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Kerch
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11 Oct 2021, 7:49 am

I couldn't find a post about this on the forum surprisingly, but it's something that needs awareness because it's just bloody awful.

The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center is a "day and residential school" in Massachusetts that aims to provide "effective education and treatment to both emotionally disturbed students with conduct, behavior, emotional, and/or psychiatric problems, as well as those with intellectual disabilities or on the autism spectrum".

They've become controversial for using aversion therapies, physical restraints, sensory deprivation, solitary confienement, electric shocks, witholding food, corporal punishment and combinations of these things.
Nobody's been prosecuted and the facility remains open.

Their website: https://www.judgerc.org/

Wikipedia page (with assorted references and links): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Rot ... nal_Center

To sum it up, it's a torture facility for autistics and generally disabled people.
And I thought you ought to know.



ASPartOfMe
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11 Oct 2021, 2:15 pm

We know, wish we didn’t.
Court Overturns FDA Ban On Shock Device For ASD Students

Autistic Children Being Tortured With Electric Shock

NY Parents Against 'Prison-Like' Facility For ASD Clients
Discussion of the Judge Rotenberg Center begins on the 2nd post

Those are recent threads. There have been threads and posts about that prison since I joined WP in 2013. Disability Rights Organizations have been unsuccessfully trying to close that place down since the 1980s.


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carlos55
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13 Oct 2021, 9:59 am

I’m sure it’s a sad and horrible place, an interesting question would be how the kids end up in there?

What distinguishes these kids from other autistic kids that are brought up in the family home.

Have they been abandoned by parents? We’re they unable to control them? Were they not able to prescribe drugs as an alternative?

I’ve heard dark stories on UK news of autistic kids having meltdowns police being called and them being placed in an institution like place for many months or years even.

Something happens after the police are called where they are assessed unable to live in the community. I don’t know how that works I only understand basics of uk the mental health act that basically says those a danger to themselves or others can be incarcerated for an unlimited time period but I thought it usually applied to psychosis not autism?


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ASPartOfMe
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13 Oct 2021, 10:53 am

carlos55 wrote:
I’m sure it’s a sad and horrible place, an interesting question would be how the kids end up in there?

New York City Sends $30 Million a Year to School With History of Giving Kids Electric Shocks - ProPublica December 23, 2014
Quote:
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 repeatedlyscrutinized 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.

“I’venseen a change since Mayor de Blasio came on board,” says Glenda Crookes, the Center’s executive director. City lawyers appear to be settling a lot of the cases, she said, adding, “It doesn’t seem like the parents have to go to hearings anymore.”

A de Blasio spokesman confirmed the Center is benefiting from a new policy in which the city doesn’t fight cases involving special needs kids in which it “is unlikely to prevail.” The change was part of an effort the city unveiled earlier this year streamlining the process for the city to cover the cost of private school or services for special needs children. Such cases have been fraught with conflict and litigation in recent years.

Councilman Vincent Gentile, a longtime critic of the Rotenberg Center, says the issue goes beyond de Blasio. “I’ve said long ago that State Ed and New York City Department of Education have to take a stand on this,” Gentile says, “and up to now, they’ve been unwilling.”

“The city’s department of education is not putting up a big fight to keep kids out,” Gentile says.

Once kids are at Judge Rotenberg Center — with or without the city paying — it becomes almost impossible for the city to remove a child if the family doesn’t agree.

Many of the students Rotenberg accepts have tried to hurt themselves or others.

State and federal filings show the Center has employed Bracewell & Giuliani, former Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s firm, as well as Albany powerhouse Malkin & Ross. Since 2010, the nonprofit school has spent about $770,000 lobbying officials in Washington D.C., Massachusetts and New York, including an effort to counter further restrictions on the use of aversive therapy by New York’s education department.

To recruit students, the Center runs radio ads and has a toll-free number, reaching parents who are desperate for help. “We get a lot of cold calls from parents,” Crookes, the executive director says. About 90 percent of the school’s kids are minorities.

The Rotenberg Center has also worked with an advocacy agency, Joan A. Harrington & Associates, that is listed on a city website as a resource for parents of special needs children.

The advocates are supposed to be independent experts, tasked with helping parents navigate government bureaucracy to find the best services for their child, yet Harrington acknowledged to ProPublica that she has previously been paid by the Rotenberg Center.

Harrington also shares an office and administrative staff with attorney Anton Papakhin, who is paid by the Rotenberg Center to represent parents embroiled in court battles to send their children to the school, keep them there or get behavioral interventions approved by courts. He has received an average of $470,000 a year from the Rotenberg Center over the last five years, according to tax filings.

Papakhin represented the parents of most of the 29 New York City students who were enrolled at Rotenberg in 2014, the Center said. Papakhin says he also works with other schools and that there is no conflict.

While families of former students have filed several lawsuits against the Center alleging mistreatment, other parents continue to be the school’s most outspoken supporters.


I can not find newer information about this corruption.


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carlos55
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13 Oct 2021, 2:04 pm

Quote:
To recruit students, the Center runs radio ads and has a toll-free number, reaching parents who are desperate for help. “We get a lot of cold calls from parents,” Crookes, the executive director says.


Quote:
who is paid by the Rotenberg Center to represent parents embroiled in court battles to send their children to the school, keep them there?


Quote:
other parents continue to be the school’s most outspoken supporters.


So, its parents dumping their severely autistic children there, not kids being forcefully taken by the state.

This creates new problems, if their natural parents are unable or unwilling to take them and there is no Rotenberg center where do these kids go?

The only place is care or adoption, would there be a queue of neurotypical parents lining up to adopt a severely autistic child that is maybe ID, nonverbal, self-harms and destructive over a cute NT child from a drug addict mom who fell on hard times? probably not.

So, these kids just languish in a care home somewhere for years? Are care home staff trained to deal with these kinds of kids, probably not, so what do they do just build another Rotenberg Educational Center and call it a different name.

Reminds me of one of those BASIC computer language programs I wrote as a kid :-

10. Close Rotenberg Educational Center
20 Parents refuse to take kids back
30. Move kids to orphanage / care home & put on adoption waiting list
40. Adoption attempts fail
50. Move children into long term care home shared with NT kids
60. Care home staff can`t cope with severe autism & demand they go to a "specialist centre"
70. Build another Rotenberg Educational Center
80. Change its name move kids there, employ same staff
90. Advocates campaign to close new center
100. GOTO 10


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ASPartOfMe
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13 Oct 2021, 6:03 pm

carlos55 wrote:
Quote:
To recruit students, the Center runs radio ads and has a toll-free number, reaching parents who are desperate for help. “We get a lot of cold calls from parents,” Crookes, the executive director says.


Quote:
who is paid by the Rotenberg Center to represent parents embroiled in court battles to send their children to the school, keep them there?


Quote:
other parents continue to be the school’s most outspoken supporters.


So, its parents dumping their severely autistic children there, not kids being forcefully taken by the state.

This creates new problems, if their natural parents are unable or unwilling to take them and there is no Rotenberg center where do these kids go?

The only place is care or adoption, would there be a queue of neurotypical parents lining up to adopt a severely autistic child that is maybe ID, nonverbal, self-harms and destructive over a cute NT child from a drug addict mom who fell on hard times? probably not.

So, these kids just languish in a care home somewhere for years? Are care home staff trained to deal with these kinds of kids, probably not, so what do they do just build another Rotenberg Educational Center and call it a different name.

Reminds me of one of those BASIC computer language programs I wrote as a kid :-

10. Close Rotenberg Educational Center
20 Parents refuse to take kids back
30. Move kids to orphanage / care home & put on adoption waiting list
40. Adoption attempts fail
50. Move children into long term care home shared with NT kids
60. Care home staff can`t cope with severe autism & demand they go to a "specialist centre"
70. Build another Rotenberg Educational Center
80. Change its name move kids there, employ same staff
90. Advocates campaign to close new center
100. GOTO 10


Ah, good old Basic
10. Close Rotenberg facility
20. Move them to a facility that does not torture their patients
30. END


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CarlM
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28 Oct 2021, 5:29 pm

Quote:
New York City Sends $30 Million a Year to School With History of Giving Kids Electric Shocks - ProPublica December 23, 2014
I believe New York State will not send kids there anymore. They probably end up there when other schools won't accept them. There are lot's of therapeutic school around. None of the others are using electric shock though.


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