Raub, who was new to the private schools role in 2018, said he would approach the complaints differently now that he has more experience. He pointed to a 2020 case in which OSPI received abuse allegations at another private school and conducted a detailed review of student restraint and isolation files, school policies and staff qualifications.
But the department continued to be hands-off when presented with concerns about Northwest SOIL, including an April 2021 allegation of emotional and physical abuse against an Everett student by a Northwest SOIL staffer.
Raub instructed the district to investigate and said he would be there for “continued support” if it “uncovers a broader, more systemic issue.” OSPI said the district and family never followed up. Everett said it investigated but “did not conclusively find evidence to report back” to OSPI.
This month, the agency said it was investigating a complaint about Northwest SOIL’s Redmond campus after a parent reported inadequate staffing and their student coming home with injuries — the same sort of allegation that has flowed to the state for years.
Because of the diffuse oversight system, many complaints never made it to OSPI. Less than four months after the Everett allegation, Green, Northwest SOIL’s top administrator across all campuses, detailed a series of complaints in her resignation letter, ranging from a lack of training to cutting assistants’ hours that school districts had already paid for. She also sent it to Tacoma Public Schools.
But with no requirement to forward Green’s letter to OSPI, Tacoma never did so, and neither did Northwest SOIL, leaving the state missing a critical piece of the puzzle.
Other states have stricter standards
In many ways, Washington’s special education funding system has exacerbated oversight problems at private schools like Northwest SOIL.
The state reformed its funding model in 1995, realizing that school districts needed more money to educate students with disabilities. It developed a safety net fund to help districts pay for special education services.
But the program prohibits those funds from being used to train teachers in public schools. And while a 2012 state Supreme Court ruling on school financing, known as the McCleary decision, resulted in the Legislature sending billions of state dollars to public schools, lawmakers sidestepped special education.
With limited options, the districts came to rely on the private schools. The safety net model “made it easier for districts to say, ‘Let’s place the student at Northwest SOIL,’” said Tucker, the Pacific Lutheran professor.
But, unlike in other states, Washington lawmakers have not adopted key oversight and transparency regulations to protect students and taxpayers.
In Massachusetts, similar private schools are required to report all instances of restraint and isolation directly to the state, allowing central oversight.
This isn’t true in Washington. While the state tracks isolation and restraint incidents in public schools with a goal of reducing their use, it doesn’t at private schools that receive public money.
The only institution with the complete picture is the private school itself, but Northwest SOIL claims it doesn’t have to disclose the restraint and isolation reports because it’s a private company. The Times filed a public records lawsuit against Northwest SOIL’s parent company after the school denied a request for those reports and other records typically available from public schools. The lawsuit is pending.
Without information from either the state or the school, the Times and ProPublica requested copies of restraint and isolation records inside Northwest SOIL from 34 school districts. Only 27 districts provided reports, and many documents were missing.
The Bethel School District, for instance, destroyed a year's worth of reports “in error,” an official said, and had to retrieve paper copies of others from a warehouse. A district that sent dozens of students to Northwest SOIL turned over fewer restraint reports than a district that sent only one.
Raub said the department is working to improve data collection and acknowledged it “would be very useful” to track restraint and isolation.
Washington also doesn’t demand state inspections and has vague staffing obligations. It requires an unspecified number of certified teachers and only one special education teacher per school. A representative from a district has to visit every three years.
In contrast, California requires periodic state inspections, a teacher with special education credentials in every classroom and a specific ratio of students per teacher, typically 14-to-1.
Stricter standards allowed former students and staff in California to build a whistleblower case when similar problems cropped up at Universal Health Services schools there. The company shut down the last of those campuses in 2013 shortly after settling the case, without any admission of wrongdoing.
Reykdal, the Washington state superintendent, said stricter staff qualifications could improve the quality of education and reduce staff turnover at private schools.
“I think it's likely that our Legislature has to say, ‘When it comes to basic ed, we're not going to have different expectations for the private sector than we do for the public sector,’” he said. “And they should up their game on that.”