The boy darted across his kindergarten classroom in a full-blown outburst. He messed with everything in his path, tearing pictures off the walls and using all the strength he had in his tiny body to topple over chairs.
When his mother arrived at the school, she was horrified to see her 5-year-old flanked by a school safety officer. As a teacher in the same district, she knew how unusual it was for staff to call in the school police.
“He was a little, itty-bitty thing,” said his mom, Jatoyia Armour, as she gestured to a photo of her son on her living room wall. “It really made it hard for me to ignore that he was a Black boy getting this type of treatment.”
Soon after, he was sent to the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support, a statewide system of 24 programs for children with serious emotional and behavioral problems. The boy, who is now 13, embodied what state data show are many of the common attributes of a GNETS student: He’s a boy, autistic and Black.
His journey in the program is also one that reporters with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution heard time and time again from families and advocates who have helped them: It’s easy to get into GNETS, and in some districts, it’s difficult to leave.
For Armour’s son, it took two years and a court order.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
An AJC investigation found much of the program, a model of innovation in the 1970s, has evolved into a patchwork system in which kids with emotional behavioral disorders are sent to schools that at times have failed to help them.
What kids get at the end of the bus ride to a GNETS program varies widely depending on where a child lives. And some of the inequities outlined in a federal lawsuit that is stalled in the courts for nearly the past decade can still be found in programs across the state, the AJC found.
The state, while fighting the lawsuit, has chosen not to use the scope of its powers to fully monitor and direct what the program delivers to help some of Georgia’s most vulnerable children, the AJC also found.
Federal law requires that students with disabilities be placed in the least restrictive environment that can help them. GNETS was founded as an alternative to being institutionalized. Students must be regularly checked for progress so they can return to their neighborhood school as soon as they are ready.
Armour turned to an attorney with expertise in special education to convince a judge that her son was wrongly placed in North Metro GNETS in Alpharetta and should be allowed to leave.
After a district appeal, Eleanor Ross, judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, ruled that the Fulton County School District violated the boy’s educational rights by prematurely placing him into GNETS without first providing the help he needed at his neighborhood school.
For example, the court ruled that the boy’s education plan did not initially include plans to support his behavior and lacked essential services like speech-language therapy, occupational therapy or psychological support. The school district also ignored an independent behavioral analyst who concluded he could succeed in a general education setting with the right help.
What made the decision so notable among special education attorneys is that the judge also ruled Armour’s son shouldn’t have been in GNETS from the start.
Armour says the whole ordeal makes her think of how many students may have been placed in GNETS unnecessarily, only to have the trajectory of their lives forever changed.
A spokesperson for Fulton County schools declined to address questions on the boy’s case, including the issues of race and gender for students in GNETS, citing federal student privacy laws.
While the parents agreed to be identified for this series, they asked that the names of their children be withheld out of concern for their privacy.
Suspended from kindergarten
Kindergarten was undoubtedly a tumultuous time for the boy.
Teachers struggled to help contain his behavior, which included running away from the classroom and acting out with teachers and other students.
Because Armour taught at a middle school in the district, her son had special permission to attend the elementary school that fed into her school. But after repeated suspensions, the school revoked that permission and transferred him to another school, where the problems persisted.
Armour was puzzled because her son tested at an above-average IQ and didn’t exhibit any of these problems at home — outside of some crying fits.
She would later learn that her son had learning disabilities, including dyslexia, affecting reading and dysgraphia, affecting writing. He also had undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, a condition related to brain development that can cause problems with communication and getting along with others socially.
As an educator, Armour knew teachers needed to document what they had done to help her son before sending him to a GNETS program. Armour said her son’s plan was lacking a full evaluation for disabilities.
Instead, at a meeting held to regularly assess her son’s education, she was met by a team of teachers and administrators. As they polled the group on whether her son should be reassigned to GNETS, Armour said she was the only one who said no. Not because Armour didn’t want him to go to GNETS should that be the right place for him, but because he had not received enough services to help remedy his behaviors.
He was only 5. She urged everyone to keep trying.
“I was essentially outvoted,” she said. “It just seemed out of my hands. And as a parent, I knew that wasn’t right.”
She refused to sign the paperwork to send him to GNETS. Two weeks later, when Armour tried to drop him off at school, two officers told her he had been assigned to a GNETS program, Armour said. If she didn’t comply, they would call social services.
Armour homeschooled him for the rest of kindergarten. But when she took him to first grade, she said, every school refused to admit him, telling her to take him to GNETS.
Armour felt she had no choice.
“I was essentially outvoted. It just seemed out of my hands. And as a parent, I knew that wasn't right."
The AJC found during its investigation that there can be many flaws in the referral process. In the case of her son, he wouldn’t be diagnosed for another two years as being autistic.
Armour’s son ended up in North Metro GNETS in Alpharetta, where he was placed in a mixed-grades classroom in the back hallway of the school. There was just a handful of kids in his class, all of whom were boys and most of whom were Black, according to Armour.
“The only thing I know that they all had in common was that they were boys, had behavior issues and they were stuck,” Armour said, reflecting on when she first toured the school.
“Is that legal?” her son quietly asked, as he sat next to his mom in their living room on a Friday morning this summer.
“That’s why we went to court,” Armour replied. “Because it wasn’t.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Black, male and autistic
In many ways, Armour’s son saw himself in his classmates when he first arrived at his new school.
For starters, he’s a boy. Most kids in the program — an eye-popping 80% — are boys.
He also has autism. According to data provided by the state and analyzed by the AJC, the most common diagnoses in GNETS are emotional and behavioral disorder, followed by autism spectrum disorder.
He’s also Black. In 2017, when he first entered the program, Black students in special education were 40% more likely to be funneled into GNETS than their white peers. That gap has narrowed in recent years, but Black students are still 10% more likely to be placed in GNETS, the AJC analysis of state data found.
These statistics also reflect national trends. Nationwide and in Georgia, Black students are more likely to be placed in special education than their white peers. They are also much more likely to be boys.
Jennifer Singh, a Georgia Tech professor who closely studied service inequalities for Black children with autism, said she wasn’t surprised that a Black student had a missed autism diagnosis, and that historically, Black children have been underdiagnosed with the disorder, although that is changing. But, she said, Black children are still diagnosed later in life, receive a lower quality of care and have more adverse outcomes.
Singh said that for students with autism, a more restrictive setting such as the GNETS program can limit peer interaction, reinforce stigma and result in lower self-esteem for children.
“It sounds like they’re still getting funneled to GNETS and that in many ways that environment … is doing more harm than good,” she said in response to the AJC’s reporting.
Was race a factor?
Race was not on Armour’s mind. At least initially.
She is Black, had grown up in Georgia and said she really hadn’t experienced full-on, overt racism. In fact, she was a teacher in the same school district, and these were her peers making this decision.
Surely, she thought, they had her son’s best interest at heart?
She also knew of white students who had been referred to GNETS, but their parents were able to send their kids to private school. As an educator, that was too costly of an option for Armour.
But, taking the case to court, she became aware of the racial elements to her son’s journey.
At GNETS, she saw that for the first time since he started school, her son’s class was filled with mostly Black boys.
Then, years later, she witnessed an exchange in her court case that begged the question: Was her son being funneled into GNETS because he was Black?
The school district’s speech pathologist, who was Black herself, took the stand and explained why Armour’s son didn’t require speech therapy because his speech errors were “dialectical differences” considered African American Vernacular English, according to court records.
That’s the only time Armour said she broke down and had to leave the courtroom. Because she fully believed, in that moment, that her 5-year-old was denied services because he was Black.
As she recently recounted the story on her living room couch, with her son sitting right next to her, Armour said the specialist “was basically asked, why didn’t you catch this? And their response was, ‘We thought he was just speaking ebonics.’”
“What’s ebonics?” the 13-year-old boy pipped in.
“They thought you were speaking ghetto,” his mom quietly explained to him.
“That’s racist,” he said.
The judge’s order directed that the boy get speech therapy as recommended by an expert therapist.
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
‘I’m a bad kid’
Years later, Armour’s son still has a rendering of the GNETS classroom imprinted in his mind: the crescent-shaped table, a toy corner and a series of file cabinets arranged in a square for timeout.
The boy said he knew something was off when he exited his isolated classroom and saw the long lines of students from other classrooms who were very much unlike his own tiny group.
“I didn’t know that those were normal, and we weren’t,” he said in a recent interview.
Inside GNETS, the teaching focused more on behavior than academics. Armour recognized that the program used a reward system: If a student came in and put their coat away, for example, he or she would get a prize.
Despite her son being very young, his mother said he knew the entire time that he was kicked out of his old school and sent to GNETS.
“He used to say, ‘I’m a bad kid. They say I don’t know how to act,’” Armour said. “Even at that age he was very much aware.”
Her son’s behavior did improve, but Armour attributes that to the fact that he wasn’t being triggered by his learning disabilities. At GNETS, there wasn’t much learning going on.
“We really didn’t learn anything,” her son said.
At GNETS, the boy recalled learning addition, subtraction and multiplication. But once he returned to his neighborhood school, he realized he was missing a lot of lessons.
“He used to say, ‘I'm a bad kid. They say I don't know how to act.' Even at that age he was very much aware."
The GNETS program he attended was also segregating the children with disabilities, said the family’s attorney, Craig Goodmark. While visiting the boy’s school, Goodmark said he witnessed a teacher directing a child away from the main playground to the area where the kids with disabilities were playing.
Armour says the teachers didn’t do enough to help him until she enlisted an attorney and sued the district. The only way she could afford to sue was because the attorney took the case on contingency.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
A life after GNETS
Armour’s son, now a young teenager, has a starkly different demeanor from that of a boy who tore up a classroom.
During one Friday morning in July, he quietly snuggled his miniature, gray dog named Cocoa. As his mom spoke with an AJC reporter, he spent time feeding Cocoa, giving her water and holding her close to him.
He also described his interests, like current affairs and graphic design. He’d love to visit Japan one day. And he’s extremely interested in reading about flying cars.
When asked about what he learned about how his mom described his early education years, he said: “How racist the school was. That’s really it.”
The whole journey his mom went on to get him out of GNETS, he said, was a “stupid situation.”
The experience led Armour to write a book, “The Roar at the Table,” which she hopes can help parents navigate special education.
The Fulton County school district has since withdrawn from the GNETS program and now uses state funding to run a new therapeutic program for kids with significant needs.
Spokespeople for the district declined to respond to this case and to the allegations of racism, citing federal student privacy laws that prevent them from sharing information about specific students.
On a personal level, Armour has also noticed improvements: Her younger son also has autism, and Armour says the services he’s receiving in Fulton County are light-years ahead of that of his older brother. He was immediately given goals, a behavioral specialist and extensive data on his performance.
As Armour looks back on her time fighting the school system to get her son out of GNETS, she admits that the idea of GNETS is not “necessarily, completely bad.”
“I get what they were trying to do,” she said, in a moment of retrospection. “It just was not implemented well, and it became more of a harm than a help.”
The courts granted Armour’s older son compensation to hire tutors to help him make up for the 18 months of the education he lost while attending GNETS. The tutoring helped him go from falling behind in classes to excelling at them, she said.
He made honor roll for the first time last year and is trying his best to stay on it this year.
“He was always capable,” Armour said.
About this investigation
This was the year when the federal Department of Justice’s nearly decade old lawsuit targeting Georgia’s program for children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders was supposed to go to trial.
It didn’t happen.
This year is also almost a decade since The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first investigated this state and federally-funded program, known as the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support, or GNETS. The same year, the U.S. Department of Justice filed the lawsuit accusing the state of “unnecessarily segregating students with disabilities from their peers.”
To dig deep into this program, which was founded to serve the state’s most vulnerable children, the AJC assembled a team: Katherine Landergan, investigative reporter; Martha Dalton, education reporter; Stephanie Lamm, data reporter; editors Rose Ciotta, Eric Stirgus and Charles Minshew; and photographers Hyosub Shin, Daniel Varnado and Arvin Temkar.
The team interviewed dozens of people with current and former experience with GNETS: parents, teachers, students, administrators, attorneys, advocates, lawmakers, researchers and special education experts, including Mary Wood, the educator who envisioned a very different GNETS more than 50 years ago. Reporters and photographers also visited schools in Atlanta, Macon and Coweta County and interviewed officials at other schools around the state.
They reviewed records from families, GNETS programs, the state Department of Education and federal and state court lawsuits, including depositions in the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.
They analyzed state data on the demographics of students attending GNETS, including gender, race and students’ primary disability; 10-year enrollment trends for GNETS and all special education students and state and federal funding. They also used social media to reach readers and school district superintendents to share their experiences.
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