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Allegations resurface at unique school for
autistic children
By Ellen Barry, Boston Globe,
10/1/2002
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org
and www.educationnews.org.
When the Boston Higashi School lets out for the end of the
day, dozens of severely autistic children line up, their hands
at their sides, like so many soldiers.
The Randolph school has won passionate loyalty from parents
who, before turning to the unorthodox Japanese training
technique, had watched for years as their children flapped
obsessively, scratched at their own faces, and banged their
heads against walls. But John and Karen Tedeman, whose son,
Scott, attended the school for 14 years, allege in a civil
lawsuit that behind closed doors, Higashi teachers used brutal
techniques that resulted in years of unexplained bruises and
abrasions.
A new raft of allegations, detailed yesterday in the Wall
Street Journal, has revived old questions about the Higashi
training method, brought to Massachusetts in 1987 at the
urging of Kitty Dukakis, the wife of the former governor. Kiyo
Kitahara, who founded the first Higashi school in Japan,
believed that autistic children should not be allowed to
withdraw and behave obsessively and drew them into highly
structured group activities, such as musical performances and
a daily 2- or 3-mile run. Although many children are recieving
medication when they are admitted to Higashi, medication is
not used there.
Complaints about Higashi instructors' discipline surfaced in
the late 1980s, and the state Office of Child Care Services
appointed a monitor for a year after investigators found that
students had unexplained injuries. But parents rushed to
defend the school, and yesterday, as the Tedeman lawsuit
became national news, they did the same.
''You see these kids achieving things that you never
thought... they would achieve,'' said Eileen Naughton, the
president of Time magazine, whose 11-year-old son attends
Higashi. ''He's sleeping better, he's eating better. They're
opening his world up in a way that in nine years, with a lot
of therapy and a lot of intervention and with my love, we
weren't getting. We were in quicksand.''
Boston Higashi is among more than 200 private special
education schools approved by the Department of Education for
Massachusetts students to attend on state-financed tuition,
education officials said. Tuition is about $32,000 a year and
board costs $90,000 a year. The Department of Education, which
oversees safety regulations at the school, reviewed the
school's handling of the Tedeman incident and found that
Boston Higashi had managed it properly, officials said.
''There's no excusing what happened. But from our perspective
it was handled properly,'' department spokeswoman Heidi B.
Perlman said. ''You can't vilify the whole school's program.
The school is world-renowned.''
Reports of student injuries at special education schools are
not unusual, Perlman said. In the last two years the
department has received 15 reports of incidents at Higashi,
but far more have come from other schools, she said.
''The reality is we're dealing with human beings and human
beings make mistakes,'' Perlman said. ''These are people
working for relatively low pay, they work for very long hours,
and they work with aggressive students.''
The Wall Street Journal investigation detailed 17 abuse
allegations lodged against the school since 1995, including
the Tedeman family's account of finding bloody abrasions on
their then 18-year-old son's back from being dragged across a
carpet. Two other complaints were reported in July - in one, a
staff member was caught on a surveillance camera pulling a
student's hair, and in another, an instructor was reported for
forcing a child into a ''push-up'' position, which is against
the school's policy.
In April, another former worker was charged with assault and
battery with a dangerous weapon after allegedly hitting one
autistic girl with a hairbrush, and assault and battery from a
separate incident. The worker, Medine Wooley, was acquitted,
said Norfolk District Attorney William Keating's spokesman
David Traub. The man charged with assaulting Scott Tedeman - a
24-year-old Japanese man named Masataka Kunihiro - returned to
Japan and a warrant for his arrest is still active, on charges
of permitting serious injury to a disabled person.
In three of these four cases, the school itself initiated the
abuse complaint and was quick to dismiss offending staff
members, said Robert Fantasia, president of the Higashi
school. And only four of the 17 abuse allegations have been
substantiated, said John Hahesy, a Higashi spokesman.
''Our kids are very challenging. There are no kids on
medication,'' Fantasia said. ''If you have 250 kids 24 hours a
day, and they play soccer, they're going to come back with
bruises.''
In the first instance, he said, the child was having
''deliberate bowel movements'' every five minutes, and the
instructor pulled the child's hair ''out of frustration'' -
and then left the country the next day, preventing
prosecution.
The second offender was fired, and Kunihiro was also fired
before he left the country, Fantasia said. ''Scotty can be a
really contentious kid. Scotty was on the floor on his back,
kicking at Kuni, Kuni dragged him about a meter, and he got
rug burns,'' Fantasia said.
Through their lawyers, John and Karen Tedeman refused to
comment for this story. But other parents said they were
furious at the lawsuit's potential damage to the school. Robin
Sims, who served with Tedeman in a parents' group, said she
''[cries] every day'' that the state of New Jersey ruled to
stop paying her daughter's tuition. The lawsuit, she said,
''sounds like a fund-raiser. You can't tell me that your child
was abused and all this happened and nine months later you
take your child out of the school.''
A lawyer for the Tedeman family said Scott's parents were
searching for a new school for him, and that Kunihiro had been
suspended after they reported their suspicions of abuse.
Sims's fierce defense of the school sounds familiar to Marlene
Ross of Framingham, whose son attended Higashi for one year in
the late 1980s and who filed complaints about abuse by its
instructors. When she acted against the school, she said, she
was ostracized by other parents.
''Parents are so desperate for some kind of miracles that they
will go into denial when any doubt is raised,'' Ross said. ''I
understand the denial because I lived with it at the time.''
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