Children's Health Defense By Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen
The Garrison School is part of a special education district that had students arrested at the highest rate in the country. It had pledged to change how it disciplines kids after a ProPublica-Chicago Tribune investigation and subsequent federal probe.
A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.
The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where, at one time, students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country.
The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.
It’s been about eight months since the U.S. Department of Education (ED) directed Garrison to change the way it responded to the behavior of students with disabilities.
The ED said it would monitor the Four Rivers Special Education District, which operates Garrison, following a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation in 2022 that found the school frequently involved police and used controversial disciplinary methods.
But the ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.
The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the ED to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district in South Dakota.
In the April incident, Xander Reed, who has autism and does not speak, did not stop playing with blocks and go to P.E. when he was told to, according to a police report.
Xander then “became agitated and fell to the ground,” the report said. When he refused to get up, a substitute teacher, Rhea Drake, dragged him to the gym.
Another staff member took a photo and alerted school leadership. Principal Amy Haarmann told police that Drake’s actions “were not an acceptable practice at the school,” the police report said.
Xander’s family asked to press charges. Drake, who had been working in Xander’s classroom for more than a month, was charged about three weeks later with misdemeanor battery, records show. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney told ProPublica that he and Drake did not want to comment for this story…
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