Four educators say they were forced out of a therapeutic school in Brattleboro after raising concerns about student mistreatment. While administrators at the I.N.S.P.I.R.E. School for Autism deny the allegations, the state has opened an investigation, at least one local school district has pulled students from the school and several other parents say they have made the same decision.
Educators Melissa McClure, Violet Witt and Al Mitton say that last spring they had grown increasingly alarmed about the small therapeutic school’s treatment of its students. In a meeting with school administrators on April 9, they played a prerecorded video in which they pleaded for better staff training, richer programming and more accountability.
“The truth is that students are berated, yelled at, belittled, and exposed to various forms of verbal and emotional abuse. This happens, not once in a while as an aberration, but with astonishing regularity,” Witt said in the nearly hour-long video, which was shared with Vermont Public.
In the days after they viewed the presentation, school co-directors Brendan Tubbs and Karen Steinbeck asked members of the group for more information about the incidents, saying they wanted to do a thorough investigation.
The educators say they were skeptical. There were cameras everywhere in the school, they reasoned, and they had only put their presentation together to highlight a problem that they believed administrators had long ignored.
“It was a pervasive culture that they were very much aware of,” McClure said.
The educators said they were also spooked that administrators demanded to know the names of other staff members at I.N.S.P.I.R.E. who worked with the group to compile their presentation.
The week after their presentation, Witt, Mitton, and McClure say they were fired for refusing to participate in the school’s investigation, and a fourth educator, contracted occupational therapist Suzy West, who had appeared in the video, said she was forced to cancel her contract for the same reason.
Tubbs and Steinbeck did not respond to a list of questions sent via email. Through a lawyer, school officials denied that they had retaliated against the four educators for speaking out.
“There is never a day where the I.N.S.P.I.R.E. School would terminate someone for coming forward with concerns about the treatment of students,” Pietro Lynn, a Burlington-based attorney, said in an interview.
Citing confidentiality around personnel matters, Lynn said he could not discuss the details of the educators’ departure. But he noted that state law requires those who work in schools to report suspected cases of abuse and neglect to the Department for Children and Families.
“There are some things that employees do not have an ability to withhold, and those things are the specifics of allegations having to do with misconduct that could be abuse or neglect. People who work at the I.N.S.P.I.R.E. School from the very bottom to the very top are mandatory reporters. They must report, and there is no exception to that rule,” Lynn said.
But McClure, Witt and Mitton say they did in fact report their concerns to DCF before they were fired.
McClure shared a screenshot of a phone call with the state’s child abuse hotline on April 12, which lasted for over an hour. McClure, Mitton, and Witt were all present for the call, she said.
An intake worker with DCF told the group that their allegations likely did not rise to the level of child abuse, according to McClure, but recommended that they reach out to the Agency of Education, which oversees private schools.
West didn’t participate in the April 12 call with DCF, in part because she wasn’t present for certain incidents, but also because she assumed that what she had seen wouldn’t meet DCF’s thresholds. And she said that the school’s leaders appeared more concerned with reporting information to them than to DCF.
The group did ultimately bring their concerns to the Agency of Education, and a spokesperson for the agency, Lindsey Hedges, confirmed that the state had initiated an investigation into the school. Because the investigation is ongoing, she said she could provide no further details.
At least one school district has already removed certain students from I.N.S.P.I.R.E. Tate Erickson, the director of special education for the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union, which serves Brattleboro and surrounding towns, wrote in an email that the supervisory union had “significant concerns” and had transitioned “several students back to public school in light of the allegations and investigation that is currently underway.”
Therapeutic schools like I.N.S.P.I.R.E. only serve a sliver of Vermont’s school population, but they play a vital role. In exchange for taking on high-need children with autism, I.N.S.P.I.R.E. is authorized to charge public school districts up to $99,840 a year per student, according to the Agency of Education. The school’s maximum capacity is 23 students, according to the state.
The attitude, I kind of came to learn over time, was that the kids were to blame.Al Mitton, former educator at the I.N.S.P.I.R.E. School for Autism
Despite its premium price, the school’s former workers say that they were struck by I.N.S.P.I.R.E.'s general lack of professionalism. The students’ needs are highly complex. They sometimes could not speak, required help going to the bathroom, or struggled with aggression. But staff training was scant, the former employees said, individualized education programs — the federally required document that outlines each child's services and goals — were haphazardly updated, and there were few established protocols.
“The attitude, I kind of came to learn over time, was that the kids were to blame,” Mitton said. “Whatever challenges or problems that they were encountering, it was their fault. And the staff dealt with that — and still deal with that — largely through punishment and through humiliation.”
Former I.N.S.P.I.R.E. educators also said staff at the school were quick to restrain and seclude children. Such practices, while legal if done and documented properly, are meant to be used as a last resort. But the former I.N.S.P.I.R.E. educators said that children were routinely sent to the school’s seclusion room as punishment.
“It's meant to be for safety, and nothing else,” West said. “It was frequently used for like, ‘You're being bad.’”
One former I.N.S.P.I.R.E. parent said she witnessed a restraint firsthand that made her deeply uncomfortable.
Neila Ingersoll said she was trying to coax her daughter to go inside the school one day during a morning drop-off when a staff member stepped in and briefly put their arm around the child’s throat.
“I started freaking out, because I was like, ‘Hey, what are you doing? What are you doing?’ And then the director, Brendan Tubbs, came out and was like, ‘Neila, go. You're making this worse.’ So I drove away,” Ingersoll recalled.
The school didn’t produce paperwork about the restraint until after Ingersoll requested it, she said. Sam Ingersoll says in some cases, his stepdaughter's behavior can warrant physical restraint. But he was disturbed that the school appeared to downplay the incident to their child's case manager, and did not document it until the family demanded it.
“It was a big red flag for me,” Sam Ingersoll said.
Their daughter was in Mitton’s class when he was fired, but the Ingersolls say school administrators didn’t bother to notify them about the change. Instead, they said, a classroom aide “reached out to me on social media and was like, ‘Hey, um, here are some things I think you need to be aware of,’’’ Neila Ingersoll recalled. (Tubbs and Steinbeck did not respond to questions about the Ingersolls’ accounts.)
Their daughter now attends Brattleboro Union High School, which has even hired the aide that worked with their daughter at I.N.S.P.I.R.E. She’s doing well, the Ingersolls said, and is excited to be in high school.
Other parents will not so easily find alternatives. Tiffany Emery-Riendeau, a former I.N.S.P.I.R.E. parent who decided to remove her son from the school after the former employees’ allegations surfaced, is now sending her 10-year-old two hours away to a residential school in New Hampshire. There’s nothing closer.
“One of my biggest fears as a parent, and especially as a parent whose child is non-speaking, is abuse, and you're sending them to this place that you should be able to trust. And that didn't happen,” she said.
The former I.N.S.P.I.R.E. employees say they’re also concerned about how slow the state has been to respond to their concerns. After an initial fact-finding interview with Witt, West, Mitton, McClure and two other I.N.S.P.I.R.E. educators in April, officials at the Agency of Education didn’t notify the group they had opened an investigation into the school until September — nearly five months later.
Their experience has left them anxious that the publicly-funded private schools who serve Vermont’s most vulnerable students may not receive adequate oversight.
“I do not mean to imply that every independent school out there is bad at all, but it seems more left to the whims and the motivation and involvement of the particular people running the private independent school,” McClure said.
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