A Growing Rot in Washington’s Education System
What happens when a fundamental institution abandons its purpose?
It begins to rot.
The corruption starts deep inside, unnoticeable on the surface at first, but it spreads, creating a butterfly effect that harms an exponential number of lives before ultimately leading to its own collapse.
The Seattle Litigation Group and Cedar Law are Seattle-based law firms fighting tirelessly against one of the most egregious examples of institutional rot in Washington State history.
The Northwest School of Innovative Learning (“NW SOIL”) is an OSPI-certified "therapeutic day school" created to serve disabled and troubled students whose needs exceeded what traditional public schools could meet, owned and operated by BHC Fairfax Hospital. It was supposed to be a safe place, a school where vulnerable children could finally receive the specialized learning and attention they needed. That's what BHC Fairfax Hospital claimed, anyway.
As it turns out, BHC Fairfax is a subsidiary of Universal Health Services (UHS), a for-profit hospital corporation worth billions. On its face, a for-profit corporation funding schools for disabled students might sound like a good thing. It wasn't.
BHC Fairfax had zero interest in serving anyone but itself. It established three campuses across the greater Seattle area, in Tacoma, Redmond, and Tumwater, not to educate children, but to maximize the millions in public tax dollars it could collect. The more students it pulled in from around the state, the more money it made.
Unfortunately, those tax dollars never went to benefiting the students under Fairfax’s care.
The NW SOIL campuses were closer to prisons than schools. Staff were grossly underqualified, functioning more as guards than teachers. When a student acted out, or when staff simply didn't like a student, they ganged up on them and would pin students to the floor, place them in chokeholds, twist their arms to near breaking, or some other form of physical assault they chose to inflict. Physical assault was, unfortunately, quite commonplace. Both staff and older students could and did attack younger and more vulnerable children with near-zero repercussions. Given that a good number of the disabled students at NW SOIL were nonverbal, it was easy to abuse them since they couldn’t speak, much less fight back. They were the perfect victims.
When investigators looked into incidents at all, they often wouldn’t begin until weeks or months after the fact, long after any information had gone cold.
After staff "restrained" a student, they would often lock them in windowless isolation cells that were rarely cleaned. Students sat confined for hours at a time with no bathroom breaks and no food. Some were even left with no choice but to urinate and defecate in the cells themselves. Students have reported the walls being frequently covered in urine, feces, and blood.
Even when students weren't being abused or confined, staff simply warehoused them. Many of the teachers didn’t bother to teach or give out assignments, and many did not bother to create or follow a curriculum. In fact, a significant number of staff held no teaching certificate and had no teaching experience whatsoever. Students played video games, watched YouTube, and did whatever they pleased, so long as they didn't disturb the staff.
For years, Fairfax mistreated troubled and disabled children, treating them not as students but as something more akin to convicted inmates. It did so with the certification of the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (“OSPI”), and with the cooperation of school districts throughout Washington that continued, despite mounting complaints, to send students they no longer wanted to deal with to NW SOIL campuses.
The consequences have been devastating. Many of the children who attended these schools can no longer function. They are traumatized and profoundly undereducated. Some never even learned to properly read or write.
Fairfax may have gotten away with it if it weren’t for the landmark investigation series by The Seattle Times and ProPublica bringing some of the horrors to light.
The Seattle Litigation Group and Cedar Law are spearheading multiple lawsuits against Fairfax, OSPI, and every school district that participated in this corrupted system. We are honored to represent over a hundred students and families who endured the horrors of NW SOIL, and we are both furious and determined to hold every responsible party accountable.
If your child attended NW SOIL and you believe they were harmed, please contact our office at (206) 407-3300 or grohwer@seattlelitigation.com to discuss your options. It's time to push back against this institutional rot before it destroys more lives.