Children with disabilities face criminal charges from school

A Fort Worth mother of two had been waiting in the assistant principal’s office for two hours to pick up her son when, from down the hallway at the Northwest district elementary school, she heard her 6-year-old scream. The woman, who the Star-Telegram is referring to by her initials to protect her son’s identity, was out of the office in an instant, following the sound of her son yelling to the closed door of his classroom. The mother, H.H., audio-recorded the interaction on her phone. “That’s my son,” H.H. yells in the recording, made in December 2019. “Open up the door now, or I’m calling the cops.” In the background, a child’s guttural scream can be heard.

“This is what we do when a child is upset like this,” a man says about restraining the child. “This is what we’re trained to do. But when he’s hitting us and yelling at us, that’s how we transport him.” Inside her son’s classroom, three staff members had cornered H.H.’s son, she said. The first-grader, who is on the autism spectrum and has anxiety disorders, had red marks all over his body and had urinated on himself. In the audio, the child is heard crying. He hits a staff member, a slap that can be heard on the recording. The staff member told H.H. they had been trying to move the boy after he refused to leave the room because he wanted chocolate from the classroom’s advent calendar, H.H. said. She left the building and held her child in her arms, both of them crying. He looked up at her. “They hurt me,” he cries in the audio recording. “They grabbed my arms.” H.H. took her son to Cook Children’s Medical Center, where staff examined him, and then she went to the Roanoke Police Department to report her son was being abused. But her son was afraid to talk to the officers, she said. “He said, ‘Please don’t let them arrest me,’” H.H. said. “I said, why would (they)? And he told me the school resource officer told him, ‘If I kept acting bad, he will arrest me.’”