The story behind the investigation

By Doug Meigs, IRE & NICAR; Mike Reicher and Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times; Amy Silverman, Arizona Daily Star; Beth Hundsdorfer and Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois

ProPublica supports local and regional investigative projects through its Local Reporting Network. These newsroom collaborations have exposed myriad failures by systems meant to support the most vulnerable members of society.

“Whether they are living in an institution or in a community, our reporting shows, time and again, how the safety net can fail them. Abuse and neglect are all too common,” said Sarah Blustain, who runs the Local Reporting Network at ProPublica. “Our local partners know where the trouble spots are — often, they hear about it from community members who have been harmed. Our program helps them to report the story thoroughly, to make sure people can’t look away.” 

Since launching in 2018, the Local Reporting Network has featured some 80 newsrooms across the United States, and the network continues to grow. ProPublica announced in April that it will be taking one new project from each U.S. state through the end of 2029 as part of its 50 State Initiative.

Reporters at The Seattle Times, Arizona Daily Star and Capitol News Illinois shared the stories behind their collaborations with ProPublica spanning several years.

Journalists hold “invisible schools” accountable for funding

By Mike Reicher and Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times

On the margins of Washington state’s special education system is a network of privately run schools that advertise an array of expensive therapeutic services. They offer public school districts an option for students with severe disabilities.

But once the students — and the tens of millions of tax dollars that follow them — enter these buildings, public accountability and transparency stop. 

The Washington state education department didn’t track how many kids were restrained or locked in isolation rooms at these schools. It didn’t track test scores or graduation rates. For many years the state couldn’t even count how many public school students attended these campuses. They were effectively invisible schools, despite serving the state’s most vulnerable students with disabilities. 

Advocates within that community, however, raised concerns to The Seattle Times about the largest chain of these private schools, Northwest School of Innovative Learning. Students returned home with bruises, but because of their limited verbal skills, they were unable to explain to their parents how they were injured.

Times reporters Mike Reicher and Lulu Ramadan dug into Northwest SOIL, its parent company and the broader private special education system in their “Invisible Schools” series. It was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network and The Times.

Despite being publicly funded, the schools (called nonpublic agencies) had an utter lack of transparency — a major reporting challenge. Northwest SOIL wouldn’t comply with the state Public Records Act, so we had to request records from 45 school districts that contracted with the school and other nonpublic agencies. We also requested records from police departments that responded to the schools, from the state education department and other agencies.

The reporters found key records in unexpected places. Unemployment insurance appeal files, for instance, revealed detailed grievances from school employees. Department of Health inspection reports produced photos of the campuses, allowing the reporters a glimpse into the restrictive buildings.

Using state education certification records, the team built a database of teachers and employees at the school and joined that information with criminal courts data. Some teachers had criminal histories and were not properly certified to teach special education. One teacher who had been convicted of assault and felony drug possession prior to being hired at the school was accused of placing a 13-year-old boy in a chokehold.

We interviewed dozens of former employees and tracked down Northwest SOIL’s former top administrator, who laid out the horrific conditions and described the school as “living in the dark ages” in a resignation letter. We interviewed students, parents and teachers who shared disturbing details.

The Times also sued Northwest SOIL to get records, arguing that the school relies entirely on public money and should not be allowed to hide behind its private-company status. A judge ordered Northwest SOIL to turn over the records. The school appealed, but after Northwest SOIL released some records to the state, the Times agreed to settle the case.

In our series we exposed gaping holes in state oversight that allowed Northwest SOIL’s problems to fester. The school had been the target of years of complaints from parents, school districts and its own staff. They alleged abuse, overuse of seclusion and restraint of students, inadequate academics, understaffing and billing school districts for services that weren’t provided. Many complaints reached the state’s top education officials, but the state, year after year, rubber-stamped the school’s annual renewal forms.

The series showed how weak state staffing rules allowed Northwest SOIL’s largest campus to have just two certified special education teachers to serve 106 students, all with serious disabilities. 

The weak and fractured oversight allowed Northwest SOIL’s corporate owner, Universal Health Services, to squeeze profits from the school by skimping on staffing and basic resources while pressuring managers to enroll more students than it could handle. Using court records, the reporting uncovered a similar pattern of problems at UHS schools in other states.

After The Times and ProPublica published the first two stories in the series, the state education department, known as the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, proposed legislative reforms to improve oversight, investigate complaints, tighten standards and require transparency. The Legislature passed the bill.

The state superintendent’s office also launched a rare investigation of Northwest SOIL, citing the Times and ProPublica reporting. As a result of the probe, the state suspended new enrollments. The school closed soon after.

The impact at the Legislature and in the classroom was a reminder that investigative reporters can fill an important gap in state oversight, bringing scrutiny to public-funded services for vulnerable populations. 

And when you’re denied records from one place, there’s almost always a way to get the information from somewhere else. Which government agencies interact with your private subject? You can develop creative records requests from unexpected sources. 

Through these requests and interviews, we were able to provide readers a window into an obscure yet critical part of the special education system.

Mike Reicher (he/him) and Lulu Ramadan (she/her)) are investigative reporters at The Seattle Times. Their investigations with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, “Invisible Schools,” began publishing Nov. 26, 2022, and continued through 2023.

Audience engagement empowers disabled sources

By Amy Silverman, Arizona Daily Star

On the last day of 2018, I was on a family holiday at Disneyland, standing in a long line for the Peter Pan ride with my husband Ray and our teen daughters. Bored, I checked the headlines. 

Without comment, I handed Ray my phone. 

A woman in her 20s had just given birth to a full-term baby boy at a long-term care facility in Phoenix, where we live. The woman has a seizure disorder. She cannot talk, walk or take care of herself in any way. 

I glanced at my younger daughter, Sophie, who was 16. Sophie has Down syndrome. She lives with us, not in an institution, and her disability is not the same. But still. It hit close to home. 

Before the end of January, a nurse from Hacienda HealthCare had been arrested. He was serving time. After that, most policymakers went on to other things. 

But I had a question. Long before the Hacienda case, we knew that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are at risk in institutions, where the population consists of people with disabilities and their staff, without much — if any — regular oversight from the public. It’s much safer, experts say, to place people with IDD in community settings like small group homes or keeping them with family. 

Yet despite decades of national reform and a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Olmstead v. L.C., community settings can often be just as isolated as institutions. Only a couple hundred Arizonans with IDD live in institutional settings; another 150,000 or so are in the community. 

How safe were they? 

I knew that reporting this would be tough, and celebrated when I secured a spot with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. An entire year to work on one story! I’d travel the state and meet with people with disabilities, their families and caregivers. I’d have time to dig into public records. 

It felt too good to be true, and it was. It was 2020. COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns spread across the country. By mid-March it was clear that I’d need to find a different path to report the story. No one was leaving the house and people with IDD were among the most vulnerable. I took a break from the project to report stories about how some states had emergency plans that discriminated against people with disabilities.

Agencies weren’t turning over public records. Politicians weren’t coming to the phone. And the most important part — all those in-person meetings — weren’t going to happen. It was time to get creative.

When I began this project, I had never heard the term “audience engagement,” let alone tried to implement it. I was so lucky to work with incredible journalists including Beena Raghav and Maya Miller — with support from editors T. Miller and Charles Ornstein — to reach some of Arizona’s most vulnerable residents. 

I had been running a live storytelling event in Phoenix for years, and with help from disability studies scholar Rebecca Monteleone we decided to ask people with IDD to write and perform stories about their lives that would center the journalism on them rather than on those around them. That event made it clear we were committed to telling stories the right way, and it led to tips and better sourcing. The stories began to come together, revealing large gaps in service for Arizonans with IDD living in community settings.

The art department commissioned illustrations from a studio in Baltimore that works with artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In addition, ProPublica commissioned Monteleone to do a plain language translation of the entire project (we also recorded audio in both plain and traditional language) as a way of making the work more accessible to people with intellectual disabilities. 

At the time, we had a hunch that this was the first time a mainstream media outlet had taken on a translation project like this — and we were right. We had great response from other journalists and got flattering attention from publications like Columbia Journalism Review. 

But in the end we had to ask: Had this work landed in the hands of a single disabled person? 

Probably not. And it wasn’t just that we weren’t adept at reaching the disability community on social media. As we’d later learn, many people weren’t interested in reading horror stories or unraveling policy arguments — even explained simply. 

As my year with ProPublica came to an end, it was clear that this work was just beginning. Monteleone, Raghav and I created the Plain Truth Project and secured funding to do academic research. We have been listening and asking questions — to figure out how people with IDD access journalism, what they want and don’t want to see in coverage, how they can be part of shaping their own stories. 

Through a monthlong fellowship with the Nieman Foundation, I also created WORDSLAW, a storytelling program for people with IDD. We’ve partnered with the Center for Public Integrity and KJZZ, the Phoenix NPR member station, to hold storytelling events that complement investigative journalism projects. 

And this fall I co-led a storytelling workshop sponsored by the National Center on Disability and Journalism and the Human Services Research Institute, again to demonstrate how to center stories on people with disabilities — by listening.