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By Neelam Bohra, The Texas Tribune

Are government programs to support disabled residents adequately serving the community? Two newsrooms in Texas explored this question in the context of public school privatization and dangerous residential care facilities.

Project: “Inaccessible Private Schools or Underfunded Public Schools: Texas’ Disabled Students Have Few Options With No Change in Sight” (Oct. 26, 2023)

Tools: Google Sheets, Datawrapper, Otter.ai

A close-up of a dark-colored vehicle with an open passenger door, displaying two accessibility-related stickers on the window. One green and white sticker reads, 'Extra Space Needed for Ramp or Lift' with a wheelchair icon and the MobilityWorks logo. Another pink sticker features a wheelchair symbol with a crown and text that says, 'PRINCESS ON BOARD. PLEASE LEAVE ROOM FOR MY CARRIAGE.' The background shows a residential area with trees and a house.
Van window decals reference the occupant’s wheelchair. JULIUS SHEIH / THE TEXAS TRIBUNE

One crying mother testified that public school students bullied her disabled son. Other parents argued that private schools would not take their children, much less accommodate them. The Texas Legislature often paraded out parents with disabled children as mascots for their proposal on school vouchers, but families themselves seemed split on the idea.

As The Texas Tribune’s disability reporting fellow, I jumped at the chance to investigate the consequences: Could vouchers actually help disabled children? Most private schools, exempt from federal law, could turn them away. Which Texas private schools would have the resources for them?

A quick scan of public records made it clear we would have to manually gather data to get an answer. No official, organized list of private special education schools existed. Collaborating with Yuriko Schumacher from the Tribune’s data team, I sorted through overlapping lists from multiple private school-focused organizations, all separate from the Texas Education Agency. 

Going school by school, we read through their websites to find the type of disabilities they served, as well as their locations, average student body sizes and tuition fees before inputting that information into Google Sheets. Once we had gone through every school on the list, we called the schools to verify our data. 

Because these schools defined “special education” so broadly, we also included schools for students with self-destructive or dangerous behaviors — they had available resources for disabled students, even if most of their population did not have disabilities. Altogether, only 67 functioning specialized private schools were available to the 700,000 students enrolled in special education, demonstrating a huge downside of voucher proposals. 

With the data spread in front of us, we sorted it and found additional issues across every category. We calculated that 82% of these schools were concentrated around Texas’ urban areas; most schools only accommodated certain disabilities; their student bodies had limited capacities; and their tuition fees surpassed the amount families would receive from any voucher proposals. 

Our data team represented these disparities using a map, and the amount of visual negative space emphasized just how many students could be left behind if the policy passed. Despite public schools having systemic issues regarding disabled students, we found a voucher program would still be worse, taking funds away from programs desperately dependent on them with no upside for most families. Comparing both options, our investigation was able to showcase overarching neglect from policymakers when it came to students with disabilities.

Neelam Bohra (she/her) was the 2023-24 disability reporting fellow at The Texas Tribune through a partnership with the National Center on Disability and Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and ​​The New York Times. 

Abuse, neglect and exploitation exposed

Project: “Disabled & Abandoned” (Sept. 22, 2022 – Dec. 14, 2022)

Tools: re:Search TX, Python, Google Sheets

A woman with long brown hair sits on a bed in a softly lit bedroom, holding a framed graduation portrait of a young woman with curly hair wearing a cap and gown. She has a solemn expression and holds a pink stuffed flamingo in her other hand. The bed is adorned with stuffed animals, including a teddy bear and a blue plush toy. A white headboard, a decorative lamp, and a painting of an angel hang on the wall behind her.
Joann Pierson poses with a photo of her daughter, Kristi Michelle Norris, who died in a Fort Worth residential group home. She choked to death trying to escape from her wheelchair, restrained and unsupervised behind closed doors. SARA DIGGINS / AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN

By Caroline Ghisolfi, Austin American-Statesman

Kristi Michelle Norris endured decades of abuse and neglect before her sudden death in a group home for the disabled in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2020. The 36-year-old died alone, choked by belts that secured her to a wheelchair after struggling to break free for nearly two hours. Others like her have faced brutal sexual assaults, violent beatings and crass indifference in Texas’ collapsing system of home and community care for people with disabilities. Without medical attention for days, some have silently endured broken bones, third-degree burns and brain injuries. Their abusers were rarely held to account. 

These horrors have left scores of grieving families demanding explanations. But, time and again, their pleas were met with silence or red tape. That’s when many of them turned to attorneys, and those attorneys to the investigative team at the Austin American-Statesman. 

The Statesman’s investigation revealed how decades of underfunding, legislative inaction and inadequate regulatory oversight turned a system meant to care for and protect more than 100,000 of Texas’ most vulnerable residents into a too-often violent and sometimes deadly environment. 

With colleagues Tony Plohetski and Nicole Foy, we launched a monthslong data collection effort to trace the consequences of these failings, which state officials had ignored for three decades. When federal and state agencies repeatedly rejected our requests for investigative reports and data, our team used advanced data mining techniques to collect information from thousands of lawsuits and identify dozens who were exploited, mistreated, injured and killed in the system. 

We developed a program to scrape information from an online cross-jurisdictional repository of Texas court cases. We then manually reviewed nearly 2,000 lawsuits alleging abuse and neglect of disability service recipients, and about 100 others describing financial exploitation of disabled individuals, injuries and deaths of workers, violations of fair pay and overtime, and retaliation against whistleblowers. Many of the accounts of neglect and abuse our team identified were never listed in the state’s records. 

Our work exposed a catastrophically broken system, galvanizing lawmakers in the Texas Legislature to propose unprecedented action to improve the care and safety of thousands of vulnerable Texans and those who care for them. 

The Statesman’s investigation also offered the families of the victims some clarity. Nearly two years after Kristi Norris died, our reporting uncovered for the first time the horrific details of her death and the years of unrelenting, voiceless pain that led up to it.

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