Auditors raised concerns on Wednesday that some private special education schools in Connecticut are failing to give students all the services they need, hiring staff without background checks and relying on substitutes who lack certification. 

State auditors looked at records from five special education schools across the state — The High Road School of Wallingford, Adelbrook Academy in Cromwell, the Grace S. Webb School in Hartford, University School JPE in Bridgeport and the American School for the Deaf. In each case, the auditors reviewed services rendered for one fifth of the students at the school. 

The report found that the High Road School of Wallingford, for example, provided to its students less than a third of the individual services for fine motor skills that were required in their students Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs — documents created by school districts that outline exactly what services a student should be receiving each year. The school also provided less than half of the individual and group counseling services that its students’ educational plans demanded. 

The Grace S. Webb School in Hartford, part of Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living, provided about half of the group counseling services that its students’ plans demanded and 68% of individual counseling services required in those plans. 

In their responses to the audit, the schools argued that chronic absenteeism prevented them from being able to offer all the services that their students were required to receive.  

“We serve students who struggle with chronic truancy, as defined by the State,” the Grace S. Webb School responded in a statement to the audit, adding that they offer specialized programs that attempt to reduce student absenteeism that can be driven by psychiatric or emotional problems. “Given the population of the students who struggle to maintain consistent attendance at school, we often deliver services in non-traditional settings as students can tolerate, which may not have always been captured fully in documentation.” 

The High Road School of Wallingford gave a similar response. 

“Chronic absenteeism and other attendance challenges are common among our referred student population and can significantly limit our ability to deliver scheduled services,” they wrote, adding that they have added in a new monitoring system meant to help the school reach out quickly if a child is not attending or engaging. 

A spokesperson for the High Road Schools told CT Mirror that most of the school’s students come in mid-year with intensive needs and high levels of absenteeism. 

“One of our main priorities is creating a safe, welcoming and positive school culture that encourages attendance and drives students’ willingness to learn,” she wrote. She said they are in “close communication” with the local school districts and review the services that students receive each month. 

The Adelbrook Academy in Cromwell, which serves 80 students, mainly with autism spectrum disorder, appears to have done better than the others, providing more than 85% of services for motor skills and language and communication skills. But the auditors noted that the academy did not provide any record of the counseling services that were being offered through the school. 

Alyssa Goduti, president and CEO of Adelbrook, said that they don’t bill counseling services separately, since they consider them part of services every child receives. She said their data has since been updated.

In response to the audit report, the State Department of Education said they were “concerned” about the allegations but said it was the responsibility of the local school districts to make sure special education students were getting the appropriate services. 

The High Road School of Wallingford is one of four High Roads schools across the state. Last March, the four schools were the subject of a report from the Office of the Child Advocate and Disability Rights CT that revealed more than 1,200 reports of students being placed in restraints and seclusion within one year. Nearly half of those took place at the High Road School of Hartford Primary/Middle School. 

The report found that the students at High Roads were “grossly underserved both in terms of educational planning and service delivery.” 

“The investigation revealed widespread student disengagement and chronic absenteeism across High Road locations, failure to adequately assess and support students’ educational needs through individualized service delivery and, perhaps most alarmingly, gross deficiencies in the number of certified special education teachers and other credentialed educational staff working with children and systemic failure to ensure and/or document that staff had undergone employment checks and criminal and child welfare background checks,” the report stated. 

In September 2024, the Office of the Child Advocate and Disability Rights CT filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs claiming that the state Department of Education had failed to properly monitor what was happening in private special education schools. 

The Department of Education had said it  “vigorously disagree[d] with the conclusions” of the report and said they had not received any complaints about the school during the time period the report took place. The High Roads Schools said the report did “not accurately reflect the academic and behavioral supports at our schools” and that they had outlined their plans for improvements. 

Sarah Eagan, executive director of the Connecticut Children’s Advocacy Center and the former Child Advocate, said she was concerned that the High Road’s report was a “canary in the coal mine” that indicated widespread problems of accountability within the industry. 

“You can’t have services and a system of care for highly vulnerable people that nobody oversees without bad things happening. And we do not learn that lesson despite being taught that over and over and over and over again,” Eagan said. 

Eagan said that while the local school district was responsible for making sure that a student was getting the special education services they were required to have by law, it was the state’s responsibility to oversee the districts. 

Matt Cerrone, director of communications for the state Department of Education, said the agency was reviewing the audit to determine next steps. In July, the state announced the hiring of an outside firm to review the agency’s system around special education and how it responds to complaints. 

Another concern Eagan raised was that certain schools were not conducting required background checks or hiring qualified teachers. She said one of the issues they found in the High Road report was a lack of credentialed staff and long-term uses of temporary substitutes. The High Roads spokesperson told CT Mirror that the school does background checks on hiring and that they have a department dedicated to hiring documentation.

The audit found that one school in particular, University School JPE in Bridgeport, did not show any evidence of background checks being done for any of the nine teachers that the auditors reviewed. 

The school responded that they had purchased the school from another company shortly before the 2023-24 school year commenced and that they kept the employees from the previous school. They said they had been unable to get anyone to conduct fingerprinting on their employees but that they had all been submitted to background checks in April 2024. 

“At the time of the audit, USJPE had been in operation for less than one year and had not had the opportunity to conduct recurrent background checks. Background checks are completed upon hire and recurrent background checks will occur April 1st for anyone employed for one or more years,” the school said. 

The auditors also raised concerns around the American School for the Deaf and the Grace S. Webb School for a lack of policies and internal controls around background checks for their employees. According to the auditors, four of six American School for the Deaf staff who were hired before July 2019 did not have a records of a national criminal history records check, and one of seven staff at the Grace S. Webb school hired before that date lacked the same record.

The American School for the Deaf said its current policy requires background checks for new employees and for any promotions. The Grace S. Webb School said they plan to implement a process to ensure that periodic background checks are conducted.  

“The Grace Webb School has long been a place of healing and learning for students who need specialized psychiatric support,” said Tina Varona, spokesperson for the Grace Webb School. “The students who attend the school face unique challenges that make it difficult to integrate into mainstream classrooms and are often unable to attend a traditional school.”

Jeff Bravin, the executive director of the American School for the Deaf, told CT Mirror that the school was using a new tracking system to make sure students were getting all their services and that they had created stricter protocols, including a new tracking system, that would confirm that “every staff member has undergone the necessary checks and verifications before beginning their work with students.”

“The safety and well-being of our students are the highest priorities at the American School for the Deaf. We take the audit’s findings very seriously and want to assure our community that we have already taken appropriate steps to address all issues raised,” Bravin told CT Mirror.

The schools, with the exception of Adelbrook. were also found to have various degrees of non-compliance with the requirement for employment history verification, and all the schools except the High Road school had multiple staff members without prior work references in their files. 

The auditors warned that a lack of background checks put students’ safety at risk and noted that not having employment verification history would increase the risk that one of their staff members might have been fired from or left a previous job, or had their credentials suspended because of “an allegation or substantiation of abuse, neglect, or sexual misconduct.”

Goduti said that although Adelbrook was compliant with all background checks, they were implementing ways to conduct recurring background checks to maximize safety. 

“Ultimately, kids need to feel safe. Families need to feel safe when they’re sending their students to us. So that is something that we prioritize,” she said. 

In a review of teaching certifications, four of the eight teaching staff that the auditors reviewed at Wallingford’s High Road School were long-term substitutes not certified to teach special education. Two of the four teachers the auditors reviewed at the University School JPE did not have evidence of a certificate in education, and the school principal did not have a state certification in either education or administration.  

The High Road School responded that they followed state requirements around hiring, and that people hired temporarily without certification were given mentorship and professional development. The school noted that they continued to try and recruit for positions, but said a nationwide teacher shortage required them to have “flexibility.” 

The University School JPE said the two teachers without a certification had bachelors degrees in their respective fields, and that the principal had a master’s degree from Fordham, had taught at Sacred Heart and Fairfield University and had worked for the prior owners of the school since 1984. 

Data from the State Department of Education shows that staffing vacancies at approved private special education programs have decreased by about 400 over the last two years, but that there are still 2,500 vacancies at programs across the state. 

Goduti said that while Adelbrook wasn’t facing staffing challenges, she was well aware of the shortage of special education teachers. She said her school does internship programs and they travel to high schools and universities to promote special education as a choice for young people. 

“We need to figure out how to get more incredibly talented young people to want to go into special education as a career. It’s a hugely rewarding career. So we’ve been thinking creatively about how we can incentivize and really encourage folks to work in this field,” she said. 

Goduti said Adelbrook appreciated the auditors’ work and that they were always trying to improve. But she said the report also didn’t show the dedication of their teachers or their students’ successes. 

“ We serve kids that really have had a lot of doors close on them in their lives. We try to meet them with compassion and commitment and rebuild the sense of trust and help them to think about what are their dreams and how do they get there,” she said. “All those beautiful parts of our service system, which we gladly showed the auditors when they came to visit, it just doesn’t come out in an auditor’s report that only identifies deficiencies but not successes or best practices that maybe could be shared or highlighted.”