{"id":1805,"date":"2019-01-22T19:11:27","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T19:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/01\/22\/shining-light-on-a-shadow-special-ed-program-in-the-georgia-public-schools\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T21:02:03","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T21:02:03","slug":"shining-light-on-a-shadow-special-ed-program-in-the-georgia-public-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/01\/22\/shining-light-on-a-shadow-special-ed-program-in-the-georgia-public-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"Shining light on a “shadow” special-ed program in the Georgia public schools"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Editor’s note:<\/strong>All photos are courtesy of LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gavin Brown’s enterprise for the New Yorker. The images cannot be reused without consent or permission.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv often writes about psychologically complex people \u2014 like a Nebraska woman who confessed to a murder she didn\u2019t commit<\/a>, and a mother from the Philippines who works as a nanny<\/a> in New York to support her own nine children, whom she hasn\u2019t seen in 16 years.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In \u201cGeorgia\u2019s Separate and Unequal Special-Education System,\u201d<\/a> published Oct. 1, 2018, one of Aviv\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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While Aviv likes to center her narratives around such characters<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In \u201cSeparate and Unequal,\u201d for example, Aviv didn\u2019t portray the teacher as a one-dimensional villain, but as someone who suffered from a system that neglected her as well as her students.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Rachel Aviv<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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Aviv\u2019s 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.<\/a><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Aviv\u2019s 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\u2019s sense of isolation can be aggravated or increased by cultural and social expectations.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Aviv started to see the Georgia story as a way to illuminate another subject that interested her \u2014 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 \u201can 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When she started her reporting, she found a number of children and families she could have built her narrative around \u2014 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 \u2014from its lack of qualified staff and resources (some parents described the schools as \u201cghost towns\u201d) to the fact that black boys were significantly overrepresented, enrolled at about twice the rate they comprised in the state\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cThere was this accumulation of really dark details,\u201d she told me. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Aviv struggled with how to start the story, rewriting the top section several times: \u201cUsually the structure of a story seems fairly obvious or intuitive to me \u2014 there are not that many different options that come to mind. But with this story I had more doubts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In one draft, she started with a scene at Seth\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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 \u201can unprecedented level of access into the classroom\u201d \u2014 and that the story was more than just the \u201cdreary downward trajectory of a student placed in a punishing and inappropriate environment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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But that approach risked leading readers to think the story centered on the teacher, when the primary characters were actually Seth and his mother.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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 <\/strong>Aviv felt so torn that she ended up writing two full drafts \u2014 something she\u2019d never done previously \u2014 and asked her editor, Willing Davidson<\/a>, to choose.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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 <\/strong>One was the version starting with the teacher\u2019s remorse. The other, which Davidson preferred, briefly introduces readers to the family, then quickly moves into Seth\u2019s entry into the special-education system.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Aviv says she agreed the published version \u201cwas clearer, chronologically, and more organic.\u201d 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 \u2014 at least temporarily \u2014 after a few pages.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Aviv says The New Yorker doesn\u2019t tell its writers how many people click on their stories. She does know it didn\u2019t end up on the publication\u2019s \u201ctop stories\u201d list, although she received a lot of emails from parents and teachers around the country after it ran, underscoring that the problem wasn\u2019t isolated to Georgia.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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If she were to rewrite the story again, Aviv says she would be tempted to focus more on Seth\u2019s family, and not just on his mother, Latoya Martin, but on her 11 brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cI 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 \u2014- or often can be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v Ferguson deemed that it was constitutional for public institutions to segregate by race as long as programs or facilities were of equal quality. It ratified the “separate but equal” doctrine that was later overturned by the 1954 ruling of Brown v Board of Education. Debates over segregation and equality shaped much of the Civil Rights movement and continue to haunt political and policy decisions today.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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The annotation:<\/strong>Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Aviv\u2019s responses in blue. <\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A statewide network of schools for disabled students has trapped black children in neglect and isolation.<\/h2>\n By Rachel Aviv<\/em>

\nSeth 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\u2019t sit still in his chair. He\u2019d pop up and snatch the glasses off a classmate\u2019s 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 \u201cYay!\u201d too loudly.
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\nHis 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\u2019t 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\u2014she was busy looking for a new job\u2014her friends warned her that the school might call child-protective services if she couldn\u2019t pick up Seth promptly. Latoya sensed that the teachers were accusing her of being a bad parent, so she informed the school\u2019s principal that she had never done drugs and that in high school her G.P.A. had been 4.0. Latoya\u2019s sister Anita said, \u201cThey kept saying we needed to work with him more at home. I\u2019m, like, we work with him\u2014that\u2019s not the problem. This is part of his disability!\u201d
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\n<\/a>This story, like a number of your recent stories, introduces us to the main characters before you delve into what happens to them. Why?<\/span>I just automatically assume that the most compelling and accessible aspect of the story is the person I\u2019ve 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\u2019s a person \u2014 their particular characteristics and ambitions and frustrations \u2014 who draws me into a larger story.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAfter 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<\/em>, attended by four thousand students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Anita, a public-school teacher in Atlanta for nearly two decades, said, \u201cI was just trying to figure it out in my head\u2014we already have special-ed classes in the schools, so why is there this second system?\u201d GNETS<\/em> has a ten-per-cent graduation rate, compared with seventy-eight per cent for other public schools in Georgia.
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\nSeth, who at twenty- one months had been given a diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder\u2014a loosely defined diagnosis often given to toddlers when their condition is not understood\u2014was assigned to the Ash Street Center, one of a hundred and seventy-nine sites in the GNETS<\/em> network. The school is surrounded by a gated fence. Latoya said that the next-youngest student in Seth\u2019s 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, \u201cI will kill that little motherfucker!\u201d
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\nLatoya said that, when she walked into her son\u2019s class, \u201cI did not see one white child. All I saw was black boys.\u201d Seth\u2019s \u201ctarget behavior,\u201d according to the center\u2019s intervention plan, was to \u201ccomply with adult directives.\u201d 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. \u201cYou all know this is against the law, right?\u201d she said to Seth\u2019s 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 \u201cmaximum appropriate extent.\u201d They can be removed from their classrooms only if their disabilities are so severe that they can\u2019t learn in a less restrictive setting.
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\nAfter 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\u2019s family has lived for as many generations as they can trace back. Latoya\u2019s sister Yvette, a high-school teacher, said, \u201cShe was just praying that a small town with teachers who had grown up around them would know how to take care of her baby.\u201d 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\u2019d grown up with. Her two older children rejoined their classes, but the school district said that Seth was now classified as a GNETS<\/em> student. He would have to take a bus to a GNETS<\/em> school called Pathways, in Bainbridge, thirty minutes away.
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\n<\/a>Did you consider other main characters for this story besides Latoya and Seth?<\/span>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 \u2014 there were legal documents and classroom videos, because of the criminal trial \u2014 so I felt that Seth\u2019s story allowed for a more comprehensive view of the inner-workings of the classroom.<\/span><\/span>
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\nLatoya\u2019s 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\u2014the secretary and the co\u00f6rdinator had left, and the positions were never filled\u2014and there was no full-time nurse, social worker, resource officer, or behavioral specialist. (The district\u2019s superintendent said that off-site staff provided support to the school.) Sonja said, of the first time she came to the school, \u201cI walked down the hallway hollering, \u2018Hello? Hello? Anybody here?\u2019 \u201d She looked in Seth\u2019s classroom and saw him sleeping on the floor, alone. His teacher was in another room.
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\nThere 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 \u201ceconomically disadvantaged.\u201d 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, \u201cYes, Ma\u2019am,\u201d 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\u2019t read. MaKenzie\u2019s mother, Erica, said that, whenever she dropped by the classroom, \u201cthere was no instruction. But I just figured I was coming at the wrong time of day.\u201d
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\nSeth\u2019s 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\u2019 disabilities. \u201cI didn\u2019t get any specialized training,\u201d she told me. \u201cI just winged it.\u201d The students at Pathways had bipolar disorder, schizophrenia<\/a>, A.D.H.D., autism<\/a>, or, as one teacher put it, \u201chome-life issues\u201d such as neglect, trauma, or poverty. Williams-Brown didn\u2019t understand why Seth, who was eventually given a diagnosis of autism, couldn\u2019t return to his neighborhood school, where there were more qualified teachers. \u201cThere was nothing in place for this young man,\u201d she told me. \u201cI just felt like these students, especially the black boys, were put there, basically, because they intimidated their teachers.\u201d
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\n<\/a>Who did you see as the audience for this story?<\/span>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 \u2014 either their own or that of family members\u2019.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe first GNETS<\/em> school, the Rutland Center, founded in 1970, was once housed in the former West Athens Colored School, whose principal promised to teach the \u201cpractical duties of life\u201d to the \u201cinferior race.\u201d The concept for GNETS<\/em> 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 \u201cface the assault of bizarre behavior.\u201d They were taught that they might be the \u201conly agent for change in the life of a disturbed child.\u201d 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, \u201cthe pieces of the mosaic dropped out,\u201d she said.
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\nIn 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 \u201cexperiments\u201d devised to provoke misbehavior. \u201cIf 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\u2019t diagnose it,\u201d the psychologist explained, at an administrative trial in 2005. \u201cThat\u2019s the same situation here.\u201d 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<\/em> reported, a teacher could be heard giving a child what someone in the room called a \u201cbe-quiet hit.\u201d 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.
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\nLeslie 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<\/em> system in 2001, when a mother called to report that her son was put in a seclusion room nearly every day. \u201cIt\u2019s all little black boys at this school,\u201d the mother told her. Lipson researched the mother\u2019s claims and then rushed into her boss\u2019s office to tell him that she\u2019d discovered an \u201cinsidious, shadow education system.\u201d She said, \u201cI thought I was Erin Brockovich. I was, like, \u2018You are not going to believe this! There is an entire segregated system in Georgia! Can we shut this down immediately?\u2019 I was talking a thousand miles a minute, and my boss waited for me to take a breath. He was, like, \u2018Um, yeah, these schools have been around since before you were born.\u2019 \u201d
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\n<\/a>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?<\/span>I found myself less worried about the question of purpose in this story than in other stories I\u2019ve 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\u2019d be a lot more troubled by the quality of education and the messages that students are absorbing about themselves.<\/span><\/span>
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\nLipson 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<\/em> became a mechanism for resegregating schools. \u201cIt became a way to filter out black boys, who at younger and younger ages are perceived to have behavioral disabilities,\u201d she said.
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\nThe Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA<\/em>) requires that students with disabilities learn in the \u201cleast restrictive environment,\u201d 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, \u201cin general, when it comes to people of color\u2014particularly poor people of color\u2014we choose the most restrictive possibility,\u201d sending students to \u201cthe most segregated and punitive spaces in the public-school system.\u201d According to Beth Ferri, a disability scholar at Syracuse University, IDEA<\/em> provided a kind of loophole to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education<\/a>, which outlawed racial segregation in schools. Now racial segregation continued \u201cunder the guise of \u2018disability,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to talk about any race anymore. You can just say that the kid is a slow learner, or defiant, or disrespectful.\u201d Ferri said that IDEA<\/em> \u201ctreated disability as apolitical\u2014a biological fact. It didn\u2019t think about things like racial or cultural bias.\u201d
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\nData obtained through records requests reveal that the percentage of students in the GNETS<\/em> program who are black boys is double that of the public schools in the state. Most of the students in GNETS<\/em> are classified as having an \u201cemotional and behavioral disorder,\u201d a vague label that does not correspond to any particular medical diagnosis. A teacher who worked for five years at a GNETS<\/em> program called Coastal Academy, in Brunswick, told me, \u201cWe always had a sprinkling of middle-class white kids, maybe two or three, but they didn\u2019t 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.\u201d Coastal Academy occupies a lot that once held an all-black school, originally called the Freedman\u2019s 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\u2019d lose her job if she were identified, said that public schools in the area would \u201csend the African-American kids to us for doing things like saying the word \u2018shit\u2019 in class or pushing a chair in really loudly. They would never, ever\u2014never in a million years\u2014attempt to come at a white parent with that.\u201d
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\n<\/a>What records did you request?<\/span>I requested all the emails from Seth\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe teacher said that students at Coastal Academy were routinely knocked to the floor and restrained. When they couldn\u2019t calm down, they were put in a Refocus Room. \u201cIf a student was having a bad day or hadn\u2019t 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,\u201d she said. \u201cI heard children shrieking and screaming.\u201d (The program\u2019s director denied that students were knocked to the floor and that the room had been used for seclusion\u2014the state banned seclusion rooms in 2010\u2014and said that some students asked to go there.) When parents complained, the teacher said, \u201cthey were met with the same rigmarole: there is a reason why your son is here, and sometimes kids with these conditions make things up.\u201d
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\nSuzie Dunson, the grandmother of a student in a GNETS<\/em> 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. \u201cHe was six years old, and he looked like a chained animal,\u201d she told me. Her grandson routinely came home from school with a swollen face. \u201cI\u2019d ask him, \u2018How was school today?\u2019 \u2018Oh, I got restrained,\u2019 he\u2019d say.\u201d According to the Woodall Center\u2019s 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: \u201cIn the process of restraining him he twisted his body and hit his head,\u201d one teacher noted. \u201cHis face must have rubbed on the ground,\u201d another wrote.
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\n<\/a>You seem to really trust your readers. You don\u2019t hammer home your points. Here, for example, you don\u2019t point out that the Woodall Center\u2019s reports sound ridiculous.<\/span>I find it harder \u2014 it doesn\u2019t come naturally to me, at least \u2014 to go in the other direction and explicitly make an argument. I am sure there are times when that would be helpful, but I\u2019d 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.<\/span><\/span>
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\n<\/a>Do you sometimes worry readers will miss the point that way?<\/span>It sometimes comes up in the editing process. My editor will say, \u2018I know you have a particular thought and argument that you’re expressing but instead of just saying it, you\u2019re having your subjects hint at it. Why don\u2019t you just say it?\u2019 I find that instruction helpful because it goes against my natural impulse.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThis year, when Dunson\u2019s grandson was sent to a juvenile-detention facility, at the age of eleven, he already had a friend there\u2014a 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 \u201ceconomically disadvantaged,\u201d as a \u201cpipeline-to-prison program.\u201d (A spokeswoman for the Woodall Center said that the school does not have documentation of Dunson\u2019s grandson being handcuffed or regularly restrained.)
\n
\nIt is not uncommon for students with disabilities to be placed in settings that are unnecessarily isolated, but GNETS<\/em> is unusual in that this form of segregation is sponsored by the state rather than by the school district; families can\u2019t 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<\/em>, \u201cI kept telling myself, \u2018This isn\u2019t a race issue. Jamir just has behavioral issues.\u2019 \u201d 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\u2019t 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<\/em> program, where the proportion of black boys to other students is nine times that of his elementary school. \u201cWhen I got to the GNETS<\/em> program, and it was majority black, it was glaring,\u201d Armour told me. \u201cThey wanted this little black boy out. And it hurt.\u201d 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<\/em>. \u201cI worked hard to move to that area to give my kid the best, and we were pushed back out,\u201d 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, \u201cHi, I\u2019m Jamir, I\u2019m bad.\u201d
\n
\nIn 2016, under President Barack Obama, the Department of Education instituted the \u201csignificant disproportionality rule,\u201d 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\u2014handcuffed, strapped to a chair, tied down.
\n
\nThe \u201csignificant disproportionality rule\u201d was supposed to take effect in the summer of 2017. But, when President Donald Trump<\/a> 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\u2019s Department of Education, told me that he was appalled by the decision. \u201cIt flies in the face of the data, reams and reams of data, showing that the problem is massive,\u201d he said.
\n
\n<\/a>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?<\/span>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\u2019m 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\u2019ve 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.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n<\/a>How long did it take you to report and write this story?<\/span>I started working on it in late May and didn\u2019t finish until September.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n 
\n
\nAfter Seth had been at Pathways for a few months, the school hired a new teacher, who was properly certified. Latoya said that her son\u2019s behavior quickly improved. In her records, the teacher wrote that Seth \u201cis affectionate with his peers and teachers (hugs). . . . He often dances and sings small phrases from the verses of song.\u201d He began to use sentences.
\n
\nThat summer, after Seth\u2019s first year at Pathways, Obama\u2019s Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Georgia to \u201cvindicate the rights of the thousands of students unnecessarily segregated in the GNETS<\/em> Program.\u201d 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, \u201cThe state rolled the dice on a change in Administration and had a good roll.\u201d The new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions<\/a>, had told the Senate, in 2000, that IDEA<\/em> was a \u201cbig factor in accelerating the decline in civility and discipline in classrooms all over America.\u201d
\n
\nIn October, 2016, Seth\u2019s new teacher quit. She didn\u2019t want to talk to me or have her name printed, for fear of professional repercussions. When I showed up at her house, she wouldn\u2019t let me in. She stood on her porch and said, \u201cWhat the Department of Justice is saying about GNETS<\/em> is completely true. It\u2019s completely true. It\u2019s not therapeutic at all. The kids are not being educated. Not even in a social-skills way.\u201d
\n
\nMelissa Williams-Brown remained in the classroom, with the help of a substitute aide who, she told me, was \u201cjust a friend of somebody who worked there. She was just a body, and that body had no educational training.\u201d Years before, Williams-Brown had learned to physically restrain middle-school students, but, she said, \u201cI was never trained how to restrain a child as small as Seth. So I just came up with my own method.\u201d She stood behind him while folding his arms across his chest or laying his arms on a desk. Seth\u2019s doctor said that he was too young for medication, but the staff at Pathways urged Latoya to give him medication; he needed \u201csomething to keep him still,\u201d Williams-Brown said.
\n
\nThe middle-school aide at Pathways, Phyllis Rambo, who lived a block away from Latoya, routinely got her hair done at Latoya\u2019s 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\u2019s eldest sister had been a close friend of Rambo\u2019s since they were toddlers, and Latoya\u2019s best friend was Rambo\u2019s daughter Daneisha. As she weaved Rambo\u2019s hair, Latoya complained that Seth became more aggressive and defiant at school. His teachers said that he had begun cursing. \u201cI want you to sit here and listen to how many times Seth curses here,\u201d she told Rambo. \u201cNot one time. We do not swear in this house.\u201d
\n
\nLatoya wondered if her son\u2019s condition was the cost of her behavior as a teen-ager. In her neighborhood, she had been known as a fighter, easily provoked. \u201cI was angry for a long time about how my daddy used to treat my mama,\u201d she told me. \u201cI thought I could change\u2014and I did change, and that\u2019s why I named my daughter Sahrenety, to be honest\u2014but then it came back with Seth. I felt like this was my punishment for being angry.\u201d
\n
\n 
\n
\nLast 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 \u201ca very astute, responsible, earnest, and dependable person.\u201d
\n
\nCherry 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<\/em> 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. \u201cI apologize for having so little ideas, but I just don\u2019t know how to work with these students,\u201d Wallace wrote.
\n
\nCherry, who was studious and unaccustomed to wasted time, began applying for new jobs after a week. She encouraged Williams-Brown to look elsewhere, too. \u201cI think you can do something better,\u201d she told her one day, as Seth lay on the floor on his back in a sunny spot by the window. \u201cThe way I see this place, it needs to be shut down.\u201d
\n
\nThe school had installed new surveillance cameras the prior year, after Georgia passed a law\u2014named for a boy whose mother complained that he routinely came home from school bruised\u2014allowing 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\u2019s 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 \u201cno\u201d repeatedly, or making funny noises.
\n
\n<\/a>Could you have done this story if you hadn\u2019t had access to several weeks of video recordings in Seth\u2019s class?<\/span>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.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n<\/a>What a treasure trove of information those videos provided!<\/span>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, \u201cBeyond the Beautiful Forevers,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nMaKenzie 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, \u201cSeth is being bad, ain\u2019t he?\u201d
\n
\n\u201cHe\u2019s always bad,\u201d Cherry said.
\n
\nMaKenzie, 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. \u201cI\u2019m bad,\u201d she muttered to herself.
\n
\nTwice 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.
\n
\nIn 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\u2019t comprehend language. \u201cYou\u2019re about three grade levels behind, and you think you\u2019re going to have a career?\u201d Williams-Brown said one day, as Seth sat in Cool Down, where he\u2019d been sent for not listening to a story. He watched the women and whimpered.
\n
\n\u201cTurn around and be quiet,\u201d Williams-Brown said.
\n
\n\u201cI\u2019m going to suggest he move back to day care,\u201d Cherry told her.
\n
\n\u201cIf he doesn\u2019t pay attention, he\u2019s going to be locked up,\u201d Williams-Brown said.
\n
\n\u201cMs. Williams, I love you\u2014be nice,\u201d MaKenzie said later. \u201cAnd Ms. Cherry.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cYou know I\u2019m always nice,\u201d Cherry said.
\n
\n\u201cYou\u2019re lying,\u201d MaKenzie told her.
\n
\n<\/a>Given all the depressing facts and actions in this story, MaKenzie seems, in some instances, to lighten the mood.<\/span>I didn\u2019t watch the videos until after I\u2019d already met MaKenzie, and I remember wishing that I\u2019d had a greater appreciation for how important she was to Seth \u2014 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.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nCherry 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. \u201cYou say you\u2019re the supervisor\u2014you say you\u2019re watching the camera, then you can see the things that happen,\u201d she said. \u201cYou aren\u2019t saying nothing.\u201d 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.
\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a bad situation,\u201d 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 \u201cThe Princess and the Frog,\u201d which was being projected onto a wall. Richardson said that her mother had heard people in town talking about how the school was \u201cnot giving them the education that\u2019s needed. It\u2019s not what it\u2019s supposed to be\u2014you and I can see that ourselves.\u201d
\n
\nCherry shook her head. \u201cI got to get out of here so quickly.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cI hate my life,\u201d MaKenzie blurted out.
\n
\n\u201cNo, you do not,\u201d Richardson said. \u201cLife is a wonder.\u201d
\n
\n 
\n
\nIn Cherry\u2019s third month at Pathways, she hit Seth. Seth had taken off his shoes again. Williams-Brown shoved them back on, saying, \u201cI ain\u2019t gonna have no mercy.\u201d 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.
\n
\nCherry 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 \u201cThe Exorcist.\u201d The film tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl with an inexplicable disease whose severity her mother doesn\u2019t appreciate. \u201cSee, her mama was in denial,\u201d Williams-Brown said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s when they got to\u2014well, have you ever heard of an exorcism?\u201d Williams-Brown said that the mother, after talking to a priest, \u201crealized that there\u2019s more we have to do for this little girl than just medicating.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cSo let\u2019s take our two students to the priest,\u201d Cherry said. She told Rambo how Seth had charged toward her the day before. \u201cI thought he was the little devil or something,\u201d she said. The two aides laughed.
\n
\n\u201cThat boy totally got me out of my element,\u201d she went on. \u201cI got to re\u00ebnact this.\u201d She stood up from her desk, walked to the classroom sink, and imitated herself raising her arm and striking him. \u201cI forgot that I was in this class,\u201d Cherry told the aides. \u201cI forgot that I was in the school here, with the camera. I forgot that this is somebody else\u2019s child. I forgot I was a teacher.\u201d
\n
\n<\/a>You\u2019ve said that the teacher, Avondika Cherry, and the story she relates here, was another reason you decided to pursue this story. Why?<\/span>I\u2019d 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 \u2018I forgot I was a teacher. I forgot I was in this school. I forgot he was a student.\u2019 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\u2019t control.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nA few minutes later, Seth walked into the room. The school bus had just dropped him off.
\n
\n\u201cYour shoes\u2014they stay on your feet today!\u201d Williams-Brown told him. \u201cDo you hear me?\u201d
\n
\n\u201cYes,\u201d he said, in a soft, hoarse voice. He sat at a table in the center of the room and ate a Pop-Tart.
\n
\nThe three women began to criticize Latoya for not giving him medication. \u201cHe is already, what, six years old?\u201d Rambo said. \u201cShe should have gotten him on young.\u201d
\n
\nSeth stood up from his chair and made a deep, wordless noise.
\n
\n\u201cSit down,\u201d Williams-Brown told him. He sat down.
\n
\n\u201cI look at it like this,\u201d Williams-Brown went on. \u201cThis is his mama\u2019s fault. He is a product of his environment.\u201d
\n
\nWilliams-Brown added that Seth\u2019s father wasn\u2019t \u201cbringing anything to the table.\u201d She said, \u201cIt\u2019s partly his fault for having a child like that.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cNot only is nothing happening at home, but nothing is happening here, either,\u201d Cherry said. \u201cBecause this isn\u2019t school.\u201d
\n
\n 
\n
\nShortly 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. \u201cI\u2019m scared,\u201d he told Williams-Brown.
\n
\n\u201cYou ain\u2019t scared,\u201d she said.
\n
\n\u201cI\u2019m scared,\u201d he said again.
\n
\n\u201cLook, did you become MaKenzie?\u201d she asked him. \u201cDon\u2019t be trying to use her antics. You ain\u2019t scared of nothing.\u201d
\n
\nLater that day, Seth had refined his vocabulary. \u201cShe hit me,\u201d he said, while sitting at a table with Williams-Brown and Cherry.
\n
\n\u201cWho hit you?\u201d Cherry asked.
\n
\n\u201cCherry,\u201d Seth said.
\n
\nCherry seemed not to realize that he was saying her name. \u201cWho hit you?\u201d she asked again.
\n
\n\u201cYou,\u201d he said.
\n
\n<\/a>Do you see Seth\u2019s experiences in GNETS as representative, or was his an extreme case?<\/span>Seth\u2019s 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\u2019s rare that the child\u2019s daily life in school is captured on video.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThat afternoon, Wallace, their supervisor, stopped by. \u201cHi, y\u2019all, how are you doing?\u201d she said brightly, from the hallway. \u201cGood,\u201d Cherry said, without conviction. Wallace kept walking. It was the only time Wallace came to the classroom in all the surveillance footage I watched.
\n
\n\u201cYou\u2019re running away,\u201d Cherry said after Wallace had passed. \u201cCome on in and help.\u201d
\n
\nAt the end of the week, at Wallace\u2019s 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: \u201cnon-compliant.\u201d Wallace was concerned about the amount of time he spent there, and she began watching footage of the classroom, taking notes as she watched. \u201cStop the power struggle with the shoe,\u201d she wrote. \u201cTone\u2014harsh, mean.\u201d 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.
\n
\nCherry 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\u2019d been hired. Cherry and Williams-Brown agreed to resign. In an e-mail to the county board of education, Kornegay wrote, \u201cI regret that this incident happened, but I truly don\u2019t know how it could have been foreseen or avoided.\u201d Kornegay told me that Seth\u2019s classroom was not representative of the Pathways schools.
\n
\nLatoya 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, \u201cMake them do what they are supposed to do. Make them give him his education.\u201d
\n
\nRichardson, the substitute aide, filled in for Seth and MaKenzie\u2019s class with the help of rotating substitutes. After three and a half weeks, Wallace couldn\u2019t find enough teachers, so she told parents at Pathways not to send their children to school that day. \u201cI can\u2019t continue like this,\u201d she wrote to Kornegay. \u201cSomething bad has already happened, and I am worried there might be more.\u201d Kornegay admonished her, writing, \u201cI believe we are failing to provide FAPE<\/em>\u201d\u2014the right to a free appropriate public education, which is guaranteed by IDEA<\/em>. 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 \u201cdiscriminates against thousands of Georgia public school students with disabilities\u201d by \u201csegregating them in a network of unequal and separate institutions.\u201d
\n
\nMaKenzie\u2019s mother, Erica, didn\u2019t learn that her daughter\u2019s 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, \u201cAre they hurting my baby again?\u201d 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.
\n
\nErica decided to teach MaKenzie herself. \u201cI\u2019ll probably continue homeschooling her all the way through, which is going to be a\u201d\u2014she paused, unable to find a fitting word\u2014\u201ca journey,\u201d she said softly. \u201cI\u2019d rather her be in school, but I\u2019m scared.\u201d
\n
\nCherry pleaded guilty. Bainbridge\u2019s 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. \u201cPraise the Lord for modern technology that allowed us to discover what was really going on in a school here,\u201d he said.
\n
\nWhen Cherry testified, she sounded as if she were talking to a job supervisor. \u201cIt was definitely inappropriate,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a mistake, and it happened, and it won\u2019t happen again.\u201d
\n
\nLatoya could barely talk at the hearing, because she was crying so hard. \u201cI no longer have a best friend, because one of those teachers was my best friend\u2019s mama,\u201d she testified. \u201cShe didn\u2019t even come tell me. These people from Donalsonville\u2014nobody came to my house.\u201d When Harrell asked her what she thought Cherry\u2019s sentence should be, she said, \u201cI think that Ms. Cherry should get jail time.\u201d She went on, \u201cIt\u2019s sickening that two black women\u2014and you already know the struggle that black people have\u2014that you would do that to your own kind.\u201d
\n
\nThe judge sentenced Cherry to a year in jail. Williams-Brown, who attended the hearing, said that, when she heard the sentence, \u201cI cried and I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried.\u201d She thought that Cherry wouldn\u2019t have been punished so severely if she\u2019d been white, but, she said, \u201cI try not to get caught up in that.\u201d Cherry\u2019s mother, Pat Grant, told me, \u201cI am just so discombobulated. My daughter didn\u2019t get her master\u2019s degree to babysit a child. She was on track to become a principal.\u201d
\n
\nPhyllis Rambo, who had worked for the school district for nearly two decades, was fired.
\n
\nWilliams-Brown, who also pleaded guilty, was sentenced to probation. Harrell told me, \u201cI saw a lot of outrage that there wasn\u2019t 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.\u201d
\n
\nIn an e-mail to the superintendent, Wallace complained that Harrell was \u201cout of control,\u201d and said that people were calling Rambo on the phone and threatening her. Rambo\u2019s daughter Daneisha told me, \u201cIt\u2019s tragic. Both parties are hurting\u2014the guilty party and the not-guilty party.\u201d
\n
\nLatoya rarely left her house. \u201cWe all live in the same community, and\u2014ooh, it\u2019s the worst feeling I\u2019ve ever felt,\u201d she said. Her sister-in-law overheard women at church saying that Latoya should be ashamed of herself for ruining her neighbors\u2019 careers. Her brother Nathan, who works at a jail, said that he heard a correction officer telling another officer, \u201cIf I were that teacher, I probably would have done the same thing.\u201d
\n
\nWhen 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 \u201cgained the weight that I lost.\u201d Her daughter visited once a week and spoke to her for an hour through a pane of glass. Williams-Brown had visited during Cherry\u2019s first week in jail, but Cherry hasn\u2019t heard from her since. \u201cI can\u2019t mentally get myself to go,\u201d Williams-Brown told me.
\n
\nI was taken aback by Cherry\u2019s 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, \u201cThis would be the sink,\u201d and imitated herself washing her hands. \u201cAnd then this force came from behind me,\u201d she said. For the second time, she re\u00ebnacted 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\u2019d been shown the video, in the superintendent\u2019s office and at her sentencing hearing, she hadn\u2019t been able to watch.
\n
\n<\/a>You don\u2019t include much physical description of the people in your stories. Why?<\/span>I find it hard to describe people in a way that doesn\u2019t feel generic. I struggle with that. It can sound so boilerplate and meaningless (\u201cblue eyes and brown hair,\u201d 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\u2019s way of moving, but that generally does not come to me.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n<\/a>You do describe Cherry here, though \u2013 which stopped me. I wasn’t sure why you say she\u2019s beautiful.<\/span>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.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nCherry 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, \u201cI just had an immediate, instinctual reaction to Seth\u2014it was like I had turned into his mom.\u201d When I asked her about her daughter, she said, \u201cShe\u2019s O.K. My mom does a real good job with her. Hold on.\u201d 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.
\n
\nAfter 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 \u201cFrom the Classroom to the Jailhouse,\u201d which would \u201chelp educators not find themselves in the same situation as me.\u201d
\n
\nEvery night, at nine o\u2019clock, 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: \u201cMy prayer is that my children will not be taken away from me.\u201d All the inmates referred to one another by their first names, but they called her Ms. Cherry. She wasn\u2019t sure why, since only a few of them knew that she had been a teacher.
\n
\nIn January, 2018, shortly after the Georgia Advocacy Office requested Seth\u2019s 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\u2019 cases, for possible inclusion in the class-action suit, the student is often transferred out of GNETS.<\/em> (The state has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. A spokesman for the attorney general said that, \u201cas a rule of thumb, we are unable to comment on pending litigation.\u201d)
\n
\nSeth entered first grade at Seminole County Elementary School. His records there describe him as \u201cunable to perform a task for 5 minutes without engaging in physically aggressive or otherwise inappropriate behaviors.\u201d For \u201cstrengths,\u201d his records say that he \u201chas remarkable sense of rhythm.\u201d 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\u2019s mother to recommend a good homeschooling curriculum, and withdrew him from school.
\n
\n<\/a>I wondered whether you considered only using Seth\u2019s first name, given the longevity and accessibility of information on the Internet these days.<\/span>In general, that is something I\u2019m 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.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nIn 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. \u201cOne 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,\u201d 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.)
\n
\nChris Vance, a special-education attorney in Atlanta, said that parents who can afford a lawyer\u2019s fees are usually successful in fighting to prevent their children from going to GNETS<\/em>. They will often hire a psychologist to analyze the student\u2019s 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\u2019s disability affects the way he learns. But, she said, \u201cthose who can\u2019t afford an attorney will often homeschool their children, and so it becomes no education.\u201d
\n
\nLatoya begins Seth\u2019s lessons at eight each morning with the song \u201cJesus Loves Me,\u201d 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\u2019s cousin uses. Latoya\u2019s mother, who recently had a stroke, was on the sofa watching TV.
\n
\nLatoya 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\u2019d done a good job, he clapped and yelled, \u201cYay, yay, yay, yay!\u201d The celebration went on for too long. \u201cLearn!\u201d his sister, Sahrenety, who was on summer vacation, told him. \u201cDo your work.\u201d She sat on the couch next to Latoya\u2019s niece, who also gave Seth pep talks.
\n
\nAfter declaring that \u201cI\u201d 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. \u201cI won\u2019t come if you don\u2019t learn,\u201d Lawrence repeatedly warned Seth. Seth got to \u201cK\u201d before everyone gave up. Latoya was sweating, and her niece was snoring loudly on the couch. A few of Latoya\u2019s customers were already in the kitchen.
\n
\nLatoya 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\u2019t mind if he\u2019s in a special-education classroom, provided he has some contact with nondisabled students during the day. She\u2019s 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, \u201cWhen people talk about \u2018behaviors,\u2019 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\u2019ve missed an opportunity to get to know this child and what he is telling us.\u201d
\n
\nMore than anything, Latoya wants to get out of Donalsonville. She told me, \u201cI feel like everybody here is looking at me, like, Why would she do that to those teachers? She knows her son is bad.\u201d
\n
\nWhenever Latoya goes to town, she must drive past Phyllis Rambo\u2019s house. Recently, when we passed it, her sister Cecelia, who was driving, became sombre. \u201cThat\u2019s Phyllis,\u201d she said, pointing to a one-story brick house. Behind the house was an old swing set where Latoya used to play with Rambo\u2019s daughter Daneisha.
\n
\nLatoya 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. \u201cI think Phyllis was basically just trying to fit in,\u201d she told me. \u201cShe needed people to vent to at work.\u201d (Rambo did not want to talk to me.)
\n
\n<\/a>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.<\/span>I didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 she recognized she was failing \u2014 and not getting it. She quickly became demoralized and felt it was impossible to effectively teach.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nLatoya had never been close with Melissa Williams-Brown\u2014Latoya described her as having been, in high school, part of the \u201cfancy crowd, the kids who basically have what you call a good life\u201d\u2014but, as she had learned more about the GNETS<\/em> system, she had begun to see Williams-Brown\u2019s mistakes in a different light. \u201cI\u2019m not upset with Melissa,\u201d she told me. \u201cI\u2019m not even upset with Ms. Cherry. I\u2019m just upset with the fact that, hey, if that was your\u201d\u2014referring to Wallace\u2014\u201cchild, it wouldn\u2019t have happened like that.\u201d She cried quietly. \u201cThe black women got the blame. I just don\u2019t feel like it\u2019s right. You\u2019ve got three teachers being slandered when they were only doing what you allowed them to do.\u201d
\n
\nIn June, Seth and MaKenzie had a playdate. MaKenzie often asked for Seth, but she lived nearly an hour away, and they hadn\u2019t seen each other for seven months. When Erica parked in front of Latoya\u2019s house, MaKenzie looked up from a magazine and saw Seth sitting under the carport, beside a washing machine.
\n
\n\u201cI love you, Seth,\u201d she said, as she walked up the driveway. \u201cI love this little boy.\u201d 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. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with you?\u201d she said gently.
\n
\nErica apologized to Latoya in advance for the language that MaKenzie might use. \u201cWhen she\u2019s nervous, her words really come out,\u201d she said. \u201cWhatever is on Kenzie\u2019s mind she\u2019s going to tell you.\u201d 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 \u201cThat little girl needs her butt tore up.\u201d But Latoya assured her that it was fine, even when Seth began repeating the word.
\n
\nIn the carport, they listened to the country song \u201cMeant to Be,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.
\n
\nThroughout 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\u2019s 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. \u201cHe can hear five conversations at a time and remember every word\u2014that\u2019s one of his autistic traits,\u201d she told me. \u201cIf you call him bad, he\u2019s going to believe it. He\u2019s going to become exactly who you say he is.\u201d
\n
\n<\/a>Why end the story the way you do?<\/span>I liked the idea of ending it with MaKenzie and Seth\u2019s 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\u2019s the way people respond that can really shape a student\u2019s trajectory.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n 
\n
\nA previous version of this article cited imprecise critiques by scholars who said that gender had been omitted from Morgan and Farkas\u2019s analysis. Morgan and Farkas, who have replicated their findings in several studies, included gender as a covariate and used\u2014but did not rely on\u2014teachers\u2019 subjective assessments.<\/em>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
\n
\n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
\n
\n \n

<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker uses the narrative of one child in one school to reveal the widespread costs of “separate and unequal”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[276],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-linda-shaw"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nShining light on a "shadow" special-ed program in the Georgia public schools - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/01\/22\/shining-light-on-a-shadow-special-ed-program-in-the-georgia-public-schools\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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