New York City Sends $30 Million a Year to School With History of Giving Kids Electric Shocks

Propublica

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.

City education officials insist they never recommend the school and fight requests by parents to place children there. Families simply enroll their kids and then take the city to court to force it to pay tuition, officials say.

But Judge Rotenberg officials told ProPublica that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has made it easier for New York City kids to go to school at the Center.