The Judge Rotenberg Center, a Boston-area school for kids with severe developmental disabilities and behavior disorders, has earned national notoriety for a long record of brutal techniques to keep children in line.
Electric shocks. Restraints. Hunger.
Federal and state authorities have repeatedly scrutinized the school. Even the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on torture has chimed in.
But New York City kids are still being sent there. Indeed, nearly 90 percent of the school’s students—121 of 137 kids—are from New York City, including 29 who enrolled this year. New York’s taxpayers send the Center $30 million a year.
The flow has continued despite records obtained by ProPublica showing the Center has repeatedly violated New York state rules, including by tying children down with leg and waist straps to punish them. The Center has received a string of warning letters from New York State and has been subject to two state inquiries over the past five years—neither of them previously disclosed to the public.
[For more of this story, written by Heather Vogell and Annie Waldman, go to http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/sending-30-million-year-school-history-giving-kids-electric-shocks-97501/]
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