Facing mounting pressure and at least one criminal investigation over its use of shock therapy on its wards, a Massachusetts clinic that is home to several District of Columbia students has gone on the defensive, saying that it is the last best hope for many otherwise lost children.
“Most of the students at the Judge Rotenberg Center have been rejected by, expelled by, and/or failed in every other program,” Rotenberg spokesman Ernest Corrigan wrote in an statement to The Examiner. “The very same children who have come to Rotenberg and have had their lives transformed.”
D.C. has paid millions to Rotenberg to house dozens of mentally ill or disabled children for more than a decade. The school is one of the only ones in the country authorized to use “aversive therapy,” like shock treatments, on its wards.
The Examiner reported last week that Massachusetts authorities had opened a criminal investigation after three wards were shocked on the orders of a prank caller posing as clinic founder Matthew Israel. After that report, Peter Nickles, D.C.’s top legal adviser, told The Examiner that the last D.C. children in the school would be pulled out within 90 days.
Corrigan said that the school reported itself immediately to authorities after learning about the prank and he said Rotenberg has taken steps to make sure it doesn’t recur.
In his statement, Corrigan said Rotenberg has been the victim of “a disturbing lack of understanding.”
He said “only one” of D.C.’s children, a 17-year-old girl, was hooked up to an electric backpack — and the treatment has worked miracles.
“When she entered JRC, [she] was an overweight, suicidal, hallucinatory, heavily drugged school runaway,” Corrigan said. “Today, as a result of JRC’s treatment, she is no longer violent, is a model student, requires no psychotropic drugs, is learning new skills, is gaining self-esteem and is able to go home and visit her mother for the first time in years.”
Corrigan said the shock therapy has been overplayed and that the clinic “relies primarily on the use of positive programming and education procedures” to help its wards.
D.C. will spend nearly $210 million to ship about 2,400 disabled students to schools like Rotenberg in fiscal 2008. Critics say that bureaucrats haven’t bothered to keep track of the children shipped there and have exposed them to abuse and neglect in schools from Colorado to Florida.
Even city leaders acknowledge that the special education system is in crisis. Nickles, now the interim attorney general, has referred to D.C. special education as “a snake pit.”
Got a tip on special education? Call Bill Myers at 202-459-4956 or send him an e-mail, bmyers@dcexaminer.
