How NYC sets up kids with emotional disabilities for failure: ‘I had more kids in the correctional system than I had graduates’

NEW YORK -- Emmanuel Otuonye graduated as valedictorian from his Brooklyn high school for students with disabilities but is so disgusted with his education that he couldn’t bring himself to attend the ceremony.

The best student at Sunset Park’s Lillian Rashkis High School reads at what his mom estimates is a fifth-grade level and still doesn’t know his multiplication tables.

“I was promised that the school would give me the help I was seeking,” said Emmanuel, 17, who was referred in eighth grade to District 75, a network of separate public schools for significantly disabled children.

“That was just a complete lie. There was not a tiny piece of truth to it.”

Emmanuel has ADHD and difficulty controlling his behavior, earning him an “emotional disturbance” designation and a referral to Lillian Rashkis.

But instead of a therapeutic environment, he said he found chaos — students regularly fighting and smoking marijuana in the hallways while staff looked on, classes with no homework or textbooks, and no extracurricular offerings. Emmanuel’s accounts were backed up by four other current and former families and staff at the high school.

As a result, Emmanuel has languished academically, said his mom, Julie Simmons. “He’s not ready to graduate,” Simmons said. “I feel in my heart they don’t know what to do with these kids, so they gave up on them.”

Roughly 26,000 students with disabilities deemed too complex for regular schools to handle are in District 75. Students there frequently have autism or physical and developmental disabilities like traumatic brain injuries or cerebral palsy.

Some of the district’s specialized programs are well-regarded and serve as a lifeline for students who need individualized attention away from the pressures and distractions of traditional classrooms.

But for thousands of kids with emotional disabilities sent to District 75, it often serves as little more than a holding ground, according to interviews with 10 current and former district families and staffers from multiple schools.

“It’s become outrageous what’s happening on a large-scale basis,” said Dawn Yuster, the director of the School Justice Project at Advocates for Children. “What we’re doing is pushing students out of school, not educating them, setting them up… especially kids who are Black and brown, to end up in the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Just 9% of District 75 students who entered ninth grade in 2013 obtained a diploma within six years, compared to 52% of public school students with disabilities and 86% of all students, according to data compiled by the Independent Budget Office.

The majority of District 75 students receive an alternative “skills” or “career” credential offered to kids unable to pass state standardized exams. The credential doesn’t confer a diploma and is not recognized by colleges or the military, severely restricting students’ options after high school.

District 75 students are also far more likely than their peers to cross paths with the police, with 21% of incidents of police handcuffing kids in school between 2018 and 2020 happening in District 75, despite the district enrolling only 2% of city students. Of school 911 calls, 9% come from District 75, according to an analysis of city data by Advocates for Children.

“From the time I started, I had more kids in the correctional system than I had graduates,” said one District 75 staffer.

“You’re putting all these kids with these emotional disabilities in one area,” added the staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They don’t have examples and they’re just feeding off each other.”

Emmanuel’s journey to District 75 started in preschool, when school officials first classified him as “emotionally disturbed.” Nearly half of the 8,400 city students classified as “emotionally disturbed” are Black and 90% are poor, even though only 25% of city pupils are Black and 72% are poor, according to 2021 DOE data.

Most of the mainstream schools Emmanuel attended prior, “didn’t know what to do with him,” including Middle School 51 in Park Slope, where he got into several fights with a classmate in eighth grade, his mother said.

In Emmanuel’s first several weeks at Lillian Rashkis in 2019, a classmate’s nose was broken in a fight — a level of violence that was commonplace at the school, multiple parents and students said.

“It’s anarchy, no one could control the students,” said Keron Simon, a former Lillian Rashkis student who graduated last year and was also classified as emotionally disturbed.

Early in his time at the school, Simon was punched so hard by a classmate that the blow dislodged a bone near his ear. He said he watched another kid get “disfigured” after being jumped by students right outside school.

“A lot of my friends literally said, ‘this is where hey throw all the riff-raff, all the people they deem unfit for society,’” Simon said.

That kind of chaos is not unique to Lillian Rashkis.

At the Queens Transition Center in South Jamaica, “kids could roam the hallway, smoke, fight, they could do whatever they want,” recalled Melinda Perez, whose son, Alexander, was a freshman there in 2015.

Alexander dropped out after less than three years. He’s now on Rikers Island, preparing to start a 3 1/2 year prison sentence for robbery, Perez said.

“I can’t blame the school 100% but I do believe they have blame in that,” Perez said. “If he was given the services he was supposed to attain from a young age, he would have been more successful.”

District 75 follows a distinct educational model. Kids are grouped largely according to their disability — which determines how many students and teachers are in the classroom with them. That approach results in children of different ages, grades and academic levels often being expected to absorb the same lesson, students and staffers said.

The academic frustration for kids stuck in mismatched classes fuels further behavior problems, staffers said, creating a vicious cycle.

“If you can’t address their academic deficiencies, they’re going to act out,” one district employee said.

Teachers don’t assign homework or distribute textbooks, multiple students and parents said.

“It’s horrible. I can’t see what my child is learning. I can’t help him,” said Ingrid Sanders, the mother of a current student at Rashkis.

Homework plays a purposefully small role in District 75 because many kids need the support of teachers to complete their work, and said the school mostly uses online curriculum in lieu of textbooks, said Caroylne Quintana, the DOE’s deputy chancellor for teaching and learning.

Making matters worse, many District 75 schools offer few outlets like extracurricular activities or work programs. Some that share buildings with traditional public schools can’t even access shared spaces like the gym, auditorium and school yard.

“Our students have not been outside all year… to me that looks like they’re institutionalized,” said a staff member at a Bronx District 75 program, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Education Department officials say they’re tackling the problem from multiple angles, installing a new, reform-minded principal at Rashkis, rolling out new training and curriculum for District 75 staff, and expanding work and extracurricular opportunities for kids.

“We are not here to maintain the status quo,” Quintana said. “Our students who have been classified as having had an emotional disability are historically marginalized. I know that this administration feels a sense of urgency in making sure we address their needs.”

Principal Heather Miller, an 18-year special education teacher and parent of a child with an emotional disability, took the helm at Lillian Rashkis in January pledging to do things differently. She’s launched new programs like a horticulture lab, is training staff in restorative justice, and says violent incidents are down 40% since she started compared to the first half of the school year.

There also are some promising efforts underway to shift the city’s approach for educating kids with emotional disabilities, including a pilot program to help traditional public schools educate kids with emotional disturbance classifications in the same classrooms as their mainstream peers — emulating the popular Nest program for kids with autism.

That pilot started in one Bronx classroom last year and will expand to seven classes in the South Bronx’s District 9 next year, the DOE said.

But some educators say little will change until the city rethinks the concept of District 75 from top to bottom.

“We are willing to acknowledge that inclusion is the direction we want to go for more of our students,” Quintana said, adding that District 75 will continue to play a role for “students who may need different placement.”

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