It was during a summer visit to their son’s boarding school that Cian Roy’s parents said they realized something had gone terribly wrong.
Cian, who has autism and intellectual disabilities, could no longer make out the numbers on the elevator buttons, his parents said. He held his iPad up to his nose to try to see images like the icon for the Netflix app. He struggled to distinguish level ground from stairs. His eyes looked cloudy.
Michael Roy and D’Arcy Forbes, who had driven about 2,900 miles from their home near Seattle to New York in August 2022 with plans to mountain bike with their son, decided instead to take him home to try to save his eyesight.
“We were concerned he’d be blind by Christmas,” Michael Roy told ProPublica.
By then, Cian had spent about six months at Shrub Oak International School, a private, for-profit school that enrolls students with complex needs who are often rejected by other schools. Shrub Oak leaders opened the school in 2018; they had experience in other education areas but had never run a boarding school. But Cian’s parents said school officials assured them that they could handle the then-20-year-old’s diagnosis of autism with a language impairment as well as his impulse control disorder.
The school also said it could handle Cian’s unusual and dangerous behavior: compulsively poking his eyes.
Instead, Shrub Oak workers did not follow Cian’s detailed behavioral plan and their neglect caused him to have a “catastrophic eye injury” that has permanently impaired his vision, the family alleges in a lawsuit filed in late January in King County Superior Court, a Washington trial court.
The lawsuit alleges that both Shrub Oak and Cian’s public school district “routinely ignored their obligations by neglecting” Cian. Shrub Oak failed to keep him safe and the Lake Washington School District, which agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to send Cian to Shrub Oak, failed to ask about Cian’s “condition, achievement, or safety” while at the school, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit — which appears to be the first by a family against the school — asks for an unspecified amount of damages that include past and anticipated medical costs. Shrub Oak and the Lake Washington district, in responding to the lawsuit, denied responsibility for any injuries.
Shrub Oak did not respond to questions and a request for comment from ProPublica. The Lake Washington district said it is “committed to the health and safety of all of our students” but declined to comment further because of the lawsuit. A trial is set for next year.
A ProPublica investigation published in May documented numerous allegations of abuse and neglect of students at Shrub Oak in its short time in operation; one former worker recently was convicted of endangering the welfare of a student from Chicago.
The investigation revealed how Shrub Oak has not sought or obtained approval from New York to operate as a special education school, which means it largely escapes oversight by education authorities and other state officials. It is also not a licensed residential facility. Though private, the school is mostly funded with public money through contracts with school districts across the country that send students there, then sometimes struggle to monitor residents’ progress or wellbeing.
A Seattle Times and ProPublica investigation in 2022 found similar problems with oversight, as well as allegations of abuse and substandard academics, at privately run, publicly funded special education schools in Washington. After that investigation was published, Washington’s largest network of these schools, called the Northwest School of Innovative Learning, shut down while under investigation from the state education department, and lawmakers expanded the agency’s oversight powers.
The Roy family’s experience — detailed through interviews as well as medical, school, court and police records — reflects concerns raised by disability rights advocates about the difficulty in monitoring out-of-state facilities such as Shrub Oak, which serve some of the most vulnerable students.
Students from at least 13 states and Puerto Rico went to Shrub Oak this past school year, but some states are now reevaluating their relationship with the school. Disability rights advocates in Connecticut have urged officials not to send more students there. Massachusetts has said publicly funded students would have to leave.
Washington, which has seven students at Shrub Oak, is the latest state to take action. In a letter to Shrub Oak dated July 2, the office of the state superintendent said it had decided to not allow public school districts to send more students to the school during the 2024-25 school year. Shrub Oak, it said, did not have a license to operate in New York and also had not undergone health inspections; it must meet those standards before any Washington school district enters into a new contract with Shrub Oak.
The state’s decision to halt new enrollments came after officials visited the school last month and after they gathered information from school districts and ProPublica stories, the agency said. It said in its letter to Shrub Oak that there were “no immediately visible health and safety concerns” during the visit last month.
Shrub Oak has criticized ProPublica for reporting “influenced by isolated incidents and the perspectives of a few individuals” and not sharing others’ positive experiences at the school. A school spokesperson previously has said Shrub Oak works with students who have been rejected by other schools and who struggle with “significant self-injurious behaviors,” aggression, property destruction and other challenges, and that its staffing is adequate. The school has posted a response to ProPublica’s reporting on its website.
But Shrub Oak had only about 85 students enrolled earlier this year, with a total of 170 since it opened, and dozens of families and workers have raised concerns about conditions there.
At first, Cian’s parents were so excited about Shrub Oak that they took legal action against their school district to get Cian placed there after the district balked at sending him to a residential school.
In its contract with Shrub Oak, the school district agreed to pay $54,641 a month — what would have been $655,692 for a year — for tuition and a 24-hour aide dedicated to Cian, records show.
The contract required that Shrub Oak provide records about his behavior and send all incident reports about his safety to the district within 24 hours.
But it does not appear that Lake Washington received those required reports, according to district records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Lake Washington provided ProPublica only one incident report it received during Cian’s time at Shrub Oak, which was unrelated to Cian’s eye poking, and said that there were no emails from Shrub Oak alerting the district to safety concerns.
One of Cian’s attorneys, Joseph Gehrke, said the school district abdicated its legal responsibility to make sure Cian was safe.
“Lake Washington never asked the school, ‘We haven’t heard anything from you. What is going on with the student we sent to you?’” Gehrke said.
Before Cian started at Shrub Oak in February 2022, his family gave the school a 27-page plan that detailed what to do when Cian poked at his eyes. He had arm splints that prevented his hands from reaching his eyes and a helmet with a plexiglass visor.
According to Cian’s parents, the school did not have the expertise it advertised and Cian was harmed.
Shrub Oak didn’t use the arm splints, according to the lawsuit and internal notes kept by school health staff and provided to ProPublica by Cian’s parents. In April, the school called 911 to seek help with a new eye injury, which the caller said had been caused by his eye poking, according to police records. The school’s notes say his left eye was “protruding out, like a bubble.” He was given eye drops but a scar formed on his left eye, permanently damaging it, according to the lawsuit.
An aide was supposed to be with Cian all night, in part to keep him from poking his eye as he fell asleep. But in May, notes from the school’s health staff say “he was eye poking all night and is bulging.”
His parents knew that their son’s left eye had been injured. But when they visited again in August for the two-week break they’d planned to spend mountain biking, his right eye was red and it, too, was damaged, according to the lawsuit. They decided to take him home to try to save the eyesight in his right eye.
They say Cian had spent much of his time at Shrub Oak isolated in his dorm room, missing class, even eating meals there.
“The key to the program was having people to stop Cian from poking his eye and redirecting him to what he should be doing. The staff didn’t know the plan at all,” said Forbes, his mother.
A former chiropractor, Forbes years ago returned to school for a master’s degree in education to gain skills to help her son. She is a board certified behavior analyst and a licensed speech-language pathologist and spends most days caring for her son and taking him to activities.
His parents say Cian’s limited vision prevents him from doing basic tasks as well as the activities he most enjoys. He has trouble plugging in appliances because he can’t see the outlet slots. When trying to garden, he can’t see the holes in the dirt to know where to plant seeds.
He still bikes with his father, but he now stays on wide, paved paths instead of biking through trees.
At this home earlier this month, Cian used a magnifying device to read and relied on color-coded measuring spoons to make banana bread. He took a Zumba class with his mom at his side.
His mother started to cry as she talked about Cian’s future. She was setting up a puzzle in which he puts numbered stickers on a grid to form a picture. He used to do the puzzles easily, but he now struggles to put the numbers in the right spaces.
“It’s taken some time to get his interest back into things” and adjust to his worsened vision, Forbes said. “You can’t bring the eyesight back.”
Sarahbeth Maney of ProPublica and Mike Reicher and Lulu Ramadan of The Seattle Times contributed reporting.
