a mother called to report that her son was put in a seclusion room nearly every day. “It’s all little black boys at this school,” the mother told her. Lipson researched the mother’s claims and then rushed into her boss’s office to tell him that she’d discovered an “insidious, shadow education system.” She said, “I thought I was Erin Brockovich. I was, like, ‘You are not going to believe this! There is an entire segregated system in Georgia! Can we shut this down immediately?’ I was talking a thousand miles a minute, and my boss waited for me to take a breath. He was, like, ‘Um, yeah, these schools have been around since before you were born.’ ”

[annotation q="I've read that you want each of your stories to have a purpose. What was the purpose for this story, and when did you determine it?" a="I found myself less worried about the question of purpose in this story than in other stories I’ve worked on. It felt pretty self-evident. We don't ordinarily get a glimpse of what's happening in special education classrooms. I think if we did, we’d be a lot more troubled by the quality of education and the messages that students are absorbing about themselves."]

Lipson studied the history of the schools, some of which were established in buildings that had housed schools for black children during the Jim Crow era. At a time when there was an outcry against court-ordered integration, GNETS became a mechanism for resegregating schools. “It became a way to filter out black boys, who at younger and younger ages are perceived to have behavioral disabilities,” she said.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires that students with disabilities learn in the “least restrictive environment,” a loose term that may mean different things depending on the race or the class of the student. Nirmala Erevelles, a professor of disability studies at the University of Alabama, told me that, “in general, when it comes to people of color—particularly poor people of color—we choose the most restrictive possibility,” sending students to “the most segregated and punitive spaces in the public-school system.” According to Beth Ferri, a disability scholar at Syracuse University, IDEA provided a kind of loophole to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in schools. Now racial segregation continued “under the guise of ‘disability,’ ” she said. “You don’t need to talk about any race anymore. You can just say that the kid is a slow learner, or defiant, or disrespectful.” Ferri said that IDEA “treated disability as apolitical—a biological fact. It didn’t think about things like racial or cultural bias.”

Data obtained through records requests reveal that the percentage of students in the GNETS program who are black boys is double that of the public schools in the state. Most of the students in GNETS are classified as having an “emotional and behavioral disorder,” a vague label that does not correspond to any particular medical diagnosis. A teacher who worked for five years at a GNETS program called Coastal Academy, in Brunswick, told me, “We always had a sprinkling of middle-class white kids, maybe two or three, but they didn’t stay long. Everyone made sure they got out. It was the black students who were trapped there. They came in first grade and never left.” Coastal Academy occupies a lot that once held an all-black school, originally called the Freedman’s School, and the percentage of black males in the program is three times that of the districts that the school draws from. The teacher, who worried that she’d lose her job if she were identified, said that public schools in the area would “send the African-American kids to us for doing things like saying the word ‘shit’ in class or pushing a chair in really loudly. They would never, ever—never in a million years—attempt to come at a white parent with that.”

[annotation q="What records did you request?" a="I requested all the emails from Seth’s teachers or the administrators in the school district that discussed Seth or his family during the two years that he was in the program. They gave me about 450 pages of emails. I also requested data showing the breakdown of race, class and gender of students in GNETS. I asked for that data on a state level, and for a number of individual schools. For a number of GNETS programs, I also requested reports about the number of incidents of restraint, and whether students were physically harmed when they were restrained. Georgia’s records law is surprisingly good. A public records officer always replied within three days and then provided a specific date that the documents would be sent by. They take the records law really seriously. I've never worked on an article in which public officials responded to my requests with such diligence, and sadly I doubt I ever will again."]

The teacher said that students at Coastal Academy were routinely knocked to the floor and restrained. When they couldn’t calm down, they were put in a Refocus Room. “If a student was having a bad day or hadn’t taken his meds, the teacher down the hall from me would park herself in front of the room and the student would stay there all day,” she said. “I heard children shrieking and screaming.” (The program’s director denied that students were knocked to the floor and that the room had been used for seclusion—the state banned seclusion rooms in 2010—and said that some students asked to go there.) When parents complained, the teacher said, “they were met with the same rigmarole: there is a reason why your son is here, and sometimes kids with these conditions make things up.”

Suzie Dunson, the grandmother of a student in a GNETS program called the Woodall Center, in Columbus, said that, when her grandson was in first grade, she stopped by the school one day and found him sitting on the floor, handcuffed to a classroom chair. “He was six years old, and he looked like a chained animal,” she told me. Her grandson routinely came home from school with a swollen face. “I’d ask him, ‘How was school today?’ ‘Oh, I got restrained,’ he’d say.” According to the Woodall Center’s records from the past two years, there were sixteen instances of teachers injuring students while attempting to restrain them. The reports typically blame the student: “In the process of restraining him he twisted his body and hit his head,” one teacher noted. “His face must have rubbed on the ground,” another wrote.

[annotation q="You seem to really trust your readers.  You don’t hammer home your points. Here, for example, you don’t point out that the Woodall Center’s reports sound ridiculous." a="I find it harder — it doesn’t come naturally to me, at least — to go in the other direction and explicitly make an argument. I am sure there are times when that would be helpful, but I’d rather let the people I'm writing about or the studies I'm citing lead readers to their own arguments or conclusions as opposed to my stating it explicitly."]

[annotation q="Do you sometimes worry readers will miss the point that way?" a="It sometimes comes up in the editing process. My editor will say, ‘I know you have a particular thought and argument that you're expressing but instead of just saying it, you’re having your subjects hint at it. Why don’t you just say it?’ I find that instruction helpful because it goes against my natural impulse."]

This year, when Dunson’s grandson was sent to a juvenile-detention facility, at the age of eleven, he already had a friend there—a boy from his class. She describes the Woodall Center, where more than half the students are black boys, and ninety-one per cent are classified by the state as “economically disadvantaged,” as a “pipeline-to-prison program.” (A spokeswoman for the Woodall Center said that the school does not have documentation of Dunson’s grandson being handcuffed or regularly restrained.)

It is not uncommon for students with disabilities to be placed in settings that are unnecessarily isolated, but GNETS is unusual in that this form of segregation is sponsored by the state rather than by the school district; families can’t escape it by moving to a new neighborhood. Jatoyia Armour, a public-school teacher in Atlanta, said that when her five-year-old son, Jamir, was referred to GNETS, “I kept telling myself, ‘This isn’t a race issue. Jamir just has behavioral issues.’ ” She and Jamir had recently moved to an affluent suburb in northern Atlanta so that he would be zoned for a better school. He was the only black boy in his kindergarten class. He had an I.Q. of 120, but he wouldn’t sit still, and had tantrums in which he threw objects. Armour said that the school called the police three times before he was transferred to a GNETS program, where the proportion of black boys to other students is nine times that of his elementary school. “When I got to the GNETS program, and it was majority black, it was glaring,” Armour told me. “They wanted this little black boy out. And it hurt.” She homeschooled Jamir for the rest of the year and then enrolled him in a charter school, but when the charter school reviewed his records she was told that he had to go back to GNETS. “I worked hard to move to that area to give my kid the best, and we were pushed back out,” she told me. She worries that Jamir has already internalized the experience. In the past year, he has begun to introduce himself to strangers by saying, “Hi, I’m Jamir, I’m bad.”

In 2016, under President Barack Obama, the Department of Education instituted the “significant disproportionality rule,” which required states to more vigilantly report when students of color are disciplined and placed in special-education classes at higher rates than their peers. Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, and although black students make up only nineteen per cent of students with disabilities, they make up thirty-six per cent of those who are mechanically restrained—handcuffed, strapped to a chair, tied down.

The “significant disproportionality rule” was supposed to take effect in the summer of 2017. But, when President Donald Trump directed agencies to cut federal regulations, the Department of Education said that the rule needed to be modified or rescinded, and delayed it for two years. Michael Yudin, the Assistant Secretary for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in Obama’s Department of Education, told me that he was appalled by the decision. “It flies in the face of the data, reams and reams of data, showing that the problem is massive,” he said.

[annotation q="With long stories like this, how do you go about organizing your material? An outline? Post-it notes? Or do you just start writing and see where it leads?" a="I rely heavily on all the different text tabs that the word processor Scrivener allows me to use. I had one document for each category of information (interviews with scholars; research notes; notes from school or legal documents; video notes; interviews with Latoya and her family; interviews with other families). Then when I’m done with most of the reporting I read through all of those notes, a process that usually takes about two days, and copy and paste various sentences, figures, or quotes from my notes into hypothetical sections of the story, each section in a new document. Then when I start with Section 1 that I can draw from the notes that I’ve culled for that section. Obviously it ends up being much sloppier than this and by about Section 2 I am no longer adhering to my system."]

[annotation q="How long did it take you to report and write this story?" a="I started working on it in late May and didn’t finish until September."]

After Seth had been at Pathways for a few months, the school hired a new teacher, who was properly certified. Latoya said that her son’s behavior quickly improved. In her records, the teacher wrote that Seth “is affectionate with his peers and teachers (hugs). . . . He often dances and sings small phrases from the verses of song.” He began to use sentences.

That summer, after Seth’s first year at Pathways, Obama’s Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Georgia to “vindicate the rights of the thousands of students unnecessarily segregated in the GNETS Program.” Negotiations for a settlement faltered shortly before Trump was elected. Alison Barkoff, who served as the special counsel in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under Obama, told me, “The state rolled the dice on a change in Administration and had a good roll.” The new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, had told the Senate, in 2000, that IDEA was a “big factor in accelerating the decline in civility and discipline in classrooms all over America.”

In October, 2016, Seth’s new teacher quit. She didn’t want to talk to me or have her name printed, for fear of professional repercussions. When I showed up at her house, she wouldn’t let me in. She stood on her porch and said, “What the Department of Justice is saying about GNETS is completely true. It’s completely true. It’s not therapeutic at all. The kids are not being educated. Not even in a social-skills way.”

Melissa Williams-Brown remained in the classroom, with the help of a substitute aide who, she told me, was “just a friend of somebody who worked there. She was just a body, and that body had no educational training.” Years before, Williams-Brown had learned to physically restrain middle-school students, but, she said, “I was never trained how to restrain a child as small as Seth. So I just came up with my own method.” She stood behind him while folding his arms across his chest or laying his arms on a desk. Seth’s doctor said that he was too young for medication, but the staff at Pathways urged Latoya to give him medication; he needed “something to keep him still,” Williams-Brown said.

The middle-school aide at Pathways, Phyllis Rambo, who lived a block away from Latoya, routinely got her hair done at Latoya’s house. Latoya sees some twenty clients a day in her living room. Tercel, who is out of work, sometimes assists by sitting near a power outlet, and, when she waves the cord of the blow dryer, plugging it in. Latoya’s eldest sister had been a close friend of Rambo’s since they were toddlers, and Latoya’s best friend was Rambo’s daughter Daneisha. As she weaved Rambo’s hair, Latoya complained that Seth became more aggressive and defiant at school. His teachers said that he had begun cursing. “I want you to sit here and listen to how many times Seth curses here,” she told Rambo. “Not one time. We do not swear in this house.”

Latoya wondered if her son’s condition was the cost of her behavior as a teen-ager. In her neighborhood, she had been known as a fighter, easily provoked. “I was angry for a long time about how my daddy used to treat my mama,” she told me. “I thought I could change—and I did change, and that’s why I named my daughter Sahrenety, to be honest—but then it came back with Seth. I felt like this was my punishment for being angry.”

Last fall, when Seth began first grade, a new teacher, Avondika Cherry, was leading his classroom. Cherry, a tall, elegant black woman who was raising a daughter on her own, had been a special-education teacher for seven years in Gadsden County, Florida, where she was once named Teacher of the Year, before rising to become an administrator of the program. She took the position at Pathways because it paid slightly better than her old job. In a reference, a colleague wrote that Cherry was “a very astute, responsible, earnest, and dependable person.”

Cherry had not been trained to teach students with autism; neither had her supervisor, a white woman named Jeanene Wallace, the director of all three Pathways centers, who had worked for GNETS for twenty-one years. Wallace asked a teacher who taught autistic students at another Pathways site if Cherry could observe her classroom for a few hours. “I apologize for having so little ideas, but I just don’t know how to work with these students,” Wallace wrote.

Cherry, who was studious and unaccustomed to wasted time, began applying for new jobs after a week. She encouraged Williams-Brown to look elsewhere, too. “I think you can do something better,” she told her one day, as Seth lay on the floor on his back in a sunny spot by the window. “The way I see this place, it needs to be shut down.”

The school had installed new surveillance cameras the prior year, after Georgia passed a law—named for a boy whose mother complained that he routinely came home from school bruised—allowing video monitoring equipment in special-education classrooms. A review of close to a hundred hours of classroom surveillance footage, obtained through an Open Records Act request, shows that there was usually about half an hour of instruction in Seth’s class per day. Much of the day was devoted to the drama of whether or not Seth would wear his shoes. He found them uncomfortable, as many autistic children do. When he took them off, he was sent to Cool Down, a desk facing a blank wall. He went to Cool Down several times a day, for up to thirty minutes at a time, for other behaviors that stem from his disability, such as counting to ten in the wrong order, saying “no” repeatedly, or making funny noises.

[annotation q="Could you have done this story if you hadn’t had access to several weeks of video recordings in Seth’s class?" a="It would have been a different story, perhaps a broader one including more families or covering a larger period of time, and probably a worse one. I wouldn't have been able to capture what was going on in the classroom and I thought that was the most important and revealing element."]

[annotation q="What a treasure trove of information those videos provided!" a="In a way, it was better than reporting in real life because in real life I can only gaze at one thing at a time. With the videos, I could keep rewinding and look at what people were doing when they said the things I wanted to quote. I remember reading that Katherine Boo, when she was reporting her book, “Beyond the Beautiful Forevers,” video-recorded her subjects. It seemed like an extravagant idea, but I can see now why it might have enabled a different kind of observing and writing."]

MaKenzie often expressed affection for Seth when she sensed that he was being maligned. She told him several times a day that she loved him. He typically gravitated to whatever part of the room she was in. Once, after Seth took off his shoes, MaKenzie asked her teachers, “Seth is being bad, ain’t he?”

“He’s always bad,” Cherry said.

MaKenzie, who liked to take off her shoes, too, sat on a beanbag chair, and Seth lay on the floor, curled up next to her legs. “I’m bad,” she muttered to herself.

Twice a week, Latoya takes her family to the Gathering Place, a church in a former supermarket in Donalsonville. The pastor gives his sermons in the old meat section, a large cinder-block room with L.E.D. lighting. Seth’s aunts and cousins make up about a quarter of the week-night congregation. When I went with them one evening, Seth sat next to five cousins and shared a folding chair with a friend from the neighborhood, a teen-ager raised in foster care who treated Seth like a little brother. As they waited for the service to start, Seth leaned on the boy’s shoulder and watched the other kids while chewing on the collar of his shirt. The pastor made announcements on a microphone, and Seth began silently weeping. He often cried when he heard loud noises. Once the congregation began singing, though, Seth stood up, closed his eyes, bowed his head, and hummed along to the melody. He danced and clapped with the other kids, but a little more vigorously.

In school, Seth was more agitated. He increasingly seemed to embody everything that his teachers resented about their jobs, and they talked about him as if he couldn’t comprehend language. “You’re about three grade levels behind, and you think you’re going to have a career?” Williams-Brown said one day, as Seth sat in Cool Down, where he’d been sent for not listening to a story. He watched the women and whimpered.

“Turn around and be quiet,” Williams-Brown said.

“I’m going to suggest he move back to day care,” Cherry told her.

“If he doesn’t pay attention, he’s going to be locked up,” Williams-Brown said.

“Ms. Williams, I love you—be nice,” MaKenzie said later. “And Ms. Cherry.”

“You know I’m always nice,” Cherry said.

“You’re lying,” MaKenzie told her.

[annotation q="Given all the depressing facts and actions in this story, MaKenzie seems, in some instances, to lighten the mood." a="I didn’t watch the videos until after I’d already met MaKenzie, and I remember wishing that I’d had a greater appreciation for how important she was to Seth — their dynamic was gentle and loving in a way that really moved me. MaKenzie could communicate and connect with Seth in a way that his teachers never had."]

Cherry shared her frustrations with such detail and abandon that she seemed either to believe that no one cared or to wish, on some level, to be fired. When Williams-Brown missed a day of school in October and a substitute, Teresa Richardson, filled in for her, Cherry said that she felt tricked by Wallace into taking a job that no one else wanted. “You say you’re the supervisor—you say you’re watching the camera, then you can see the things that happen,” she said. “You aren’t saying nothing.” She wondered if Wallace, whose office was forty minutes away, was intimidated by her, because she had so many opinions about what was wrong with the program. She was also the only black lead teacher in the building; besides Williams-Brown and Rambo, the middle-school aide, the other teachers were white.

“It’s a bad situation,” Richardson agreed. She was sitting on the floor next to Seth, holding his legs still, trying to coax him to take his afternoon nap. A few feet away, MaKenzie was watching “The Princess and the Frog,” which was being projected onto a wall. Richardson said that her mother had heard people in town talking about how the school was “not giving them the education that’s needed. It’s not what it’s supposed to be—you and I can see that ourselves.”

Cherry shook her head. “I got to get out of here so quickly.”

“I hate my life,” MaKenzie blurted out.

“No, you do not,” Richardson said. “Life is a wonder.”

In Cherry’s third month at Pathways, she hit Seth. Seth had taken off his shoes again. Williams-Brown shoved them back on, saying, “I ain’t gonna have no mercy.” Crying, Seth bolted toward Cherry, who was facing the sink, and slammed into her body. Cherry was startled, and she turned around and hit him four times on the arm and the head. He fell to the floor, and she hit him three more times. MaKenzie watched from a few feet away.

Cherry wanted to resign that night, but, with a mortgage to pay, she continued. When she arrived the next morning, Williams-Brown was chatting with Phyllis Rambo. The conversation turned to the movie “The Exorcist.” The film tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl with an inexplicable disease whose severity her mother doesn’t appreciate. “See, her mama was in denial,” Williams-Brown said. “And that’s when they got to—well, have you ever heard of an exorcism?” Williams-Brown said that the mother, after talking to a priest, “realized that there’s more we have to do for this little girl than just medicating.”

“So let’s take our two students to the priest,” Cherry said. She told Rambo how Seth had charged toward her the day before. “I thought he was the little devil or something,” she said. The two aides laughed.

“That boy totally got me out of my element,” she went on. “I got to reënact this.” She stood up from her desk, walked to the classroom sink, and imitated herself raising her arm and striking him. “I forgot that I was in this class,” Cherry told the aides. “I forgot that I was in the school here, with the camera. I forgot that this is somebody else’s child. I forgot I was a teacher.”

[annotation q="You’ve said that the teacher, Avondika Cherry, and the story she relates here, was another reason you decided to pursue this story. Why?" a="I’d read a short article in the Bainbridge, Georgia, newspaper, and they quoted an excerpt from the video in which Cherry is reflecting on hitting Seth. She said something like ‘I forgot I was a teacher. I forgot I was in this school. I forgot he was a student.’ And that seemed really honest and raw to me; unprompted, she was articulating dismay about what she had done. I had the sense that she was a caring person and teacher who had somehow found herself in a situation that had escalated in ways she couldn’t control."]

A few minutes later, Seth walked into the room. The school bus had just dropped him off.

“Your shoes—they stay on your feet today!” Williams-Brown told him. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said, in a soft, hoarse voice. He sat at a table in the center of the room and ate a Pop-Tart.

The three women began to criticize Latoya for not giving him medication. “He is already, what, six years old?” Rambo said. “She should have gotten him on young.”

Seth stood up from his chair and made a deep, wordless noise.

“Sit down,” Williams-Brown told him. He sat down.

“I look at it like this,” Williams-Brown went on. “This is his mama’s fault. He is a product of his environment.”

Williams-Brown added that Seth’s father wasn’t “bringing anything to the table.” She said, “It’s partly his fault for having a child like that.”

“Not only is nothing happening at home, but nothing is happening here, either,” Cherry said. “Because this isn’t school.”

Shortly after Cherry hit Seth, MaKenzie began telling her teachers that she was scared. She sometimes said it more than a dozen times a day. Seth learned the words, too. Nine days after Cherry hit him, he sat at a computer, watching a music video about a tractor. “I’m scared,” he told Williams-Brown.

“You ain’t scared,” she said.

“I’m scared,” he said again.

“Look, did you become MaKenzie?” she asked him. “Don’t be trying to use her antics. You ain’t scared of nothing.”

Later that day, Seth had refined his vocabulary. “She hit me,” he said, while sitting at a table with Williams-Brown and Cherry.

“Who hit you?” Cherry asked.

“Cherry,” Seth said.

Cherry seemed not to realize that he was saying her name. “Who hit you?” she asked again.

“You,” he said.

[annotation q="Do you see Seth’s experiences in GNETS as representative, or was his an extreme case?" a="Seth’s case was more extreme in the sense that his teachers went to trial and that doesn't usually happen, but I do think students in GNETS are neglected in a way that is common in many school districts throughout the country. In those instances, it happens at the school or county level rather than the state level, so, for an enterprising parent, it can be easier to escape.  And, of course, it’s rare that the child’s daily life in school is captured on video."]

That afternoon, Wallace, their supervisor, stopped by. “Hi, y’all, how are you doing?” she said brightly, from the hallway. “Good,” Cherry said, without conviction. Wallace kept walking. It was the only time Wallace came to the classroom in all the surveillance footage I watched.

“You’re running away,” Cherry said after Wallace had passed. “Come on in and help.”

At the end of the week, at Wallace’s request, Cherry sent her a chart listing nine times in two days that Seth had been sent to Cool Down, usually for the same reason: “non-compliant.” Wallace was concerned about the amount of time he spent there, and she began watching footage of the classroom, taking notes as she watched. “Stop the power struggle with the shoe,” she wrote. “Tone—harsh, mean.” When she reviewed footage from October 10th, she saw Cherry imitating herself hitting Seth. She rewound to the previous day to watch what Cherry was reenacting.

Cherry and Williams-Brown were told to report to the office of the superintendent of the school district for a meeting the next day. The superintendent, George Kornegay, played Cherry the video of her hitting Seth, and she told him she had been asking for help since she’d been hired. Cherry and Williams-Brown agreed to resign. In an e-mail to the county board of education, Kornegay wrote, “I regret that this incident happened, but I truly don’t know how it could have been foreseen or avoided.” Kornegay told me that Seth’s classroom was not representative of the Pathways schools.

Latoya was shown a clip of the video a few days later and wanted to pull Seth out of school. But her sister Yvette, the high-school teacher, told her, “Make them do what they are supposed to do. Make them give him his education.”

Richardson, the substitute aide, filled in for Seth and MaKenzie’s class with the help of rotating substitutes. After three and a half weeks, Wallace couldn’t find enough teachers, so she told parents at Pathways not to send their children to school that day. “I can’t continue like this,” she wrote to Kornegay. “Something bad has already happened, and I am worried there might be more.” Kornegay admonished her, writing, “I believe we are failing to provide FAPE”—the right to a free appropriate public education, which is guaranteed by IDEA. A month earlier, the Georgia Advocacy Office, together with the Arc of the United States, a disability-rights organization, had filed a class-action lawsuit, alleging that the state “discriminates against thousands of Georgia public school students with disabilities” by “segregating them in a network of unequal and separate institutions.”

MaKenzie’s mother, Erica, didn’t learn that her daughter’s teachers had been forced to resign, or why, until five weeks after they left. When a video of the hitting incident was played on a local news channel, MaKenzie heard the sound of Seth crying and called out, “Are they hurting my baby again?” The news program announced that Cherry had been charged with battery, assault, and cruelty to children. Williams-Brown had been charged with failing to report child abuse.

Erica decided to teach MaKenzie herself. “I’ll probably continue homeschooling her all the way through, which is going to be a”—she paused, unable to find a fitting word—“a journey,” she said softly. “I’d rather her be in school, but I’m scared.”

Cherry pleaded guilty. Bainbridge’s courthouse is across the street from the board of education, and both buildings overlook a small courtyard with two monuments dedicated to Confederate soldiers. At the sentencing hearing, the state solicitor general, Benjamin Harrell, a young, white attorney, played the clips of Cherry hitting Seth and reenacting the encounter the next day. “Praise the Lord for modern technology that allowed us to discover what was really going on in a school here,” he said.

When Cherry testified, she sounded as if she were talking to a job supervisor. “It was definitely inappropriate,” she said. “It was a mistake, and it happened, and it won’t happen again.”

Latoya could barely talk at the hearing, because she was crying so hard. “I no longer have a best friend, because one of those teachers was my best friend’s mama,” she testified. “She didn’t even come tell me. These people from Donalsonville—nobody came to my house.” When Harrell asked her what she thought Cherry’s sentence should be, she said, “I think that Ms. Cherry should get jail time.” She went on, “It’s sickening that two black women—and you already know the struggle that black people have—that you would do that to your own kind.”

The judge sentenced Cherry to a year in jail. Williams-Brown, who attended the hearing, said that, when she heard the sentence, “I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried.” She thought that Cherry wouldn’t have been punished so severely if she’d been white, but, she said, “I try not to get caught up in that.” Cherry’s mother, Pat Grant, told me, “I am just so discombobulated. My daughter didn’t get her master’s degree to babysit a child. She was on track to become a principal.”

Phyllis Rambo, who had worked for the school district for nearly two decades, was fired.

Williams-Brown, who also pleaded guilty, was sentenced to probation. Harrell told me, “I saw a lot of outrage that there wasn’t more that could be done against them. People around here said, specifically, that all three women in the video were equally bad. They were saying that they should get life. Or even death.”

In an e-mail to the superintendent, Wallace complained that Harrell was “out of control,” and said that people were calling Rambo on the phone and threatening her. Rambo’s daughter Daneisha told me, “It’s tragic. Both parties are hurting—the guilty party and the not-guilty party.”

Latoya rarely left her house. “We all live in the same community, and—ooh, it’s the worst feeling I’ve ever felt,” she said. Her sister-in-law overheard women at church saying that Latoya should be ashamed of herself for ruining her neighbors’ careers. Her brother Nathan, who works at a jail, said that he heard a correction officer telling another officer, “If I were that teacher, I probably would have done the same thing.”

When I visited Cherry in jail, she had been there three months, and had lost twenty-three pounds. Her mother had moved into her house to take care of her daughter, who was nine years old and growing so quickly that, Cherry said, she had “gained the weight that I lost.” Her daughter visited once a week and spoke to her for an hour through a pane of glass. Williams-Brown had visited during Cherry’s first week in jail, but Cherry hasn’t heard from her since. “I can’t mentally get myself to go,” Williams-Brown told me.

I was taken aback by Cherry’s beauty. She had a short pixie haircut and wore navy-blue jail scrubs. We sat at a table in a small cinder-block room, and, for three hours, she methodically narrated each disappointment at Pathways. When she got to the day that she hit Seth, she walked to the corner of the cell, telling me, “This would be the sink,” and imitated herself washing her hands. “And then this force came from behind me,” she said. For the second time, she reënacted hitting Seth. It was as if she were still trying to figure out what exactly she had done to him. She said that both times she’d been shown the video, in the superintendent’s office and at her sentencing hearing, she hadn’t been able to watch.

[annotation q="You don’t include much physical description of the people in your stories. Why?" a="I find it hard to describe people in a way that doesn’t feel generic. I struggle with that.  It can sound so boilerplate and meaningless (“blue eyes and brown hair,” etc.) unless you can do it really well. I know some writers who enter a room and immediately have a nuanced, idiosyncratic way of describing a person’s way of moving, but that generally does not come to me."]

[annotation q="You do describe Cherry here, though – which stopped me. I wasn't sure why you say she’s beautiful." a="Because she did look so elegant and beautiful in this really dark and expressionless space. That was my first reaction to her. And something about her beauty made me aware of her having been plucked out of society abruptly in a way that shocked me."]

Cherry recounted the previous half year with almost no reference to her personal life; even when she talked about her regrets, she described them through the lens of professional development. She spoke at length about the support that she expected to be in place for teachers, and said that, without it, “I just had an immediate, instinctual reaction to Seth—it was like I had turned into his mom.” When I asked her about her daughter, she said, “She’s O.K. My mom does a real good job with her. Hold on.” She walked out of the room, toward the bathroom. She came back with a piece of toilet paper three feet long, sat down, bent over her knees, and sobbed.

After a few minutes, she gathered herself completely. She understood that she would never get another job in education, and was contemplating working toward a counselling degree or writing a book called “From the Classroom to the Jailhouse,” which would “help educators not find themselves in the same situation as me.”

Every night, at nine o’clock, Cherry led five or six other inmates in prayer. They sat in a circle and held hands. Cherry said that their requests were often the same: “My prayer is that my children will not be taken away from me.” All the inmates referred to one another by their first names, but they called her Ms. Cherry. She wasn’t sure why, since only a few of them knew that she had been a teacher.

In January, 2018, shortly after the Georgia Advocacy Office requested Seth’s records, the district allowed him to return to his neighborhood school. Leslie Lipson, the lawyer with the office, said that when she becomes involved in students’ cases, for possible inclusion in the class-action suit, the student is often transferred out of GNETS. (The state has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. A spokesman for the attorney general said that, “as a rule of thumb, we are unable to comment on pending litigation.”)

Seth entered first grade at Seminole County Elementary School. His records there describe him as “unable to perform a task for 5 minutes without engaging in physically aggressive or otherwise inappropriate behaviors.” For “strengths,” his records say that he “has remarkable sense of rhythm.” After three weeks, he was suspended for spitting at his teacher. Latoya said that, in February, Seth pinched his teacher several times and was suspended a second time, for six days. Latoya asked MaKenzie’s mother to recommend a good homeschooling curriculum, and withdrew him from school.

[annotation q="I wondered whether you considered only using Seth’s first name, given the longevity and accessibility of information on the Internet these days." a="In general, that is something I’m concerned about. In this case, Latoya took pride in using his story and name to help expose flaws in GNETS, so I deferred to her and to her husband on that decision."]

In the past fifteen years, the number of black families in the country choosing to homeschool their children has more than doubled. Cheryl Fields-Smith, a professor at the University of Georgia, studies why black families in Georgia increasingly make this choice. “One of the dominant themes was a desire to protect their children from being labelled a troublemaker, or having a special-education label placed on them,” she told me. According to the Department of Education, students of color are roughly twice as likely to be identified as having an emotional disorder as white children and nearly three times as likely to be labelled cognitively impaired. (In 2015, four decades of research was challenged by a widely cited series of articles by Paul Morgan, a professor of education at Penn State, and George Farkas, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who argued that if environmental factors, such as poverty and single parenthood, are taken into account, students of color are actually underrepresented in special education. But other scholars have criticized the authors for overgeneralizing and relying on variables that could be subject to racial bias.)

Chris Vance, a special-education attorney in Atlanta, said that parents who can afford a lawyer’s fees are usually successful in fighting to prevent their children from going to GNETS. They will often hire a psychologist to analyze the student’s behavior in class and then draft a plan that allows the student to stay in the general classroom for most of the day and work with an aide who has been trained to understand how the student’s disability affects the way he learns. But, she said, “those who can’t afford an attorney will often homeschool their children, and so it becomes no education.”

Latoya begins Seth’s lessons at eight each morning with the song “Jesus Loves Me,” which he sings exuberantly, clapping and stomping his feet. On a recent morning, Latoya sat on the floor with a pile of frayed manila folders from Easy Peazy, an online Christian homeschooling curriculum that MaKenzie’s cousin uses. Latoya’s mother, who recently had a stroke, was on the sofa watching TV.

Latoya instructed Seth to recite words pictured on flash cards. Repeating the words required a vigorous windup: Seth arched his back, pumped his arms in the air, and then shouted out the words so loudly that his five-year-old cousin, Keylan, who came to the lesson uninvited, covered his ears. When Latoya told him that he’d done a good job, he clapped and yelled, “Yay, yay, yay, yay!” The celebration went on for too long. “Learn!” his sister, Sahrenety, who was on summer vacation, told him. “Do your work.” She sat on the couch next to Latoya’s niece, who also gave Seth pep talks.

After declaring that “I” is for igloo, Seth began rolling on the ground. Latoya called her brother Lawrence, and put him on speakerphone. He usually came over to play basketball when the lesson was over, around ten-thirty. “I won’t come if you don’t learn,” Lawrence repeatedly warned Seth. Seth got to “K” before everyone gave up. Latoya was sweating, and her niece was snoring loudly on the couch. A few of Latoya’s customers were already in the kitchen.

Latoya realizes that she cannot keep homeschooling Seth, and she plans to move back to Atlanta next month. She wants Seth to attend a public school where the day is structured and predictable and the classroom aides understand the sensory triggers for his outbursts. She doesn’t mind if he’s in a special-education classroom, provided he has some contact with nondisabled students during the day. She’s not even opposed to the idea of eventually placing him in a school for children with autism, as long as the segregation serves a therapeutic purpose. She discovered a specialized school north of Atlanta, the Lionheart School, that she aspires to send Seth to one day, if she can afford it. The director of the school told me, “When people talk about ‘behaviors,’ the assumption is that the child is doing something bad, but we see behaviors as communicative. If the child is punished for screaming, then we’ve missed an opportunity to get to know this child and what he is telling us.”

More than anything, Latoya wants to get out of Donalsonville. She told me, “I feel like everybody here is looking at me, like, Why would she do that to those teachers? She knows her son is bad.”

Whenever Latoya goes to town, she must drive past Phyllis Rambo’s house. Recently, when we passed it, her sister Cecelia, who was driving, became sombre. “That’s Phyllis,” she said, pointing to a one-story brick house. Behind the house was an old swing set where Latoya used to play with Rambo’s daughter Daneisha.

Latoya had started talking to Daneisha again, after Daneisha wrote her a letter describing how important their friendship was to her. For months, friends from their neighborhood had been urging her to forgive Rambo, too, and over time Latoya had begun to soften toward her. “I think Phyllis was basically just trying to fit in,” she told me. “She needed people to vent to at work.” (Rambo did not want to talk to me.)

[annotation q="Many writers would have painted Cherry and Melissa Williams-Brown (another teacher) as the villains of this story. Why did you avoid that? That was important to me." a="I didn’t think that they (Cherry and Williams-Brown) were bad actors. They were placed in a situation in which it was basically impossible to be a good actor. They were trying. But they lacked training, support, staff and supervision. Cherry was repeatedly asking for help — she recognized she was failing — and not getting it. She quickly became demoralized and felt it was impossible to effectively teach."]

Latoya had never been close with Melissa Williams-Brown—Latoya described her as having been, in high school, part of the “fancy crowd, the kids who basically have what you call a good life”—but, as she had learned more about the GNETS system, she had begun to see Williams-Brown’s mistakes in a different light. “I’m not upset with Melissa,” she told me. “I’m not even upset with Ms. Cherry. I’m just upset with the fact that, hey, if that was your”—referring to Wallace—“child, it wouldn’t have happened like that.” She cried quietly. “The black women got the blame. I just don’t feel like it’s right. You’ve got three teachers being slandered when they were only doing what you allowed them to do.”

In June, Seth and MaKenzie had a playdate. MaKenzie often asked for Seth, but she lived nearly an hour away, and they hadn’t seen each other for seven months. When Erica parked in front of Latoya’s house, MaKenzie looked up from a magazine and saw Seth sitting under the carport, beside a washing machine.

“I love you, Seth,” she said, as she walked up the driveway. “I love this little boy.” She combed her fingers through his dreadlocks and commented on how long they had grown. He looked away, smiling. Then he walked toward his uncle, who was mowing the lawn. MaKenzie stood still, wringing her hands. “What’s wrong with you?” she said gently.

Erica apologized to Latoya in advance for the language that MaKenzie might use. “When she’s nervous, her words really come out,” she said. “Whatever is on Kenzie’s mind she’s going to tell you.” It quickly became clear that one of the words that MaKenzie had difficulty controlling was the N-word. Erica was accustomed to people making comments like “That little girl needs her butt tore up.” But Latoya assured her that it was fine, even when Seth began repeating the word.

In the carport, they listened to the country song “Meant to Be,” by Bebe Rexha and the Florida Georgia Line. MaKenzie stood under a tree and swayed her arms in the air. Seth walked over to her and began doing the two-step, rocking his hips and shoulders from side to side. Their rhythms were familiar to each other; they had often danced together at school, while their teachers were talking. On Cherry’s last day at Pathways, MaKenzie had sashayed toward Seth, stood behind him, and begun moving his arms to the beat of a nursery song, leading him in a kind of square dance.

Throughout the afternoon, MaKenzie repeatedly told Seth that she loved him and kissed his cheek or the top of his head. Latoya took solace in believing that MaKenzie’s warmth may have counteracted the harsh tone of his teachers. She was less concerned about the physical violence than about the effects of listening to them talk. “He can hear five conversations at a time and remember every word—that’s one of his autistic traits,” she told me. “If you call him bad, he’s going to believe it. He’s going to become exactly who you say he is.”

[annotation q="Why end the story the way you do?" a="I liked the idea of ending it with MaKenzie and Seth’s unique emotional bond. It made me aware of how important that classroom experience had been for them and what they were missing now that they were being homeschooled apart from peers. As for the last quote: I hoped to leave readers with the sense that disability doesn't necessarily have to determine school outcomes.  It’s the way people respond that can really shape a student’s trajectory."]

A previous version of this article cited imprecise critiques by scholars who said that gender had been omitted from Morgan and Farkas’s analysis. Morgan and Farkas, who have replicated their findings in several studies, included gender as a covariate and used—but did not rely on—teachers’ subjective assessments.

The post Shining light on a “shadow” special-ed program in the Georgia public schools appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]B[/dc]efore Christopher Solomon took on the case of the wolf researcher who ignited a political firestorm, the situation had sparked plenty of regional coverage. In particular, The Seattle Times, where Solomon reported for six years before his leap to freelancing, “had covered it like a blanket,” he said.

But Solomon thought the saga was worth a deeper look.

“Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist," published July 5, 2018, in The New York Times Magazine, centers around controversial wildlife biologist Rob Wielgus, a former tenured professor at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash. Solomon is an avid skier, hiker and fly fisherman who has made his mark writing about the environment and the outdoors; this was one more chance for him to spend time in the wild. And as a freelancer, he has learned to scour the landscape for fresh approaches to the stories that draw him.

[caption id="attachment_141448" align="alignright" width="225"] Wildlife biologist and wolf researcher Rob Wielgus[/caption]

Besides that, Wielgus – a tattooed, tough-talking, melodramatic, motorcycle-riding scientist – is the kind of character Solomon likes best.

“He was very outspoken, often uncensored, and sometimes wrong about things,” Solomon told me when I reached out to ask about the wolf man piece. “He also was hard to stereotype; he called himself a ‘redneck hippie.’ All this added up to a subject who was hard to pigeonhole and interesting to try to understand.”

Profiling Wielgus also gave Solomon an opportunity to explore a contentious issue that embroils the American West: While wolves are protected under the Endangered Species Act, game officials in some regions can destroy a wolf if a rancher has taken measures to deter the predators but the wolf continues to kill livestock.

Solomon hunts for chances to unspool big themes through individuals like Wielgus – in fact, he told me he won’t pursue a major piece unless he has a strong protagonist to build it around. That approach has helped him land long-form narratives under national mastheads, and be named a contributing editor to Outside Magazine.

(Two of his pieces have been selected for this year's "Best” anthologies. “The Detective of Northern Oddities,” published January 2017 in Outside Magazine, profiles a veterinary pathologist in Alaska who studies dead wildlife to try to discern a link to climate change; it will be featured in The Best American Science & Nature Writing. “In the Home of the Bear,” published December 2017 in High Country News, takes readers on an up-damn-close journey with grizzlies in Alaska’s McNeil River bear sanctuary; it is a pick for the upcoming “Best American Travel Writing.”)

Solomon’s story sense is formed by learning that “people don’t respond to facts.” (He says an an editor once told him: You keep bringing us issues, but we want stories.)

“Look at the public’s resistance to the facts of climate change,”  he said. “You can cluck in dismay all you want about that, but the truth is that humans respond to emotion. So you hang the larger issue from the frame of this person’s personal struggle. If you’ve done your job well, the reader is surprised how much she has learned, because she has been pulled along by the story.”

All that informed Solomon's desire to write about Wielgus, the controversy spawned by Wielgus' research and the larger issues it represented. Solomon says he did his usual “crap-ton” of background reporting: He made calls, wrote emails, read whatever he could find and requested thousands of pages of public records from WSU.  By the time he started to write, he had immersed himself in the history of the near-extinction of wolves in the U.S., the tensions over their reemergence in the Northwest, and the ins and outs of the conflict between Wielgus, university officials and state lawmakers.

[caption id="attachment_141449" align="alignleft" width="270"] Christopher Solomon in the field[/caption]

But Solomon always makes time to get out in the field to talk with key people in person. He estimates he worked for five months on the wolf story while juggling three other assignments.

For all that, he spent just a little more than a day with Wielgus, his main character, which is all he could get. Luckily, he said, “it was a very rich day.”

That day came two-thirds into Solomon’s reporting, when he was far enough along in background research to now focus on scene, character and the bigger thematic questions.

“The background work usually impresses people,” he told me. “The person notices and cares that you have put in the effort.”

On the day Solomon was to finally meet Wielgus, he arrived early at their rendezvous point: tiny Republic, Washington, a town of some 1,000 souls tucked in the far north of the state, all but surrounded by the Colville National Forest. Solomon wanted a bit of time to explore on his own.

“I scribbled down postings I saw on bulletin boards on the main street, and flyers on lampposts,” he said.  “I wrote down what was inside the beds of pickup trucks throttling down Main Street. I wrote down the unusual things for sale at a pawn shop in town and I wrote down the fun conversation I had with the owner of the shop, who didn’t know I was a reporter.”

Just one example of his vacuum-cleaner approach: He noted that a large cougar pelt sat on the counter of the pawn shop. That detail didn’t end up in his story, but Solomon says it helped him get a sense of the place. The dozens of details he leaves out makes him confident about the two or three that make it in. During interviews, he doesn’t just write down answers to his questions, but logs what he’s smelling and hearing, how the light looks on the trees, and what the interviewee is doing, even if it’s just to roll down the car window or turn up the radio. It’s hard, he says, to tell right away what will be helpful when writing.

“I enjoy the hell out of wandering around like this,” he said. “One is a salaried flaneur.”

THE ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Solomon’s responses in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button, which you’ll find just below the social media buttons in the top right-hand menu, or at the top of your mobile screen. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist?

Rob Wielgus was one of America’s pre-eminent experts on large carnivores. Then he ran afoul of the enemies of the wolf.

By Christopher Solomon

The New York Times Magazine

July 5, 2018

[dc]Y[/dc]ou might not guess from looking at him that Rob Wielgus was until recently a tenured professor of wildlife ecology. Wielgus likes to spend time in the backwoods of the American West that lie off the edge of most tourist maps, and he dresses the part: motorcycle leathers, tattoos on both forearms, the stringy hairs of a goatee dangling like lichen from his lower lip.

Atop his bald head he often wears a battered leather bush hat of the type seen at Waylon Jennings concerts. A Camel smolders in his face like a fuse.

The first time I called him, he told me that he couldn’t chat because he was riding his Harley home from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota.In introducing Wielgus and, later, his antagonist, you start with a physical description. I've seen this in a number of your stories. Why do you do that right off the bat?I enjoy describing people, places, things. I think readers want to visualize a character if they’re going to spend time with that character for a few pages. So I try to give that description up-front. I do think a New Yorker approach definitely can work, where the description of someone’s appearance comes in Section III of a story. But the reality is that most of us work under much tighter word counts, and we always will.  And a description of appearance later in a story runs the risk of feeling tacked on, which gives an editor an opening to cut it.

This story shows Wielgus as the match that sets fire to his own career. Am I right to assume the word “fuse” in your description of him is designed to foreshadow what’s to come?“Fuse” was an intentional choice. Years ago I heard Rick Bragg talk about how the best details are those that do double-duty — that is, they provide color while also giving us more insight into the story or character. It was hard not to see the parade of glowing white Camels in Wielgus’ mouth as fuses stuck in a man who always seemed about to combust with emotion.

When we met last fall, Wielgus, who is 61, wasn’t wearing his bush hat, however, but a straw cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He was, he explained, in disguise. We had rendezvoused in Republic, a faded former mining town of about a thousand people in the northeastern part of Washington State. Stores wore boomtown facades to tempt passing drivers and their dollars to linger. But this was mid-October: Pickup trucks throttled past on the main drag, hauling hay and firewood for a winter that would slump down from Canada any day.You are a master of the telling detail.   But the description of the town of Republic was one place where I wondered if you needed as much as you had. I would argue that the description of Republic is necessary, given the action that follows. It sets the scene, of a rural, conservative, slightly down-at-the-heels Western town – the kind of place where a college professor like Wielgus, with his contrary viewpoints, might find himself unwelcome. In this way it also sets up the one man-against-others theme that will permeate the rest of the piece. The description provides a little context for the sense of menace and intimidation that Wielgus feels – whether real or imagined by him. Finally, I did want to give readers a few glimpses of rural northeastern Washington State, where the wolves roam. Even so, I tried to keep the description brief. This was no time for entire paragraphs on Republic’s mining history (though I had them, from touring the local history museum).

Wielgus had spent years in the surrounding woods doing research, and he loved the area. Now he considered it hostile territory. Before he pushed through the swinging doors of a bar, he paused and lifted an untucked shirt to show me the black handle of a .357 handgun poking from the front pocket of his jeans. “Too many death threats,” he said. “I never started carrying this till I started studying wolves.”

Not long ago, Wielgus was a respected researcher at Washington State University in Pullman, in the far eastern part of the state, with his own prosperous lab and several graduate students under his guidance. His specialty was North American apex predators — mountain lions and bears. Over a 35-year career, Wielgus has published surprising research about how these animals behave, especially once their paths cross with civilization. Unlike some wildlife research, which can be esoteric, Wielgus’s work by its nature has concrete, real-world implications. And Wielgus, by his nature, hasn’t been shy about emerging from academia to tell wildlife managers, ranchers and politicians exactly how they have screwed up and why they should pay more attention to him and his findings. He is accustomed to being the least-popular man in the room.It’s not until fairly deep into the piece that we know, in any detail, what Wielgus found in his wolf research. Why did you hold off on that? I struggle often where to place chunks of dense info in a story so the placement feels thematically correct but doesn’t break down the momentum. Wielgus’ research originally was higher up in the story. My editor suggested that it was too much info, too soon. He was right. We ended up teasing the research high up, and delivering more later.

Wielgus had no idea how unpopular he could get, though, until he began to study wolves. By the time I met him, his academic reputation lay in shreds. His lab was essentially shuttered. He was $50,000 in debt, he said, and he had had to pull his daughters out of college. His career, he told me, was over.

Even today, no animal in North America is at once more loved and reviled than Canis lupus, the gray wolf. Once as many as two million of them loped the forests and arroyos of the continent, Nate Blakeslee writes in “American Wolf.” Then European settlers arrived and got to work. There were bounties for wolves as early as Jamestown. “Wolfers” later roamed the Great Plains, shooting buffalo, lacing the carcasses with strychnine and returning the next day to collect the poisoned wolves’ pelts for their $2 bounties, Barry Lopez recounts in “Of Wolves and Men.” A federal program would kill tens of thousands more, including in our national parks. By World War II, wolves had been eliminated from most places in the country.

In 1973, Congress passed the landmark Endangered Species Act. Within a few years, the gray wolf was listed as “endangered” throughout the West. Gray wolves were successfully reintroduced in the mid-1990s when the federal government relocated 31 wolves from Canada to Wyoming’s Yellowstone country and 35 to central Idaho. Since then, wolves have wandered across state lines to take up residence again in their former homes in Oregon and California.

Wherever the predators have arrived, blistering conflicts have followed. Shouting matches at public meetings. Threats to government officials. Dead livestock. Dead wolves. So in 2008, when biologists found that the first wolves had returned to Washington since the animals were extirpated there in the 1930s, officials pledged to learn from other states’ mistakes. They would finally move past the “smoke a pack a day” threats of the virulently anti-wolf crowd, not to mention the incessant carping of environmentalists. In time, the state would go so far as to spend $1.2 million on a consulting group that applied to wildlife issues the peace-building strategies learned in places like Rwanda and East Timor.

But no conservation issue in the West today is more polarizing than wolves, where the trenches on each side remain well worn and deep. On one side are people who want to see the return of an important predator — physically and symbolically — to the landscape (or, more precisely, simply to know again that it is there, because spotting a wolf outside of Yellowstone can be famously difficult). On the other side are people who also care about the land but for whom the Great Outdoors is often where they make their living. Some run cattle or have flocks of sheep or horses. When wolves and people share the same landscape, sometimes wolves kill what people value, like cows and dogs. These killings take money from their pockets, and it spreads fear.

In a larger sense, the argument over wolves is a gulf of values: In bringing back wolves, one side wants to atone for the sins of the past and knit back together a wounded landscape; the other sees in wolves’ proliferation a refutation of the rural way of life of the American West. A wolf, in this debate, is always much bigger than a wolf. “Wolves are Democrats,” I was told more than once; they symbolize Big Government and regulation and all the ways that distant bureaucrats and coastal elites want to destroy the cherished rural ranching culture of the West.

The strange story of Rob Wielgus is a tale of what happened to one loud scientist who ran afoul of powerful forces. More broadly, it’s a parable of the American West in the 21st century and of how little we still can agree what it should look like. And it’s a reminder that, if you find yourself in a powder keg, the last thing you want to be is a struck match.Did you see this story as a parable of the American West in the 21st century before you started reporting? If not, what was your initial thought about the theme of this story? At first, this seemed a straightforward story about a researcher and a controversial topic, wolves – a good story in itself. Then the story began to have elements of the larger ‘war on science.’ But Wielgus and his case are sui generis, in some ways, so that doesn’t fully fit. Only later, at the end of the reporting, did it seem that this story also speaks to some of the ongoing divides in the American West, and the power systems that guide them.

[dc small]S[/dc]ince their howls were first confirmed in the North Cascades a decade ago, wolves have prospered in Washington State. Today 22 documented packs are sprinkled around the state, totaling at least 122 animals — a conservative estimate, as the state acknowledges. In 2015 a wolf was hit by a car within a commuter’s drive of Seattle.

A state recovery plan that covers the eastern third of Washington allows no killing of wolves except in special circumstances until their numbers sufficiently rebound. (Federal regulations protect them in the western two-thirds of the state.) As the wolf population has grown, poaching has occurred. Six years ago two ranchers and one of their wives were sentenced for violating the Endangered Species Act after she tried to FedEx a box that was dripping blood. It contained a fresh wolf pelt being sent for tanning.As I said earlier, you are a master of the telling detail, like the wolf being hit within a commuters’ drive of Seattle, and the FedEx box dripping blood. Do these come up as you report, or do you spend time specifically hunting for them? I love little details that tell a story. I keep an eye out for them. After all, what paints a clearer picture – a sentence that says, “Poaching sometimes occurs” or one that says, “A Fed Ex box dripping blood”? It’s an indulgence, but I have a subscription to ExpertAccess.org – a version of the LexisNexis story database. It’s $250 a year, I think– a little steep. But with the database you can find stories on your topic or person published all over the world, in publications small and large. There are often gems in these stories (that you then have to go back and verify, if you use them). A lot of people these days think they can do all their research on Google, just reading stories that pop up. But there’s a lot of good stuff out there that won’t appear on a web search.

In Washington State, politics and cultures split as sharply as the climate does along the crest of the Cascade Mountains — generally wet, urban and liberal on one side, and dry, wide open and deeply red on the other. Government-mandated protection of wolves doesn’t go over well in a region where independence is prized and where rural residents tend to look sidelong at any mention of environmentalism or endangered species, seeing the words as code for an attack on jobs like ranching that aren’t easy, or necessarily lucrative, to begin with. And wolves sometimes do cause losses to ranchers: A 2015 look at wolf predation in three Rocky Mountain states said that wolves killed 967 animals — cattle, sheep, goats, llamas and horses — between 1989 and 2008.

Washington State has a program to reimburse ranchers for wolf depredations. But not every death is compensated. And ranchers are proud: Some won’t take the dollars. “I don’t raise my animals to get ate,” as one horse rancher put it. They would rather address the problem at its source. In Washington’s wolf country, it’s not unheard-of for a county’s leaders to authorize the sheriff to usurp state authority and kill wolves if needed or for a billboard to appear in Spokane bearing demonic yellow eyes above a laughing little girl and the question, “Who’s next on their menu?”

Agriculture and ranching are powerful in Washington State — agriculture is a $10.6 billion industry, and the state leads the nation in producing crops like apples, hops and blueberries. This means serious sway in the Legislature, which controls a chunk of funding for Washington State University, a land-grant university with a heavy focus on agriculture research. All of this can make for a complicated pas de deux between politicians and the university. This was the fraught world that Wielgus, the maverick academic, was thrust into. With the “crap-ton” of research you did, how did you organize your notes when it came time to write? I am terrible at this part of the process … my first step is to re-read everything I have collected. This takes forever. But how to make sense of it? I’ve tried a number of things. Often, I just take notes of my notes — distilling them down. But that can result in 18 pages of notes, on a legal pad. Just nuts. I’ve tried John McPhee’s strategy of using 3x5 cards. I didn’t love it. Too many cards. The latest method that intrigues me, taught to me by Tom Curwen at the L.A. Times: 1) Make a list of all the ‘topics’ your final story will have. Label them A-Z. 2) Read through your notes. Beside each fact/note/quote you want to use, place the appropriate letter. “A.  / C. / X. / etc.” 3) Use the “sort” function on your word processor (make sure you have the function, and know how to use it, before you start) to collate your notes into these discrete topics. 4) Essentially, you now have the basics of an outline — your notes divided into the topics you want to cover. It takes some practice, but it’s kind of slick.

Wielgus grew up hunting rabbits and poking around the woods that fringed the suburbs of Winnipeg, Manitoba. (He holds Canadian and American passports, and his voice still tilts upward pleasantly at the end of some sentences.) After college he took provincial jobs with wildlife agencies, studying moose, elk and caribou. In your structure, you start by introducing Wielgus, then step back to talk about the controversy over wolves nationally, then a history of wolves in Washington state. After that, you go into a tick-tock of the Wielgus saga. Why did you organize it this way? This story is part profile. It couldn’t be told without first introducing Wielgus, since he would appear throughout the rest of the piece. And he cuts a striking figure. Within the first five minutes of meeting him, we walked into the bar in Republic, and the exchange in those moments was almost surreal. It seemed to capture the tension and high emotion surrounding wolves, and also captured the melodrama about Wielgus, too. It was one of those “well, this is probably my lede” moments that a reporter is glad to get. But the opening section also needed to have a minor primer about wolves, just to set the stage for a reader who knows nothing about the predator. Originally, the history and background about wolves kicked off Section II of the piece. But there was no room to do that – mention history, then return again to history – even in a piece that ended up being 5,500 words. So we trimmed it out of the later section, kept it tight and punchy, and moved all of the history up to the intro section. Then it’s done, and we can move on.

How long was the story when you turned it in?I turned in a 6,000ish word story, originally. It went through rewrites – things removed, moved around, added – and crept up to 6,500 words. But the assignment was 4,500 words. Fortunately, at the 11th hour, the editors found room for another 1,000 words. Which was a gift. So the final cutting wasn’t brutal.

He first became interested in carnivores when he embarked on graduate school and received an offer to join a grizzly-bear research effort in Alberta. “The danger of grizzlies really turned my crank because I was an adrenaline junkie,” he told me that night at the bar in Republic (where the evening’s chief threat turned out to be a bartender who didn’t have Wielgus’s preferred whiskey). He got his doctorate studying grizzlies in western Canada and northern Idaho, then went to the Pyrenees for a year to help with bear recovery. In 1997, Wielgus took a job as an assistant professor at W.S.U. He started the Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory and began to study mountain lions. Through their work, he and colleagues discovered something fascinating: Killing adult males actually increased cougar sightings and also the number of cattle and sheep killed by other mountain lions, as younger cougars showed up in the old cat’s territory. The studies later played a part in a decision not to expand the hunting of mountain lions in the state.

In 2012, the state asked Wielgus to calculate a population model for Washington’s wolf-recovery plan. Wielgus had never studied wolves before, but he had a successful ongoing collaboration with the state’s wildlife agency, and the job aligned well with the lab’s overall focus. The agency was pleased with the modeling work and came back with a much larger offer: to oversee a multimillion-dollar research project as part of wolves’ return to Washington. Funded by the state Legislature for at least four years, the work would try to get to the bottom of the age-old conflict between wolves and livestock.

For a carnivore scientist, it was a tremendous opportunity. Wielgus designed a study that would radio-collar hundreds of livestock and dozens of wolves. “It was the largest study of wolf-livestock interactions ever conducted on the planet,” he told me. In other places where wolves and livestock share the landscape, only about 20 percent of wolf packs ever attack sheep and cattle. But there wasn’t a lot of good information about what accounts for those attacks and therefore how they might be prevented. Tracking both predator and prey would help provide answers. Fewer dead cows would mean fewer wolves hunted down. And that could mean peace among the humans.

[dc small]O[/dc]nce Wielgus got his first round of money to start the study, the associate dean for research at W.S.U.’s College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences asked Wielgus to come see him. At the meeting, according to Wielgus, the dean reminded him that his work would be controversial and unpopular with some politicians. Then, Wielgus said, the dean drew a box in the air between the men, and added, “If you step outside of this box, then basically your job is over.”

It felt like a threat, Wielgus said: “I didn’t even start the research yet.” (The university says the dean denies making the statement.)

Both men knew who was likeliest to be unhappy: State Representative Joel Kretz, the Republican deputy minority leader of the State House. At least 15 of the state’s known wolf packs live in Kretz’s northeast Washington district, which is largely rural and forested and is the size of Massachusetts. Kretz is a vocal supporter of his constituents’ way of life and fights back when he perceives it to be threatened. He advocates for a lower bar to kill wolves when they prey on livestock. And, in a cheekier move, in 2013 he introduced a bill that would have shipped wolves off to the San Juan Islands, the popular getaway northwest of Seattle.

One morning in late autumn, I drove a few hours and turned at the crossroads of Wauconda, to visit Kretz. When not in the state capital Olympia, he lives here at his 1,400-acre Promised Land Ranch. Kretz poured coffee in his kitchen near a sign that read “Life’s Better in Cowboy Boots.” He wore a hide-colored Wrangler pearl-button shirt and a tooled leather belt with a silver buckle, his trademark wrangler’s mustache completing the effect. Out the window, a weak December sun rose above a corral steaming with quarter horses, which Kretz raises and sells.

Kretz told me he had mistrusted Wielgus for a long time, since Wielgus’s initial mountain-lion studies. “A lot of the state’s wildlife policy has been based on his work over the last 10 or 15 years, and I’d say at one time he did good work,” Kretz told me. “I mean, he’s a smart guy.” But Wielgus had “drifted,” Kretz said. Kretz himself is a sometime lion hunter; in a local newspaper, I found a picture of him sitting on a pickup’s tailgate beside a big dead tom, wearing stripes of its blood on his cheeks like war paint. Wielgus “has an animal rights agenda, and it taints his work,” Kretz said, though he didn’t point to any science refuting the peer-reviewed lion research. By leading to policies that maintained low limits on the number of cougars that could be harvested, Kretz said, Wielgus’s cougar work made it harder for people in rural areas to manage (i.e., kill) the cats. He suggested that tying the hands of his constituents could increase attacks by the animals on children. (Cougar attacks on humans are in fact rare.)Several times you let someone say something controversial or untrue, then undercut it with a statement in parenthesis. What’s the thought behind doing that rather than having Kretz and others address the criticism directly? Sometimes I felt it was important to let the person say his piece. Kretz, for instance, chose a course of action based, apparently, on his beliefs. So I gave him the chance to say why he did what he did. But, as a journalist, it’s also my job to address inaccuracies. I owe it to the reader to tell them that at some point.

So Wielgus and his graduate students already had an ardent skeptic watching them when they got to work in 2013 recruiting ranchers for their wolf-livestock study. It was slow-going at first. Many ranchers were reluctant to collaborate in a study about wolves. And Wielgus didn’t always endear himself to people. Over hours of conversation, I found him to be articulate, irreverent and passionate — and also blunt, cocksure, hyperbolic and prone to melodrama. It could be hard to tell at times whether he was performing for me. Among scientists, who can be a maddeningly careful, even beige species, he was unusual for saying exactly what he thought, often at high volume. His indelicacy made him poorly suited to enter the charged world of wolf politics.

All sides got a taste of Wielgus in the summer of 2014 after wolves from the Huckleberry pack in northeast Washington killed dozens of sheep that belonged to a single rancher. (Packs are usually named after a nearby mountain or other feature, in this case Huckleberry Mountain.) As events unfolded, there was plenty of blame to go around, said Carter Niemeyer, a well-regarded wolf expert who worked with Wielgus at the time: The rancher didn’t take prudent efforts to safeguard his sheep, which fomented the chaos; then, a government shooter made the critical mistake of killing the wolf pack’s breeding female. Afterward, at a meeting of the Wolf Advisory Group, a regular convening of ranchers, hunters, local politicians and environmentalists that helps guide the state’s wolf policy, Wielgus stood up and criticized just about everyone involved, recalled Niemeyer, who was at the meeting. “Some of the stuff Rob is doing is what a lot of us would like to do, but we know better,” Niemeyer told me. “He walks in and doesn’t respect the politics of wolves.”

Wielgus didn’t particularly disagree with that assessment. “I’m crude and rude,” he said the day after our talk in the bar. “Always have been.” (Chulo lobo — Spanish for “wolf pimp,” a slur someone once called Wielgus — is stenciled on his Harley’s gas tank.) We were driving east, through a land dressed for autumn. Over Sherman Pass, Wielgus turned his black pickup onto a Forest Service road. His satellite radio was set to Outlaw Country. When I asked whether he’d considered the merits of deploying honey versus vinegar, he retorted, “Bullshit is superdiplomatic.” And he added: “I’m not gonna mince my words and pretend to be a nice diplomatic guy, ’cause I’m not. I’m a pissed-off scientist.” Whose idea was it for you and Wielgus to go to the site of the Profanity Peak pack’s den? It was my idea to go into the mountains with Wielgus. Nearly all of this story recounts events in the past that I’d never get the chance to witness first-hand. Even so, I wanted the story to have some action – I want to see things and describe things. I think stories feel more immediate and successful if that can be done in a way that doesn’t feel too forced. I’ve also found that doing something with someone, in a place he or she feels comfortable and is perhaps distracted by a task (driving, flensing a whale, whatever), is the best way to get the person relaxed and talking.

Did he think that was weird? How do you convince sources when they balk?Wielgus at first was a little reluctant to drive several hours to Republic and then into the mountains with me. That’s a lot to ask of someone. But I explained to him that this was a large story, and so it required certain things of him. I needed to understand him in his environment. After that, he got it. I’m happy to explain to people why I’m doing what I’m doing. I think sometimes they think the requests are odd. But I find that people are pretty pleasant, and pretty compliant, if you ask nicely, and if you show sincere interest in them and what they do.

We rattled higher through dark spruce and lodgepole. Mist snagged on the peaks. “It’s great wolf country,” he said, waving a hand before the windshield. We crossed one cattle guard, then another.

In the fall of 2014, Wielgus and a colleague published the lab’s first wolf study in the journal PLOS One. Crunching a quarter-century of data about wolf attacks on livestock in three other states, the authors found something unusual: Killing wolves one year was associated with more, not fewer, deaths of livestock the following year. The paper further suggested that killing wolves may cause the increased livestock deaths. Just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one causes the other, but Wielgus posited a firm connection. As he explained to me, killing wolves fractures the highly regimented social order of the pack. “So, if you kill wolves, you get more breeding pairs, you get more livestock depredation.” This was of a piece with his previous work: When humans kill the apex predator, a chaotic reshuffling is set into motion, with unintended consequences.

If Wielgus’s reasoning was correct, the finding was explosive. It undermined “lethal control” — killing wolves — a major, and controversial, tool many states use to manage wolves and that some environmentalists reluctantly tolerate as the price of getting the animals back on the landscape. (In Washington today, if a livestock owner loses three animals in 30 days, or four in 10 months, and has undertaken at least two measures to deter wolves, the state may begin to eliminate the predators.)

The study made national headlines. It also fired up some lawmakers and ranching and agriculture groups. At the time, Wielgus’s university had been looking for money and support for a few major construction projects, including some tied to the College of Agriculture. W.S.U. also was gathering support to build a medical school in Spokane. As reported in The Seattle Times, when the study appeared, an outside lobbyist for W.S.U. wrote to the university’s director of state relations, Chris Mulick, “[H]ighly ranked Senators have said that the medical school and wolves are linked. If wolves continue to go poorly, there won’t be a new medical school.”

“[W]e’re looking a wee bit like Sonny on the causeway here,” Mulick wrote to another university official, alluding to the assassination scene in “The Godfather.”

Soon after that, in early 2015, several of Wielgus’s graduate students visited the state Capitol to present their ongoing wolf-livestock work to lawmakers. When they stopped by to see Kretz in his office, he was friendly and showed off some hunting pictures, they said. Then he told them matter-of-factly that he planned to shut down Wielgus’s lab. (Kretz said he only vowed to cut off state funding.)

During state budget negotiations a few months later, when it was time to fund the next round of wolf research, many Republican legislators balked. Kretz was willing to work with Democrats to secure money for the work, which he told me he thought was important for ranchers, his constituents. But he had a condition: The money had to be rerouted through another research group, essentially laundering it of Wielgus’s name. No longer would Wielgus be the primary researcher, a professional blow that also meant he couldn’t be paid for his months of summer work each year — a change that would cost him tens of thousands of dollars. Kretz told me that he undertook the action to be fiscally responsible, to not let money flow to a researcher he found disreputable. The fact that some Washington state lawmakers tied their support for a new WSU medical school to withdrawing money from Wielgus sounds, in itself, explosive. Were you tempted to make that a bigger part of the narrative? In a word, yes. Documents and emails obtained from public-records requests show a university administration consumed with how it is perceived, both by state legislators and Big Agriculture in the state. There are some questionable examples of the university kowtowing to these interests and pressures. I wrote much more about this in earlier drafts of the story. Alas, it was trimmed out over time, as sometimes happens.

By that fall, Wielgus had started to see signs that his university no longer supported him against his critics. He and a doctoral student published two more papers about the behavior of mountain lions. Again, the results were counterintuitive: They found that hunting older male cougars seems to increase the preying of cougars on populations of mule deer and also critically endangered mountain caribou in the Pacific Northwest. Before the papers’ publication, Wielgus worked with a university writer on a news release to the media. “I’ve just learned another Wielgus study news release is set for release,” Chris Mulick wrote to fellow administrators. “I am happy to beg that we not go forward with this.” The interim co-provost then emailed the writer who wrote the release: “[P]lease do NOT release this on Monday. Our government relations staff have advised that this could potentially create substantial difficulties for CAHNRS [the ag school] and W.S.U.” W.S.U. also spiked an already-completed profile of Wielgus slated for the university magazine. Wielgus emailed his doctoral student, “My name is voldemort in wa. ... he who must never be mentioned.”

So Wielgus was already feeling persecuted when, in early 2016, researchers at the University of Washington and Kathmandu University published a study that contradicted Wielgus’s 2014 findings. Tweaking the statistical models, they determined that killing a wolf one year decreases the number of cattle and sheep killed the next year. To his opponents, the rebuttal study was support for their case that Wielgus was biased and doing shoddy work in the service of his prejudice. Wielgus saw it as part of a political vendetta against him — a rival university prompted to do a hit job.

Later, Lyudmyla Kompaniyets and Marc Evans of W.S.U. took a third cut at the same data and came to yet another result. Their study found that Wielgus was correct that more cattle died even as wolf deaths increased. But they concluded that Wielgus’s study overlooked a simpler explanation for that rise in livestock depredation: Wolves were proliferating at the time. Recent papers from other researchers have added texture to the data around the effectiveness of lethal control but as yet provide no definitive answer. From a distance, this just looks like science as usual, moving forward in its crooked line.

But the topic here was wolves, and that weaponized everything.

[dc small]A[/dc]fter what seemed like hours of driving, Wielgus turned onto a rough spur road and stopped the truck at a hairpin turn on the hillside. On the drive he had been talkative; now he grew quiet. He climbed out and motioned with a fresh cigarette: A few hundred yards from here the Profanity wolf pack, named for nearby Profanity Peak, made its den in the spring of 2016. Wielgus wouldn’t walk any closer. “I just don’t want to go where the pups were gunned down,” he said.

Wolf packs have large territories — Profanity’s was about 350 square miles, and it overlapped with parts of the Colville National Forest where ranchers lease public land to graze their cattle for market. That spring, the Diamond M Ranch released its cattle a few miles from the new den, where the pups had been born. By July the Profanity pack had killed its first calf. By August as many as eight more cows were dead. That’s when the agency shot two wolves by helicopter.

Wielgus was livid. He isn’t against killing wolves as a last resort, he explained, but this, he said, was no last resort. He and his grad students were monitoring the radio-collared Profanity wolves at the time. By the end of June, the wildlife agency knew where the new den site was, and that the pack had pups. They also knew that the ranch had set salt blocks nearby, which attract cattle, who lick them for the needed minerals. But even after the first livestock was confirmed killed in early July, no one moved the salt blocks, “and no one moved the livestock,” Wielgus said. Trail cameras used to monitor the pack showed that cows were all around the area through July. Once the area’s deer, a preferred prey, were scared off by the cows, wolves opportunistically attacked cattle, he said. Wielgus insists to this day that the Diamond M’s patriarch, Len McIrvin, could have been prodded by the state to take steps — quickly moving the salt blocks, removing cattle from the den site — to avoid serious problems. But McIrvin, who has a well-documented antipathy to wolves and has three times had the state kill wolves for him after taking cattle losses, all but forced further confrontation by his inaction, Wielgus claimed. And, he said, the state was complicit for making nice with the rancher while not forcing him to do more. “The movie is called ‘Set Up and Sold Out,’ ” Wielgus fumed.

Threading through and animating Wielgus’s fury is what he sees as a systemic problem: Little is legally required of ranchers before the state agrees to kill wolves on their behalf. At the time, ranchers were required to remove any dead animals and undertake just one additional preventive measure from a menu of options, which could be as basic as not turning out to pasture underweight calves that could be easier targets. Low bars like this, in Wielgus’s view, result in more conflict; we’re dragging out this century-long fight over predators rather than resolving it. But there’s a smarter, more humane way to live in harmony with wolves, he said. Yes, it will require uprooting some of the old ways. It will take more effort. But these are also public lands, and the wolves belong there, too.

In a seven-year case study published last year, researchers found that sheepherders in Idaho who used a strategic array of nonlethal deterrents — from flagged fences to dogs to increased human presence — to protect sheep from wolves on public lands experienced significantly lower wolf depredations. Sheepherders lost just 0.02 percent of the sheep population in those protected areas, the lowest loss rate among sheep-wolf areas statewide. The rate was 3.5 times as high in a study area not protected against wolves. And no wolves were killed in the area in which the deterrents were used.

Of course, fencing and cowboys cost money. And lethal control is often better funded in the West than deterrence. But to demand less deterrence before we kill wolves, Wielgus argued, is unfair to wolves, cattle and even ranchers, who may over time lose their access to public lands if wolves keep needing to be killed. And it sets up a cruel paradox. “We spend millions of dollars on wolf recovery, and then what — we just shoot them? It’s insane.” He kicked at a cow pie in disgust.

The Profanity wolves killed more cattle in mid-August of 2016, and the state wildlife director approved the shooting of up to the entire pack. “I snapped,” Wielgus said. When The Seattle Times called to ask what was going on, he lashed out — at the decision to kill the wolves, at the rancher (by name) and at the rancher’s actions that, Wielgus claimed, provoked the depredation. “This livestock operator elected to put his livestock directly on top of their den site,” he told the paper.

[dc small]T[/dc]he Profanity saga is a complicated one, more nuanced than in Wielgus’s telling, with accounts that turn on details that I have been unable to reconcile. Were you disappointed when you realized you weren’t going to get to the bottom of what happened to the Profanity Peak pack? Was untangling that history one of your original goals?At first I had wanted to untangle the Profanity incident, and I was disappointed when I saw that it seemed unlikely to do so. Then a much smarter friend reminded me that this wasn’t so important. In the end, this story is about bigger things – about how people reacted to the incident, and not just the incident itself.

But it does seem that Wielgus, in his anger, exaggerated some statements he made to the newspaper. The rancher didn’t know of the den’s location when he first loosed his cattle a few miles away, said Donny Martorello, the wolf-policy lead for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and he cooperated with wildlife officials. The situation that summer was “dynamic,” Martorello said, with the wolves moving around the area quite a bit. Wolves and cattle-grazing areas overlap almost everywhere in the state, he concluded: “To think we’re going to stop all conflict is not realistic.”

I called the rancher, McIrvin, who lives hard by the Canadian border. He said that he and other ranchers weren’t told precisely where the den site was. He didn’t put his salt lick right atop a wolf den that spring; he put it right where he has put it for decades, where the Forest Service had told him to put it, he said, which turned out to be near the den.

But McIrvin showed little interest in relitigating the past, and he also showed little patience for anyone who wanted to accommodate wolves. “The range riders, all they are is coroners to find the dead ones,” he said of cattle, of which he claims to lose 70 per year to the predator, though he acknowledged the state can’t confirm that. There’s only one deterrence that works: “Putting the fear of man into that mother wolf,” he said. “We could take care of the wolves. That’s no problem. It’s the bureaucracy that’s the problem.”

In any event, Wielgus’s comments to the newspaper were a grenade tossed into a tomato patch. The rancher got death threats from wolf advocates. Martorello had to hide his wife in a hotel. Wielgus soon received a call from Ron Mittelhammer, who was dean of the College of Agriculture, grilling him about whether he made false statements about the Profanity incident. He was ordered by the dean not to speak to the public about wolves without coordinating with the university.

Internal emails that I obtained through public-disclosure requests reveal university administrators deeply worried about blowback from the uproar; they were in repeated contact with Republican legislators and the cattlemen’s association as they coordinated their response. Within days W.S.U. issued an unusual news release that excoriated its own faculty member, apologized to the community and “disavowed” Wielgus’s statements. He received a “letter of concern” — his first of two in the next several months — reprimanding him for inappropriate conduct. Later, at the urging of Kretz and other Republican legislators, W.S.U. had a professor of statistics and mathematics analyze Wielgus’s 2014 wolf study for error. (The university found “no evidence of research misconduct.”)

W.S.U.’s swift action after the Profanity incident earned high praise from Wielgus’s opponents in the Legislature. “You guys really kicked ass on that wolves thing,” Mark Schoesler, the powerful anti-wolf leader of Republicans in the State Senate, said in a call to Chris Mulick afterward, as recounted in an email from Mulick to W.S.U.’s president. Mulick added, “His wife does some work of the Cattlemen’s Association and he joked that their dinner conversations have been much improved.”

Back on the mountain, a low slid across the sky like a dirty blanket. Wielgus finished yet another cigarette and looked around. His voice quavered. “I tried my best, Blackie,” he said, naming a wolf that had been killed. He kicked at the ground again, turned away, groaned. I thought I was seeing an act. Then I realized that’s just Wielgus: passionate, at times almost to the point of self-parody. I’m not sure whether to trust Wielgus, from the time he shows you his gun to the ongoing melodrama that makes you wonder whether he’s putting on an act. Were you tempted to come down one way or another on his trustworthiness? Or did you like the tension in the ambiguity?I’m gratified you felt that way. I did want readers to feel a bit conflicted about Wielgus, because that’s how I felt about him, and because the reality of wolf politics is that assigning white and black hats is too simplistic. And as I said, Wielgus is complicated. That’s one thing that drew me to his story – though I had no idea just how complicated he was at the get-go. I liked him and found him very charismatic… But I quickly found him to be an unreliable narrator. I did speak to numerous other researchers about Wielgus; they appeared in various drafts but do not appear in the final story. They generally praised his work on cougars and bears, or at least found it sound. But as I write in the story, I think many would agree that there are problems with his 2014 wolf study.

I thought of what I had heard a few times from people who knew Wielgus, both fans and critics: He was a man bearing a valuable message: that with more deterrence, you can reduce livestock deaths. Handled more deftly, the incident could have been a chance to talk more constructively about how to manage wolves better going forward, said Paula Swedeen, policy director of Conservation Northwest, whose group is trying to bring back wolves while bridging the divide with ranchers.

What doubly frustrated some people about the Profanity incident is that, after years of mistrust and false starts, the warring sides finally had reached a tentative détente and were starting to move forward, albeit carefully, they said. But by attacking the rancher and getting some things wrong, Wielgus “ruined the credibility of his own work and the students’ work,” Swedeen said.

A gallery of Herefords had gathered in a half-ring behind us as Wielgus and I spoke, and now they watched him as if they were some mute Greek chorus.

“[Expletive] this place,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” When those cows arrived, I’m thinking the writer in you must have rejoiced. What a great happenstance!It was both comical and poignant to look up from the notebook and see those moon-faced cattle in a semicircle around us. I like these odd moments in reporting. I don’t necessarily know what they mean, but they seem worth mentioning.

Wielgus and I climbed into his pickup and jounced back toward the blacktop. I asked him what he would do next. He said he didn’t know. Six months earlier, his lawyer filed a complaint against W.S.U. alleging numerous violations of academic freedom and requesting “corrective actions” including a retraction of its public excoriation of him and reimbursement of pay lost when his grants were shifted out of his lab. The complaint was prelude either to a lawsuit or a settlement. Though Wielgus continued to teach, he knew his career at W.S.U. was over. He would see if he could find other work at other universities, out of state, he said. He still had research he wanted to do. (In the spring, Wielgus would resign his post and drop the complaint in exchange for a $300,000 settlement.) Some of the research recently completed in his lab — work done by graduate students and potentially useful to all sides — now sat on the shelf, too toxic to touch, at least in Washington. Everyone had lost, including taxpayers who funded the work.

The state’s wolf population, meanwhile, was growing by about 30 percent annually. This spring the federal government announced that it was reviewing the status of Canis lupus in the Lower 48 and, by year’s end, could issue a proposal to revise the wolf’s status, possibly to reduce protection for the animal. But for now, and despite occasional poaching, sanctioned shooting and rough-and-tumble human politics, the wolves were doing pretty well.

Why did you end the piece the way you did? Is it meant as a simple update on the wolves after we know what happened to the humans in this saga? Or is it supposed to make the point that all the human friction hasn’t yet hurt the wolves? This was a tricky story to conclude. Wielgus’ story ends, but the conflict rolls on. Meanwhile, the wolves generally are doing rather well population-wise. But as someone pointed out to me, ‘Wildlife management isn’t really about managing wildlife. It’s about managing people.’ Human desires ultimately dictate if, and where, animals remain on the landscape. And that’s something we still can’t agree on.

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