Tag: nbc10 investigators

JoAnna Holton’s son struggled with his new school environment when he started Kindergarten at Jamison Elementary School in the Central Bucks School District last year. 

“Hitting himself,” said the mom of the then 5-year-old boy with autism. “They said he just seems to not be able to calm down and, like, they would say, ‘We can handle it but we just want to let you know.’”

Holton’s son is also non-verbal. 

She tried helping on her end by putting her son on ADHD medication. 

“See if that could help him feel better in his skin and better in those situations of like the whole newness,” she said. 

But as the months went on, she said, he continued coming home with injuries. 

“He would have bruises on his ear and then in his right ear, behind his ear,” she said. “It would be like total like shock, you know, and heartbreak.”

She trusted the staff at the school. So, she asked the boy’s doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to increase his medication.  

Then in December, she received a call from Warwick Police about an investigation into abuse in her son’s classroom. 

A classroom aide had accused the teacher and educational aide of abusing and neglecting the classroom’s four autistic children. They ranged from 5- to 8-years-old.

Police didn’t file criminal charges. But a federally authorized investigation from Disability Rights Pennsylvania found the aide’s allegations to be “credible” and “corroborated.” 

The state Department of Education found that the district restrained Holton’s son — along with the son of a school board member — by using desks to wedge them in their chairs against the wall.    

“The teacher or the teacher’s aide would sit on the desk while he would be freaking out because he would be held in that spot so he would hit himself,” she said, referring to the aide’s allegation noted in both state reports.

Holton says she didn’t know the full extent of what happened in the classroom until she got a call from the school district in the spring. 

“The Special Ed supervisor called me and said that he was restrained 3,193 times,” she said, her voice breaking.

That was over the course of four months.

“I remember, like, catching my breath and saying, ‘Wait, you mean minutes, minutes?’ and she said, ‘No, times,’” Holton said .

The son of school board member James Pepper was in the same classroom.

“They were so completely and utterly failed,” Pepper said in an August board meeting.

Pepper’s son, who also has autism and is non-verbal, was restrained an estimated 2,933 times, according to an email the district sent Pepper and his wife recapping a phone call about the restraints.

In total, the Central Bucks School District reported more than 6,400 restraints for the 2024-25 school year. That’s nearly a quarter of the total number of restraints reported statewide last year. 

“Six thousand is alarming,” Pennsylvania Department of Education Secretary Carrie Rowe said in an interview with the NBC10 Investigators. “Something has to be going wrong and additional oversight is needed.”

Rowe said the state has begun “targeted monitoring” with Central Bucks and are determining “where the gaps are.”

“It would be wrong for us to think that this is just a problem of Central Bucks,” said Margie Wakelin, a lawyer with the Education Law Center whose work includes representing families of children who have been restrained.

Wakelin isn’t involved in the Central Bucks situation.

“I really hope that the state will recognize that oversight is necessary, particularly related to the use of restraints,” she said.

The NBC10 investigators obtained exclusive information that shows how many times kids have been restrained in Pennsylvania schools.

It shows the use of restraints has gone up drastically in Southeastern Pennsylvania – nearly tripling in the last four years.

“This is a crisis that needs intervention immediately,” Wakelin said.

About a fifth of Pennsylvania students have disabilities — ranging from dyslexia to autism.

State law says that restraints may be used when students with disabilities act in a manner that is a danger to themselves or others and when less restrictive measures have not been effective.

Schools have 30 days to report an instance to the state.

Rowe says when her department sees an increase at a district,  it starts asking questions.

“Are there any particular patterns, particularly in that school or the district or perhaps the region? What are the commonalities with regard to… what training is being used and what vendors are being used,” she said. “Every time we see these types of increases, or even if a specific restraint is of concern to us, we’re going into that school.”

The department later told the NBC10 Investigators that other than Central Bucks School District, it has only officially intervened in one other school.

Back in Bucks, Holton’s son is currently out of school. 

He finished the 2024-25 school year in the classroom, following the firing of some of the staff in the classroom and administrators. 

He was supposed to start at a private school for children with autism in the area in September, following what Holton said was a verbal agreement from the district that it would send the required paperwork. But nearly two months into the school year, Holton says that has not happened. 

“Here we are, just still struggling, still trying to find a way for him to be where he needs to be and get the program that he deserves, that is necessary and that he’s owed,” she said. 

Through a spokesperson, the school district declined to speak about the Holton situation. The district issued a statement saying many of the questions we had “involve ongoing legal proceedings, which the district cannot address for privacy and legal reasons.” 

The Central Bucks School Board fired the superintendent and several administrators in response to the abuse investigations and reports.

The district spokesperson said that Central Bucks ensures all training and certification standards are met for staff who work with students with disabilities.

A spokesperson for the teacher in question declined an interview on her behalf. In a prior statement, the teacher called the allegations false claims. The teacher’s aide did not return a call seeking comment. 

Robert Beecham has been trying to recreate the father-son bonds he once had with his twin boys.

“We play basketball here,” Beecham said, pointing to the courts at Quakertown Memorial Park. “There’s baseball fields on the other side where they test out their baseball gear. They have a lot of fun.”

The Lehigh County father hadn’t seen his sons in five years prior to January. That’s when one of the twins was rushed to Lehigh Valley Hospital.

“He was in really, really bad shape,” Beecham said. 

The 15-year-old boy had been starved and abused for years, according to the Lehigh County District Attorney’s Office.

In pictures the DA shared, the boy looked malnourished, his knees were red and swollen, and he had bruises from sleeping on the floor.

His twin brother, according to authorities, was equally starved and abused. 

The boys’ mother and stepfather, Tracy and Joshua Dechant, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder, aggravated assault, child endangerment and other charges. 

According to court documents, medical personnel said that based in the malnutrition, dehydration, and nutritional deficiencies, the boys were at “high risk of death without treatment.”

One boy weighed 53 pounds. The other weighed 55 pounds. 

Beecham had partial custody of the boys following a 2011 divorce from their mother. But he says that starting in 2020, the boys cut him off at their mother’s request. 

When he got the call about the first twin landing in the hospital, he rushed there. 

“He said, ‘Hey dad, I haven’t seen you in a while.’ So, that hit me kind of hard,” he said. “He smiled, he hugged me. And I didn’t leave the hospital for all the days that they were there.”

According to authorities, the boys’ abuse took place in recent years. 

The father of twin boys who were found severely malnourished in Lehigh County spoke with NBC10 Investigative reporter Claudia Vargas about the situation and how the boys are recovering. 

During that time, the twins were enrolled in the state’s largest cyber charter school- Commonwealth Charter Academy, the school confirmed.

It’s the same cyber charter where a Chester County 12-year-old was enrolled when she died in May 2024 of starvation and abuse. 

Cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania offer both live-virtual instruction and learning programs that can be downloaded, which wouldn’t offer live instruction.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of students enrolled in cyber charter schools has jumped from about 25,000 to nearly 43,000. 

“Why didn’t somebody go out there monthly to just see how the kids are?” Beecham asked in an interview with the NBC10 investigators. 

The state does have a requirement that cyber charter schools must at least once a week “ensure that each enrolled student is able to be visibly seen and communicated with in real time.” That could be in person or virtual. The purpose is to make sure the child is safe and learning. 

That law was passed after the Chester County girl, Malinda Hoagland, died. It went into effect at the start of the 2024-25 school year.  

The state Department of Education sent letters to all 14 cyber charter schools in the state last fall asking to prove their policies for how they were to enforce the new wellness check, among other requirements. 

But in a response to the state’s letter, CCA wrote: “The legislature intentionally used the phrase ‘is able to’ to convey a requirement for an ‘opportunity,’” to see students in real time. 

“It is a wildly irresponsible position that they’ve taken,” said State Rep. Peter Schweyer (D., Lehigh), chairman of the House Education Committee who helped pass the wellness requirement for cyber charters. “It flies in the face of common sense, it flies in the face of what the legislature very clearly wanted.”

He says the intent of the law is that the camera would just be turned on.

In its letter to the state, CCA wrote that the department’s “mandate that all 30,000 students actually be seen and heard each week is unreasonable and impossible for execution.” 

When the NBC10 Investigators met with CCA executive Timothy Eller, he said CCA believes the state department of education is taking the law further than it goes. 

“We’re trying to understand what PDE was trying to enforce,” he said. 

Pennsylvania Department of Education Secretary Carrie Rowe says “the requirements are pretty clear” and that they are being implemented for safety reasons.

“The students need to be seen and heard once a week,” she said. “Now, CCA happens to be a pretty big school, but that doesn’t excuse them from their responsibility to do this.”

Rowe said 13 of the 14 cyber charters are in compliance with the state wellness check law, adding that CCA is not. 

But Eller says he and the others at CCA believe the school is in compliance with the law because CCA allows for various opportunities for virtual and in-person checks throughout the week. 

“Not all the time it will be on camera, it can be in one of our family service centers, during a field trip. It could be during special education related services,” he said. 

Eller says the last communication with the state on this topic was in November.

Rowe says the department is reviewing CCA’s annual report filed this summer, as is required. She says the department isn’t planning sanctions against CCA.

“They just need to find a pathway forward, and that is absolutely something that we’re wanting to work with them to do,” she said. 

The twin boys’ father says he wishes CCA was doing more.

“What I was told from the children, you don’t have to have your camera on for charter school. Most teachers don’t require it. They just have to log on,” Beecham said.

He says in addition to safety and wellness, the checks should verify learning. 

“I don’t think it’d be hard for a parent to log on and do a child’s schoolwork or just even just log on, and show that they’re logged on without those checks and balances,” he said. 

Beecham hired one of the lawyers representing Malinda Hoagland’s sisters in a wrongful lawsuit against CCA and government agencies.

The lawyer, Ally Crouthamel, says cyber charters should have a system in place so that abuse can be caught – similar to how teachers and staff may notice something is wrong with a child they see in person. 

“You’re telling me if she walks into a school, you know, the local, the local elementary school where we are right now, no one’s going to notice that the twins or Miss Hoagland has lost significant amount of weight in a short month. They’re not going to notice the shackle marks or the bruises or whatever?,” she said.

For CCA’s part, Eller says all teachers and staff are trained to report any suspicions of abuse. 

He says Malinda was an honors student who was frequently on camera and participated in class. 

“I’m not sure what happened on the other end of the camera prior to the student appearing, but there was no indication to the teacher from at least CCA that there was something amiss,” he said.

On the Beecham twins, Eller called it a “sad situation,” but declined to comment given the ongoing investigation. 

Beecham says while he wants cyber charters to have better oversight, the responsibility shouldn’t all fall on the school. 

“You can’t put all the blame on the charter school because of the evil people that did the abuse,” he said.