Washington State's Special Education in Turmoil

Washington state spends millions on a special education system favoring corporations rather than its children with disabilities, reported The Seattle Times and ProPublica in a joint investigation.

Unequipped to provide special education to many of its high-need students in public schools, school districts in Washington often send such students to nonpublic agencies such as Northwest School of Innovative Learning (SOIL), owned by Universal Health Services (UHS), a Fortune 500 corporation.

In this investigation, reporters uncovered “years of alarming reports about abuse and lax academics” at SOIL. The reporters found that SOIL “operated with virtually no curriculum and staff so poorly trained that they often resorted to restraining and isolating students.”

 According to the article, “Northwest SOIL collects about $68,000 in annual tuition per student – more than triple the average per-pupil cost for a K-12 student in Washington – while a student with the highest needs can bring the school as much as $115,000 a year, all paid for with taxpayer dollars.”

 Years of complaints about SOIL have gone unheeded, according to the article: “Despite the complaints, the state took no action to force changes at Northwest SOIL. Instead, it allowed the school to stay open and tap a pipeline of taxpayer money. In the five school years ending in 2021, Northwest SOIL collected at least $38 million and took in hundreds of public-school students.”

 Such negligence is not characteristic of SOIL alone among UHS facilities, reported The Seattle Times and ProPublica: “UHS, which earned nearly $1 billion in profit last year, has long faced criticism that it squeezes patient care to maximize profit at its more than 400 hospitals and residential facilities nationwide.”

- S. Karn