Twice in the same week in May 2023, sheriff’s deputies restrained and put 10-year-old Caleb Killingsworth in the back of a patrol car.
The second time, Caleb, an autistic child who weighed less than 90 pounds and stood less than 5 feet tall, according to his mother, was restrained on the ground and then handcuffed. The fifth grader came away with scrapes on his face.
Both times school staff called law enforcement after Caleb walked away from the Pine Tree Center, a specialized school in Lake Orion, Michigan, with a program for "emotionally impaired" students, a state designation that applies to roughly 10,000 Michigan students with behavioral disabilities.
There are at least two dozen such programs across Michigan, serving some of the state’s most vulnerable students with complex behavioral issues that may cause them to scream, swear, scratch or kick others, and run away. But critics say the schools are failing many of those students, evidenced by incidents where youths are restrained and secluded in the throes of a crisis, or in Caleb’s case, where law enforcement are called in to take over for school staff.
“No one can make it make sense to me,” Christina Rivera-Killingsworth, Caleb’s mother, said. “And if I feel the way I feel, what is happening to my son who can’t vocalize for himself? … What is he feeling? What is this doing to him?"
An analysis by the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, found visits from law enforcement happen more frequently at specialized schools with emotional impairment programs. Law enforcement and emergency dispatch agencies logged visits, calls and incidents at schools with emotional impairment programs at rates higher than nearby traditional schools over a two-year period.
Police reports described students who were in significant crises subjected to grave consequences: handcuffed, zapped with a stun gun or detained in a patrol car.
At Pine Tree, records show staff called police because they said Caleb was fighting them and they were worried he would run into traffic. A spokesman with the school district declined to comment.
His mom wishes the school had intervened before he had ever walked off campus, before officers put their hands on her son, creating trauma she worries will endure. Caleb had been at Pine Tree less than six months when he walked away, and it had been barely a year since the family had moved to Michigan from Texas for a military assignment.
“What these experiences, what all of this cumulative information points to is, this is wholly inappropriate,” said Heather Eckner, director of statewide education with the Autism Alliance of Michigan. “To have to turn to law enforcement, it's like they're turning to these crisis, emergency kind of approaches, because they fundamentally lack the skills and supports and knowledge to prevent it.”
She said students with disabilities — and often autism — end up in these crises over and over again at emotional impairment programs due to a lack of accountability and support from the state.
Related:How the Detroit Free Press compiled 911 dispatch data for Michigan schools for students with disabilities
Among incidents the Free Press identified:
Law enforcement logged incidents at Pine Tree at a rate of 73 incidents per 30 students in 2021 and 2022, according to the Free Press’ analysis. Less than 4 miles away and in the same school district, law enforcement visited Lake Orion High School at a rate of 11 incidents per 30 students.
The data for 2021 and 2022 is similar for many of the other schools with emotional impairment programs identified in the analysis. The median rate of law enforcement or emergency services visits logged for two dozen schools identified by the Free Press with emotional impairment programs is more than five times higher than for nearby traditional schools, 24 visits per 30 students compared with five visits per 30 students at traditional schools.
Advocates say the problems faced at these schools are emblematic of the severe mental health crisis among youths in Michigan, and point to a greater need for behavioral health interventions, one that does not involve repeated calls to law enforcement.
When asked about the higher rates, several administrators of districts with emotional impairment programs said they didn’t feel a comparison with a traditional school was fair, because their countywide programs serve such a specialized and challenging group of students. A few agreed to a phone interview, while most only answered email questions.
Karlie Parker, associate superintendent of special education for the Muskegon Area Intermediate School District, said in a phone interview that the logs of law enforcement visits don’t always reveal the nature of visits from law enforcement, which are not always negative.
"Yes, we have crises, things to deal with because we are supporting a very complex population of children," she said. "We're supporting the tippy top of the tippy top of students across our county with complex behavioral needs. So that would be the only thing that I ask people when they look at things like this is to recognize these are kids, and these are kids who have an enormous amount going on and come from complicated situations and complicated homes."
Ryan Jarvi, a spokesperson for Northwest Education Services, a district in Traverse City that includes the Creekside School, a specialized emotional impairment program, wrote that calls to law enforcement are not meant to be punitive to students.
“Since our students attend Creekside due to a previous pattern of dysregulated behavior, the calls to law enforcement are likely more frequent than in other area schools,” he wrote.
Experts say calling children “emotionally impaired” — or emotionally disturbed under the federal definition — can come with significant stigma.
“Emotional disturbance is putting a label that tends to be really stigmatizing upon children,” said Nicole Tuchinda, a law school professor at Loyola University New Orleans who researches trauma and special education.
Students designated as emotionally impaired by public schools in Michigan are referred to as “emotionally disturbed” under the federal term. The federal definition of emotional disturbance defines students as having one or more of these issues:
It’s unclear when or why Michigan adopted “emotionally impaired” over “emotionally disturbed.” But some experts say either label could shame children. Some states, such as Wisconsin, have overhauled the term they use to describe students with behavioral health issues — Wisconsin now uses “emotional behavioral disability.”
Emotional disturbance began as a term in the 1930s with the rise of residential treatment centers, said Deborah Doroshow, an associate professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who published a book about the history of children referred to as emotionally disturbed. Residential centers separating children from their parents fell out of favor in the 1970s as insurers questioned whether the practice was effective, along with increasing pressure to keep children in their communities.
Eventually, emotionally disturbed children fell under the umbrella of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and it fell more often to educational institutions under special education laws to try to manage a range of behavioral disabilities in children, as well as the juvenile justice system, Doroshow said.
But critics say the patchwork of education, mental and behavioral health systems in the country have failed to provide enough of a safety net for children with behavioral issues due to trauma or other mental health issues.
Students under the emotionally disturbed category are less likely to graduate than students who fall under other categories of disability, according to the most recent federal data available, from the 2017 to 2018 school year. The same data shows emotionally disturbed students were twice as likely to drop out than other students with disabilities, 32% for students with emotional disturbance compared with the national rate, 16%, for all students with disabilities.
The statewide graduation rate for students with emotional impairment was 53% for the 2022-23 school year, compared with 66% overall for students with disabilities, according to data provided by the Michigan Department of Education. Emotional impairment has the third-lowest graduation rate statewide out of the 12 disability categories.
And some students routed to emotional impairment programs shouldn’t be there, the Autism Alliance's Eckner said. Her organization frequently sees children diagnosed with autism outside of the school district given the emotional impairment designation for school services, rather than the autism designation.
Parents said they think behaviors associated with autism are punished in emotional impairment programs, but the programs fail to address any of those behavior triggers.
“Kids with autism … are being warehoused in these restrictive placements, and because they're wholly inappropriate for kids with autism specifically, then we're going to see escalated behaviors,” Eckner said.
It is unclear how many emotional impairment programs exist in the state. MDE did not provide a list of emotional impairment programs when a reporter asked for it. The department instead requested the Free Press pay $1,662.17 in records request fees for an estimated 30 hours to find the information.
The Free Press has declined to pay those fees.
Instead, the Free Press identified two dozen programs, often operated by intermediate school districts, which are county-level districts charged with consolidating special education programs.
State rules require emotional impairment programs to limit classrooms to no more than 10 students at one time, and educators should have emotional impairment endorsements attached to their teaching credentials, which require specialized coursework in their undergraduate or graduate programs.
Advocates like Trina Tocco, director of the Michigan Education Justice Coalition, said many children often need psychiatric help in addition to the behavioral health interventions in schools, but the wait times for psychiatric help, which would prescribe children medication, are long and often a winding path for families to navigate. Tocco is also the mother of a child with an emotional impairment designation.
And interventions meant to help students with emotional disabilities can ignore underlying causes of behavioral issues, Loyola's Tuchinda said, like persistent trauma, which could include being removed from their home as a foster child, violence in the home or substance abuse among parents.
“In my opinion, the school system fails kids with this label and they don't really know how to support them and their success,” Tuchinda said.
On May 23, 2023, Caleb became aggravated in class and left his classroom at Pine Tree to go to recess, according to witness statements in an Oakland County Sheriff’s Office report. An educator directed him to return to the classroom, but Caleb refused, becoming upset and throwing a football at a school social worker.
He left Pine Tree’s grounds with his head down, eyes up and “fists clenched,” an aide wrote in his statement. As he walked off the school campus, two staff members began to follow in a car, and they drove past him, “to not spook Caleb,” a social worker wrote. An aide and the social workers tried to get him to accept a ride back to school, but Caleb remained silent. A sheriff’s deputy arrived and tried to talk to Caleb, then blocked him from moving forward. That’s when the deputy grabbed Caleb’s hoodie.
The deputy radioed for assistance, “due to juvenile attempting to run towards traffic” and another joined. The other deputy wrote that Caleb was kicking and scratching them, so one lifted Caleb by his legs, carried the child into the back seat of the car, all while Caleb scratched and pinched the officer’s arm.
The deputies drove him back to Pine Tree, and his father picked him up.
Two days later, Pine Tree staff called emergency dispatch again for a runaway student. This time, Caleb had said another student tackled him, while staff members reported that the other student bumped into him, but didn’t tackle him. When the educator wouldn’t suspend the other student, Caleb became angry and hopped the fence again.
Six staff members followed him this time, as he walked briskly on the side of the road during rush hour, according to the deputy’s report. A deputy asked Caleb if he could stop and talk, but the 10-year-old refused. The deputy held onto Caleb’s left arm, Caleb screamed and pulled away. According to the deputy’s statement, the officer used the arm bar technique on Caleb to drop him to the ground. The deputy asked Caleb to put his hands behind his back, but the child refused. The deputy handcuffed Caleb and walked him to the back of his patrol car.
Stephen Huber, a spokesman for the Oakland County Sheriff's Office, wrote in a response to questions about the incident that handcuffs and the arm bar technique were used because “Juvenile was actively physically resisting and violent with the deputy.”
“The deputy was concerned the Juvenile would break free and run into traffic,” Huber wrote.
He added that the office “takes mental health and autism awareness training seriously and ensures that all deputies are training in these areas to identify, understand and respond to someone in a mental health crisis.”
Rivera-Killingsworth has pictures of the scrapes on her son’s face from the incident. According to the police report, the agency couldn’t determine whether the injuries were caused by “Caleb’s hostile/violent encounter with deputies” or from hopping the fence.
For Rivera-Killingsworth and Caleb’s father, Anthony Killingsworth, it’s hard to make sense of the encounter with police. They understand, they said, as trained military and law enforcement personnel themselves, that it was important to keep him from running into traffic, but feel the lengths deputies took were a step too far.
“I know you’re law enforcement, I get it, I know we have protocol to follow. I understand that, I do, but we’re not talking about a grown person, we’re talking about a child,” she said.
If those two incidents in the same week weren’t enough, a Children's Protective Services complaint alleging an incident at the school further hurled the family into chaos, Rivera-Killingsworth said.
After Caleb was restrained by deputies the first time, Rivera-Killingsworth wrote an email complaining about Caleb’s interaction with law enforcement and treatment by the school, sending the message to Michigan Department of Education officials, Oakland Schools leaders, and school board members. Two days later, the day a deputy handcuffed Caleb, a worker identifying themselves as Children's Protective Services called. Someone made a report against her, she said.
She was cleared of wrongdoing about a month later, a report shows. But the complaint was traumatizing for her and the whole family, keeping her from being in the same room with any of her children for 30 days without another adult.
She has complained to the federal education department, which in October opened up an investigation into Lake Orion Schools for Caleb’s treatment at the school. The investigation is ongoing.
Mark Snyder, a spokesman for Pine Tree, declined an interview with school administrators and declined to answer a list of questions sent by a reporter.
For Caleb, the impact of being handcuffed and detained by police, as well as his time at Pine Tree, triggered worrying behaviors his parents hadn’t seen for years or had never seen. He started self-harming again, Rivera-Killingsworth said. A new behavior: Caleb started smelling everything, and eating non-food items, like paper, when he became anxious. He started making repetitive noises, like a tick.
The reasons why police are called to specialized emotional impairment programs run the gamut: Sometimes officers just come to make an appearance, put in face time with students. Other reasons are more serious, like alleged assaults on teachers by students or children hurting themselves.
At the Edison School in Ferndale, a part of the Hazel Park Schools, the police department logged 230 encounters in 2021 and 2022 for the school of 46 students in the 2021-22 school year. (The Free Press removed incidents logged on holidays, incidents from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. and those coded as animal-related or 911 hang-ups.)
The Ferndale Police Department logged 16 instances of alleged assault and at least 17 alleged instances of an intentional threat to commit violence against schools during that period at Edison School. In some cases, students walked away from the school, often called "eloping." In another, one student reported that another punched them repeatedly on the head, according to police reports obtained through a public records request.
Sometimes students made troubling threats, that they were going to bring a weapon to school and hurt certain teachers or students. And sometimes encounters turned violent: In May 2022, a teacher tried to block a student from leaving the campus when the student pushed the teacher out of the way and he fell backward, into a glass door, injuring the teacher’s hand and requiring a hospital visit.
Hazel Park’s superintendent and a spokesman for the district did not respond to questions from the Free Press.
Leaders of other schools said they have called law enforcement when students ran away from campus, a significant issue in emotional impairment programs.
Teresa Belote, superintendent of St. Joseph County Intermediate School District, which ran the Pathfinder Program for students with emotional impairment, wrote in an email that she was “not surprised” her district’s rate of logged incidents was higher.
“During the timeframe you mentioned we had several students who had experienced extreme trauma and would run away from the school if agitated/escalated,” she wrote. “We called the police if a student eloped because our program sits on a busy road and student safety was a concern.”
Sometimes, school administrators at Pathfinder would call police as a backup measure, she wrote, to ensure safety.
At the Keeler Center in Redford Township, Superintendent Jasen Witt wrote in response to questions about incident logs that sometimes the school must rely on local law enforcement when behaviors by students escalate. A “considerable number of students” run away from the classroom and school building at Keeler, Witt wrote, and the school relies on police in those instances.
The Valley Center School in Kalamazoo “serves students ages 8-18, with emotional or unique behavioral needs,” according to its website. Law enforcement logged incidents at Valley Center, with 31 students, at the highest rates of all schools reviewed, at a rate of 244 logs per 30 students, compared with a rate of six logs per 30 students at Milwood Magnet School, a middle school 2.4 miles away with 688 students.
Nearly half of the 252 entries analyzed from Valley Center from 2021 and 2022, 43%, were categorized as community policing, which often involves officers visiting proactively to build relationships in the school. Principal Meghan Haas said officers from Kalamazoo Township police come not to intervene in these instances, but just to visit.
“Sometimes they stop and play basketball,” she said. “It depends — sometimes it does just look like checking in with the staff, just kind of doing a quick walk around the building.”
But sometimes even the presence of police can be upsetting to students and parents at these specialized schools, a parent told the Autism Alliance through its Michigan Parent, Advocate & Attorney Coalition.
Other visits at Valley Center, however, are categorized more seriously: In two years, officials logged nine assault incidents, one incident categorized as a suicide attempt, and 34 incidents categorized as “trouble with subject,” a catchall. Haas said issues that necessitate a call to law enforcement really depend on a student’s situation.
Some Valley Center students have emergency plans, which might involve calling emergency services if they walk away from school. In other instances, the police are called “if imminent risk was so great we didn't feel that our school interventions would be enough to keep people safe in a situation,” she said.
Sometimes, a school official will call just in case, while staff members are intervening with a student exhibiting a difficult behavioral issue, said Angela Telfer, executive director for special education for Kalamazoo RESA, Valley Center’s school district.
“Sometimes they come when we call them and they let us finish, and they, you know, are there in case we need backup,” she said.
The logs do not indicate how often students at various programs were charged with a crime.
A Free Press review of the police reports from Edison in Ferndale indicate that officers rarely request charges from county prosecutors, and school staff members at Edison —frequently school Principal Michelle Krause — told officers they would handle the situation internally, but wanted incidents of violence and threats reported.
Evan Maritz was 13 when he was placed at the Creekside School in Traverse City in late 2021, an emotional impairment program run by Northwest Education Center. Matt Maritz, Evan’s dad, said he was told by administrators that the program would help Evan, diagnosed with a behavioral disability as well as ADHD, both of which affect how he socializes and works with other students.
Evan is reserved and quiet. He stands tall and broad-shouldered. He’s protective of the people and pets in his life. Evan once stayed up all night sitting on his back deck to defend his beloved three pet ducks — French Fry, George and Penguin — from possible predators after a bear was spotted in the area.
At Creekside, Evan ran into issues fast.
The teen said he felt suffocated by small hallways and overstimulated by the sounds of other students screaming. He was sent out of the classroom into a hallway area regularly, he said, for doing things he wasn’t supposed to, like talking off-topic. Sometimes other kids would provoke him, he said, like when a student slapped him hard on the back repeatedly. Evan said he fought back, throwing the other student to the ground. Matt Maritz said he watched video of that incident, and Evan was punished for his actions, but not the other student, despite provoking Evan.
Evan didn’t feel like anyone at the school was trying to get down to the root cause of his behavior to help him move back to a traditional school setting. Instead, it felt like a school for students nobody else wanted, he said.
“I think what was supposed to be healing is, they just have us pretty much sit in silence while we do our work with like either soft piano music playing or nature sounds,” he said.
In other instances, Evan felt uncomfortable when staff put their hands on him trying to get him to exit the classroom, after he made inappropriate comments or refused to follow directions, behaviors that have to do with his disability, he said.
Educators should have been trying to calm the teen with specific de-escalation tactics, Matt Maritz said. One tactic he had discussed numerous times with school staff: having Evan call him or Evan’s mother, but Evan was rarely allowed to call his parents at Creekside, Evan and Matt Maritz said.
Evan remained at Creekside until March 2022, when one day while he was drawing, a teacher demanded he leave the classroom, he said. Instead, Evan asked the teacher what they thought of the drawing. The teacher demanded he put it away. Evan did not respond. More educators surrounded Evan, he said, making him uncomfortable. He pushed an educator’s head away. Then, they physically restrained him, pushing Evan to tears.
He ended up in a school seclusion room, according to Matt Maritz, unable to leave and traumatized, he said. Evan’s parents pulled Evan from Creekside after that and he has been in virtual school since.
The whole ordeal taught them to distrust Creekside and distrust the school district, which had routed him to Creekside in the first place. For a while, Matt didn’t trust Evan, either, because he’d believed what adults at Creekside told him — that Evan was repeatedly causing trouble. Then he began to request video footage as incidents happened, realizing adults were failing Evan, villainizing a kid in middle school, he said.
What was promised to be therapeutic ended up disastrous for his son, Matt Maritz said.
“I realized that I've broken the trust between myself and my son,” he said. “It took me almost a year to regain my son's trust. So I've had to work on that.”
Jarvi, the spokesman for Northwest Education Services, in response to questions about the incident where Evan was placed in seclusion, wrote that he could not speak directly about a specific student, but that the district’s policies and practices comply with state and federal laws, and employees are trained to follow state law.
Evan’s parents also complained to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that Northwest Education Services failed to positively reinforce changes in Evan’s behavior and instead reprimanded him, failed to address ongoing bullying and inappropriately restrained and secluded him. The federal agency began investigating the complaint in October 2022, and the investigation is ongoing.
For students with behavioral disabilities like Evan and Caleb, rigid systems and rules don’t always work, family members said. Emotional impairment programs made them feel isolated and criminalized for behaviors the children struggled to control.
School districts with these specialized programs also have some of the highest numbers of instances of restraint and seclusion of students with disabilities, according to the data — practices parents and advocates say are harmful.
State data does not include numbers for individual schools, however Hazel Park Schools administrators recently acknowledged that most incidents there were recorded at Edison, and they pledged to address restraint and seclusion.
Rivera-Killingsworth’s complaint to the federal Office for Civil Rights claims Caleb was secluded for hours at a time, sometimes as long as three hours in spring 2023.
Evan said he wants a change, saying, “I just hope that they won't be able to do that to other people.”
Multiple specialized emotional impairment programs use level-based systems to help contain behavioral issues, parents and administrators reported to the Free Press.
How level systems work depends on the school, but often they share similar characteristics: Students are expected to earn points throughout the day, sometimes hourly, for displaying the correct behavior.
At Edison in the 2021-22 school year, students were expected to prepare a point sheet every day, according to a student handbook from that year. Positive behaviors received points and students were expected to rise through different levels, up to level five, where the goal was students would return to their traditional district school. The point sheets “act as a concrete measurement tool for the student,” according to the handbook.
But some behavioral health experts say these systems don’t work for the students they’re trying to serve. Ginger Healy, a clinical social worker and program director for The Attachment and Trauma Network who once worked as a school therapist, said that on their face, programs that incentivize good behavior make sense in a school setting, because it can help teachers focus on content and curriculum.
But they do more harm than good, she said. And level programs also create a scale of behavioral expectations that some children might not be able to fulfill because children operate on different levels due to disability or social-emotional abilities.
“A lot of these programs or behavior systems can really shame a child. If you're seeing your name on the board or on a level system,” she said. “It's really painful. It's really shaming, and you get labeled, and other kids label you and then you get treated differently.”
At Pine Tree, rigid rules and a point system made it harder for Caleb to access coping mechanisms when he became overwhelmed, Rivera-Killingsworth said. Access to a sensory room listed as a school “point of pride” online, had to be earned, she said he told her.
“He’s a sensory child 100%,” she said. “That room should always be readily available.”
In Kalamazoo at Valley Center, administrators said they have moved away from a level system, with more of a focus on students as individuals to help students better achieve their behavioral goals.
Tocco, the Michigan Education Justice Coalition director, said specialized emotional impairment programs are emblematic of the larger problems in special education in Michigan, with children not receiving the intervention they need, having to fight for any accommodations — particularly when it comes to mental health issues.
And in the case of students deemed emotionally impaired, there is not enough of a focus on the psychiatric help students need, she said.
“In a lot of these programs, kids just feed off of each other,” she said. “Which makes sense, right? Of course they do.”
Parker, the associate superintendent of special education for the Muskegon Area Intermediate School District, said staff shortages and a crisis in mental health care that is out of schools’ control also contribute to escalated behaviors in emotional impairment programs.
“We are short on social workers and special education teachers who want to work with students with complex behavioral needs,” she said. “And community agencies are short staffed on that additional support that they're supposed to get. Residential treatment facilities don't have enough beds to take kids … so oftentimes when they're with us and exhibiting these high behaviors, they're on a waitlist for a residency.”
Advocates and experts recommend schools find ways to address student behavior before it spins out of control, utilizing crisis intervention training that focuses on forming strong relationships between students, and educators and special education aides. Educators who train others in crisis prevention suggest finding what triggers emotional distress in students, like when they're struggling to understand a concept in class but don't want their peers to know. For students with very sensitive triggers, it can take very little time to spiral into crisis.
But helping mentally vulnerable students also requires keeping a consistent staff in specialized schools, something Belote, the superintendent in rural St. Joseph County, found to be increasingly difficult amid a statewide shortage of special education teachers, leading to the closure of her district's secondary countywide emotional impairment program.
And police reports reviewed by the Free Press from programs across the state demonstrate that the people working in these specialized environments risk harm and face fraught interactions with kids and teens on the job.
"It's harder to fill the hardest positions," Belote said.
Caleb isn’t at Pine Tree anymore.
His parents moved their family nearly an hour away, from Clarkston to Canton, to get away from schools in Oakland County, where they feared Caleb would always be routed to specialized emotional impairment programs like Pine Tree.
The decision to move wasn’t easy. It uprooted Caleb’s siblings, who had already established friendships at their schools. It also imposed a significant financial burden, Rivera-Killingsworth said. They were in the thick of planning her 15-year-old daughter’s quinceanera party. They had planned a trip to Texas. And immediately after they moved, Rivera-Killingsworth had to go away for military training.
With help from an outside special education advocate, they enrolled Caleb in the Plymouth-Canton Community School District at Liberty Middle School, a traditional district school. And they agreed with school and district administrators that Caleb wouldn’t have any special education plan this time, he’d instead lean on school staff and his parents in a more holistic way, with the support of the principal at Liberty.
Caleb's first year at Liberty wasn’t without its hiccups: When other students made racist comments (he is Black) or approached him in a way that made him feel threatened, Rivera-Killingsworth said Caleb had a reaction: He’d try to fight back. But in one instance when he hit another student, he immediately walked himself to the principal’s office and told the principal what he’d done.
Caleb wasn’t punished. The principal told Rivera-Killingsworth that he saw her son’s reaction as a response built on trauma, something they could work on together, which they did.
In June, Caleb finished his first year at Liberty. He returned in September.
Contact Lily Altavena: [email protected].
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