School officials in Clover, South Carolina may have some explaining to do. Three families allege that their special-needs kids were subjected to outrageously degrading mistreatment at a local elementary school.
A three-month investigation by WJZY in Charlotte has revealed horrifying accusations against officials at Larne Elementary School in Clover, a fast-growing suburb on the South Carolina side of the Charlotte metro area. Watch here.
Bill and Kim Brittain say they were forced to pull their son, Will, out of Larne because they didn’t feel safe leaving him in his special education class. Will is autistic and has very limited verbal skills. Earlier in the school year, Will’s anxious behavior coming home led Bill and Kim to get permission to come in for observations. At one of those observations, Kim said that when she was getting ready to leave, Will got ready to follow her. When the teacher said that Will couldn’t leave just yet, Will started crying. Kim took that as a sign that “he was trying to tell me something.”
Bill was concerned enough that he sent his son to school with a wire on October 2. That afternoon, when the parents came to pick up Will, his teacher was overheard saying this:
“Okay, I know how hard I work, and how hard you work, and how hard she works. This woman makes me mad. If I find her, I will kill her, I will go to her house and kick her ass.”
When the Brittains heard this, they immediately yanked Will out of school and began homeschooling him. They also filed a formal complaint against the teacher. While district officials say the matter was investigated, there is no written record that the teacher was ever disciplined. District spokesman Bryan Dillon said that both the teacher or her aide denied making the complaint, and they were simply counseled on “the importance of professionalism at all times in the classroom.”
WJZY also spoke with Kim Garhart, who said she pulled her son out of Larne last year after he started acting out at home. He began “regressing” in the bathroom, and was heard yelling “I’m okay, I’m okay, it’s okay” while in the bathroom. He was also very afraid of being in the dark. The final straw came when he began crying, hitting himself, and yelling “no school!”
The two families’ anger turned to outrage when they learned that a now-former teacher’s aide in Larne’s special ed program had claimed to have witnessed horrible mistreatment of special ed kids in 2014. The woman, a 10-year veteran, claimed that she saw one child being dragged into a dark closet when he didn’t want to eat something, and another child who had his shirt yanked off him when he didn’t want to complete a worksheet. She was fired a few months after coming forward, and has sued the district for wrongful termination.
An investigation by the district seemed to corroborate a number of the aide’s claims. Among other things, aides reported seeing kids flipped out of chairs, backed into corners in order to make them count, and allowed to fall out of chairs as a “teaching moment.” Despite this, the district found no evidence of malice or mistreatment, and chalked up the aides’ accounts to “isolated snapshots of teaching methods.” However, the Brittains and Garhart both say that they never learned about the details of the investigation until WJZY obtained them via a FOIA request.
In response to the report, district officials called an emergency meeting for special ed parents on Friday night. According to Matt Aldridge, who attended the meeting, all he heard was “flowery language” that WJZY’s claims were embellished. Aldridge’s daughter, Maddie, is a double amputee who is a student at Larne; like her father, she was born without any shinbones. He says that Maddie was forced to crawl into a bathroom because she wasn’t allowed to bring her wheelchair in there.
Two years ago, Aldridge complained that Larne officials weren’t doing enough to make the playground accessible for Maddie. Maddie’s mother, Renee, told WBTV in Charlotte that the district isn’t doing enough to make the school bus accessible for Maddie, and her self-esteem has been ruined due to the mistreatment.
When Jimmy Carter said that society should be judged on how it treats its weakest members, he probably had situations like this in mind. It is simply incredible that allegations of mistreatment this serious merited such a cursory review. Someone needs to look into this further–and soon.
