Rachel Aviv reports in The New Yorker about the scandalous segregated schools for students with disabilities in Georgia.

Georgia has a separate system of schools for children who act out, children whose teachers want to get rid of them. Federal law requires that children with disabilities be educated in the least restrictive environment, but Georgia ignores it. Children, especially black boys, are warehoused in buildings with ill-trained staff and meager instruction. The schools are part of the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support (GNETS).

An excerpt:

“The first GNETS school, the Rutland Center, founded in 1970, was once housed in the former West Athens Colored School, whose principal promised to teach the “practical duties of life” to the “inferior race.” The concept for gnets was visionary. According to a report by researchers at the University of Georgia, the schools, then called psychoeducational centers, would rely on teachers trained in developmental psychology, ready to “face the assault of bizarre behavior.” They were taught that they might be the “only agent for change in the life of a disturbed child.” Mary Wood, a professor emerita at the University of Georgia, who developed the concept, said that she intended for each program to have a consulting psychiatrist, a social worker, a program evaluator, and a psychologist. But as the first generation of directors retired, in the nineties, “the pieces of the mosaic dropped out,” she said.

“In the two-thousands, funding was cut, and the psychologists who remained seemed to be given free rein. One mother learned that a school psychologist was planning to subject her daughter, who had post-traumatic stress disorder, to fifteen hours of “experiments” devised to provoke misbehavior. “If I go to a mechanic with my car and my car is not doing the problem that I brought it there for, the mechanic can’t diagnose it,” the psychologist explained, at an administrative trial in 2005. “That’s the same situation here.” Over the years, a few parents became so suspicious of the program that they sent their children to school wearing recording devices. On one tape, a teacher could be heard giving a child what someone in the room called a “be-quiet hit.” On another, teachers laughed about how they had put a student in a seclusion room because they needed a break. In 2004, a thirteen-year-old student hanged himself in a Time Out Room, an eight-by-eight concrete cell that could be locked from the outside.

“Leslie Lipson, a lawyer at the Georgia Advocacy Office, a state-funded agency that represents people with disabilities, said that she first learned of the gnets system in 2001, when a mother called to report that her son was put in a seclusion room nearly every day. “It’s all little black boys at this school,” the mother told her. Lipson researched the mother’s claims and then rushed into her boss’s office to tell him that she’d discovered an “insidious, shadow education system.” She said, “I thought I was Erin Brockovich. I was, like, ‘You are not going to believe this! There is an entire segregated system in Georgia! Can we shut this down immediately?’ I was talking a thousand miles a minute, and my boss waited for me to take a breath. He was, like, ‘Um, yeah, these schools have been around since before you were born.’ ”

“Lipson studied the history of the schools, some of which were established in buildings that had housed schools for black children during the Jim Crow era. At a time when there was an outcry against court-ordered integration, gnets became a mechanism for resegregating schools. “It became a way to filter out black boys, who at younger and younger ages are perceived to have behavioral disabilities,” she said.

“The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (idea) requires that students with disabilities learn in the “least restrictive environment,” a loose term that may mean different things depending on the race or the class of the student. Nirmala Erevelles, a professor of disability studies at the University of Alabama, told me that, “in general, when it comes to people of color—particularly poor people of color—we choose the most restrictive possibility,” sending students to “the most segregated and punitive spaces in the public-school system.” According to Beth Ferri, a disability scholar at Syracuse University, idea provided a kind of loophole to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in schools. Now racial segregation continued “under the guise of ‘disability,’ ” she said. “You don’t need to talk about any race anymore. You can just say that the kid is a slow learner, or defiant, or disrespectful.” Ferri said that idea “treated disability as apolitical—a biological fact. It didn’t think about things like racial or cultural bias.”

“Data obtained through records requests reveal that the percentage of students in the gnets program who are black boys is double that of the public schools in the state. Most of the students in gnets are classified as having an “emotional and behavioral disorder,” a vague label that does not correspond to any particular medical diagnosis. A teacher who worked for five years at a gnets program called Coastal Academy, in Brunswick, told me, “We always had a sprinkling of middle-class white kids, maybe two or three, but they didn’t stay long. Everyone made sure they got out. It was the black students who were trapped there. They came in first grade and never left.” Coastal Academy occupies a lot that once held an all-black school, originally called the Freedman’s School, and the percentage of black males in the program is three times that of the districts that the school draws from. The teacher, who worried that she’d lose her job if she were identified, said that public schools in the area would “send the African-American kids to us for doing things like saying the word ‘shit’ in class or pushing a chair in really loudly. They would never, ever—never in a million years—attempt to come at a white parent with that.””

THe next Governor of Georgia must address this scandal and comply with federal law. The state’s obligation is to act in the best interests of the child.