Dan Glaun/MassLive

By Dan Glaun | MassLive

When current and former staffers at Tri-County Schools for troubled youth gathered for a reunion this May at the Brass Cat bar in Easthampton, they did not know what was coming.

By the end of that month, the head of the nonprofit that operated Tri-County for 30 years would announce the school's abrupt closure for the next school year. Two months after that, the reasons for that closure would become clear: the release of a damning investigation which found repeated abuse of the often traumatized children the school was designed to serve.

That abuse was enabled by internal turmoil and administrative unresponsiveness to staff and student concerns, a MassLive investigation has found. Former staffers, students and parents said that school leadership placed undersupported and ill-trained staff on a collision course with emotionally troubled students, leading at times to physical violence and avoidable injuries.

On that day at the Brass Cat, current staff mingled with veterans of the school's heyday. They were shocked to learn that the often chaotic institution they worked for was once a model for the region's special education schools, according to two former staffers who attended the event.

"When we were telling them what that school was like, they couldn't believe it," said Danielle Crescione, a former instructional aide who ran enrichment programs that were cancelled after she left the school in 2015. "They're not bad people, they really aren't. But they were not trained to do this kind of work."

One staffer had his arm in a sling from a student breaking it, Crescione said. Others complained about understaffing and lack of support from administrators, said Stephen Dion, who served as the school's director from 2007 until he was let go in 2013.

"They weren't trained, they weren't supervised," Dion said. "Staff were left alone in rooms. Staff were not trained. Staff were told, 'You're not going to get any more help.' "

Paul Rilla, the head of the Easthampton-based Northeast Center for Youth and Families nonprofit that ran the school, acknowledged that the school had not lived up to its past performance.

"It was painfully clear that despite our best intentions, despite our past record of success and despite our exhaustive efforts to correct problems identified by the state (and by ourselves), it was becoming increasingly difficult to meet the needs for all of our students.," Rilla said in a statement.

But he attributed the school's staff turmoil to resistance among some veteran staff to changes in the school's approach to student care, coupled with difficulties in recruiting qualified replacements and overall declining revenues for special education schools.

Rilla rejected claims that administrators were apathetic to staff and parent concerns, saying the school's leadership worked to address Tri-County's problems.

"Many issues in the Disability Law Center report directly reflect this challenge: classroom staffing challenges, over-use of police resources to deal with aggressive students, our own need to report certain staff to DCF or terminate their employment for improperly restraining children, and other issues," Rilla said. "There was never a week when we were not actively recruiting to fill positions.

MassLive interviewed 10 former staff, students and parents at Tri-County, reviewed state audits and inspections and examined school financial records in an attempt to answer a single question: How did a school with a model record in dealing with Western Massachusetts' most challenging students deteriorate into an institution plagued by neglect, violence and staff injuries?

MassLive's investigation found:

Administrators placed uncertified teachers in charge of classes following mass departures of experienced educators.

Executives at Northeast Center for Youth and Families, the nonprofit that ran the school, received steady salary raises over the last five years -- after cutting pay for support staff responsible for handling disruptive students.

School staff used physical force to restrain students who were being disruptive but non-violent, violating state regulations and sometimes causing student injuries.

Staffers suffered bites, punches and broken bones from confrontations with students.

The school's website falsely advertised student enrichment programs that were cancelled or curtailed years earlier.

Both administrators and state regulators were warned of staff concerns years before the Disability Law Center's investigation found repeated allegations of abuse against students.

The Disability Law Center's investigation of the school was damning, but did not close the book on Tri-County -- or its leadership. The DLC, a nonprofit authorized to conduct official investigations of abuse against disabled people in Massachusetts, has said the school intends to "reassess its operation and re-open with a trauma-informed care focus." It would need state approval to do so.

In an interview, Rilla said he hopes the school will reopen but has not made any final decisions.

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Art work in a window at Tri-County Schools. (Dan Glaun/MassLive)

Understaffing

At its peak Tri-County had 65 staff and taught more than 115 students with behavioral difficulties too difficult to handle in standard public schools. For years, there was almost no staff turnover. The school's workforce included enough support staff to monitor hallways for student disruptions and multiple clinicians and counselors to talk down students in crisis.

But that all changed in 2013, Dion said. Administrators slashed salaries for support staffers, according to Dion and two former instructional aides, fired a union steward and replaced Dion with the first of several short-lived school directors.

Rilla declined to comment on the pay cuts.

"They kind of made it known they didn't want the old-time people," Dion said.

The pay cuts and layoffs triggered a mass exodus of staff, Dion, Crescione and former instructional aide Greg Metzidakis said. Between 2013 and last year, nearly the entire staff had turned over, according to Dion. Administrators did not fill vacant positions, placing legally mandated staffing ratios out of balance.

Rilla offered a different explanation for the turnover, saying that some veteran staff were uncomfortable when the school changed to a "trauma informed care" model that placed an emphasis on understanding students' past struggles.

"This change did not come easily, and some of our longtime staff left," Rilla said in a statement. "We had several school directors during this time."

That approach ran into roadblocks, according to the Disability Law Center investigation. The report found that in recent years staffers used restraints and discipline techniques without considering students' traumatic histories, sometimes leading to increased distress and physical confrontation.

The staff turmoil coincided with major declines in both the number of students attending the school and the Northeast Center for Youth and Families' financial health. From 2012 to 2017, the school's population declined by more than 60 percent -- and along with it, the millions in tuition payments those students brought in. Top nonprofit executives continued to receive raises, even as revenues dropped by 25 percent and support staff were hit with pay cuts.

After 2013, the school began placing students in age-mixed classrooms against best practices, Crescione said. For months, there was one certified teacher in the entire elementary wing, she said.

"A complete disservice has been done to all those elementary kids. You can't put a kid that's 8 years old in with a kid that's 13," she said. "There were classrooms with six kids in them and one staff."

Cuts to clinical staff were particularly severe, according to interviews with Crescione, two former students and two former staffers who requested anonymity to protect their careers.

One instructional aide, who worked for Tri-County both before and after the staff decreases, said staffers used to be able to freely call on counselors to help de-escalate classroom situations. Students, who often had severe behavioral disorders, could become agitated or angry in class, and the school's counselors and staff psychologist helped de-escalate outbursts without the use of physical force, the aide said.

But by the time of the school's closure, just one counselor remained and was often too overworked to immediately respond to classroom tensions, the aide and another staffer with knowledge of clinical operations said. During one incident, the school's only counselor was tasked with chasing a student who ran from Tri-County's Easthampton campus all the way to Holyoke -- leaving Tri-County without any clinical staffing for more than two hours, the staffer said.

"Excuse my language, but it was just a shitshow," the aide said.

Bianca Cavanaugh-Green, a former Tri-County student who attended from 2015 until the school's closure, said the one counselor on staff was "great." But he was sometimes assigned to work as a "one-to-one" classroom aide with high-needs students, leaving him unable to see other kids, Cavanugh-Green said.

"They would say sorry, he's not counseling today," she said. "The one counselor we had to talk to wasn't available because he was doing someone else's job."

School administrators tried hard to replace departing staff with qualified applicants but faced an increasingly difficult labor market, Rilla said.

"In the past five years, our ability to recruit and retain the unique individuals who are compassionate, interested and capable of working with these children has become overwhelmingly difficult, especially in the western part of the state," he said. "This is hard work. It is not for everyone."

The Massachusetts Association of 766 Approved Private Schools, an organization representing private special education schools in the state, confirmed that recruitment problems were not limited to Tri-County in recent years.

"We are hearing from many of our members that they are having difficulty filling positions due to the low unemployment rate," MAAPS Director of Government Relations and Communications James Daiute wrote in an email.

The lack of support staff, who were supposed to be the schools first-line of response when students required restraint, meant that teachers and the school's counselor had to sometimes physically grapple with students, Crescione said.

"Clinical staff should not be putting any child in a hold. The one clinical staff they left there had to assist in many holds," Crescione said. "How can kids trust that clinical staff when they've had to hold them? As soon as clinical staff has to put their hands on any child, that trust is gone."

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Tri-County Schools on East Street in Easthampton.

Unprepared and undertrained

As veteran staff fled Tri-County, they were replaced by newcomers whose good intentions could not overcome insufficient training and a lack of administrative support, according to multiple former staffers.

Joe Simanis, who managed information technology at the school from 1993 to 2007, said at that time there was a concerted focus on training. The school had strict incident reporting standards and paid close attention to the proper use of restraints on students, he said.

But after Dion left, and as Rilla and Associate Executive Director Meredith Lagoy cycled through a series of school directors, that all changed, former staffers said.

"They replaced them with people who weren't trained and weren't certified," Dion said. "They just got rid of all the experienced, well trained teachers."

One former staffer, who worked at the school during its last years, told MassLive that other schools where he had worked required six days of restraint training and frequent recertifications, to ensure that staffers knew when using physical force on students was allowed and how to do so safely.

At Tri-County, staffers who were not on the front lines of student behavioral management did just one training per year -- despite often being called on to assist in restraints, the staffer said.

The former instructional aide who worked at Tri-County both before and after the leadership change said administrators placed her in a classroom with seven boys and a substitute teacher. She was expected to lead the class despite lacking a teaching certification and was not provided lesson plans, she said, while the substitute contributed little and did not teach.

Those lapses had serious consequences, staffers said.

"Although students were injured by staff, staff were also injured by students on a daily basis," said Cavanaugh-Green, the former student. "The school was not equipped to handle aggressive students."

The former instructional aide said she was injured five times during her last six months on the job. She was bit and punched, and injured her knee while performing a restraint, she said.

And the other former staffer who requested anonymity said students would sometimes insult or threaten to fight aides and teachers. Some teachers walked out of classrooms because they did not feel safe or supported by the administration, he said.

Crescione said some staffers suffered broken arms and broken fingers at work.

"They could have been avoided by more staff training," she said. "The administration knew there were unprepared staff to deal with those kids."

In his statement, Rilla said that staff turnover was not the only challenge faced by the school. Public schools across the state developed in-house programs for their troubled students in recent years, referring only students with the most severe behavioral issues to Tri-County and other special education schools like it, he said.

"As a result, the student populations coming to schools like ours are increasingly challenged and require more skilled interventions," Rilla said.

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A photograph of former Tri-County Schools student Bianca Cavanaugh-Green's swollen ankle, taken after she was allegedly pulled off a moving bicycle by staff. (Courtesy Bianca Cavanaugh-Green)

Physical force against students

Few would dispute that the student body at Tri-County posed challenges for its educators.

The school was a refuge for students referred from public schools who could not meet their behavioral needs. Many suffered from mental illness or had severe trauma responses from childhood violence and abuse. Others had autism and required specialized care to avoid overstimulation that could place them in distress.

And sometimes, when students acted out physically in ways that posed a danger to themselves or others, staffers physically restrained them -- as allowed and governed by strict state regulations. For years, Tri-County managed to educate its students without frequent restraints, and in 2009 easily cleared an inspection from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

And the school was creative in its efforts to keep students safe and calm. Tri-County kept a clutch of therapy rabbits on its campus, and staff would bring students out to see them as a means of de-escalating conflicts.

"It didn't matter how angry the child was. They could have ripped apart everything in a classroom," Crescione said. "They could go outside and sit down with a bunny and instantly calm down."

But by 2015, state inspectors noted deficiencies in the school's implementation of its restraint policies. And when parent complaints led the Disability Law Center to launch an investigation in April of this year, the results were shocking.

Staff repeatedly escalated confrontations, causing avoidable fights and leading to student injuries, investigators found. The report listed nine pages of misconduct allegations, finding evidence of abuse both emotional and physical. An eight-year-old boy came home with a broken finger after being restrained "almost daily" for behavioral problems, the report found. Some staffers were fired after calling students "asshole," "retard" and "SPED" during confrontations. Another staffer was fired after putting a student in a headlock.

"TCS staff repeatedly utilized excessive force and ignored student distress during restraints, used restraints as a non-emergency intervention, and intentionally antagonized students into restraints, resulting in physical and psychological injury to students with disabilities," the Disability Law Center said in the report, which was released in August.

State regulations prohibit the use of restraints as a response to property damage, refusal to comply with school rules or verbal threats that "do not constitute a threat of assault, or imminent, serious, physical harm."

But students interviewed by MassLive described the frequent use of physical force against students who were being disruptive but non-aggressive -- sometimes in ways that escalated the situation into violence.

Cavanaugh-Green said students were often manhandled if they were being loud and not listening to teacher instructions, or if they attempted to leave the school without permission.

"This happened the entire time I was there. Their version of escorting down the hallways is grabbing you very hard and dragging you," she said. "They shoulder bumped you. They would block you from going anywhere. They would do all these things that they know would trigger students."

Cavanaugh-Green, who has post traumatic stress disorder, acknowledged she sometimes clashed with school staff. She once removed a door handle from a school door while she was off her medication; after one administrator called the police on her and another staffer confronted her, she swung the door handle, striking the staffer in the hand, she said.

She was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, but those charges were later dropped, she said.

But staffers were sometimes quick to resort to physical force, she said. Cavanaugh-Green shared photographs with MassLive depicting bruising she said came from restraints at school. And during one incident a staffer grabbed the handlebars of her bicycle when she ignored requests to stop cycling, sending her tumbling onto the ground and injuring her ankle, she said.

Karen Green, Cavanaugh-Green's mother, confirmed her daughter was injured when a staffer knocked her off a bicycle.

"Managing one kid at home is terribly hard and challenging, so I get it. But this is their goal and mission," Green said. "Is this the toughest population? Absolutely. But they're still entitled to be respected and kept safe."

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A 2014 promotional video featuring former Tri-County Schools staffer Danielle Crescione. The video is still promoted on the school's website, despite advertising an agricultural program that is no longer offered.

False advertising

To judge it by the descriptions on its website, Tri-County remained an educational paradise until its closing days.

The website, which was taken down after MassLive reached out to the Northeast Center for Youth and Families for comment, touts a wide range of extracurricular and vocational programs. It advertises equine therapy and a student chess club -- and no less than a "backyard menagerie" of free-range chickens and therapy rabbits cared for by students.

But any parent expecting the advertised benefits for their children would come away disappointed. Those programs were dramatically curtailed, altered or eliminated in recent years, according to former students and staff.

Crescione, who is still featured in a video touting agricultural learning despite leaving the school in 2015, led alternative programming at the school. While the school hired a staffer to replace Crescione after she left, the staffer was soon reassigned as a classroom aide and the enrichment programs atrophied, Crescione said.

The chess club ended immediately after Crescione left, she said. Her agricultural and recycling program, called C.A.R.E.S., followed suit within half a year of her departure, according to both Crescione and a former staffer who requested anonymity.

"That program completely fell by the wayside," Crescione said.

C.A.R.E.S. lay dormant for over a year while still advertised on the school's website. In 2016, the school hired Aemelia Thompson to restart the agricultural and therapy animal programs.

She built goat and chicken enclosures and ran regular agricultural programs for students until she left the school in January of 2018. She then found adoptive homes for the Tri-County animals, she said.

But through her tenure, the school still touted Crescione's program on its website, Thompson said. The two programs had different cirricula, and Thompson asked the Center to update its web page to no avail.

"I contacted Paul Rilla and NCYF to see if they could take down Danielle's program from the website," Thompson said. "I said is there any way we could change this, it's different now."

The website also advertised a volleyball team which did not exist at the school, multiple former staffers said.

Cavanuagh-Green said a friend had transferred to Tri-County to participate in their automotive program, only to find it no longer existed.

"I would constantly look at the website to see if they updated it and they never did," she said. "I was like this is insane, this isn't right."

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A photograph of the Northeast Center for Youth and Families' 2013 federal tax return.

Financial problems

Tri-County, like more than 150 private special education programs across the state, filled an important role in its local education ecosystem.

Public schools incapable of handling students with severe behavioral problems could refer them instead to facilities like Tri-County. And because local school districts owe every child an education -- no matter how intensive their needs -- the districts would pick up the tab for tuition costs.

For Tri-County, those referrals were lucrative. In 2016, the school received $42,000 per student each year --a number that has increased to over $50,000 by last year, according to state data. It was an amount of funding that allowed the school to offer resource-heavy services while remaining profitable during Dion's tenure, he said in an interview.

But student referrals began to drop, gutting revenues for the organization -- a problem that did not only affect Tri-County, Dion said. Other private special education schools have also seen student referrals drop as public schools enhance their own special ed programs, he said.

Daiute, Director of Communications for the the Massachusetts Association of 766 Approved Private Schools, confirmed that overall enrollment has been dropping at private special education schools in Western Massachusetts.

Evidence for the organization's financial problems can be found in a 2011 audit of the nonprofit, which found that the center had improperly used $406,000 in funding from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to "fund losses that it incurred within programs it operated in the state of Connecticut." Those expenditures were part of $1.2 million in improper or poorly documented spending identified by the office of State Auditor Suzanne Bump.

And a review of Northeast Center's tax records shows that salaries for the group's top executives increased, even as Tri-County cut pay for support staff, attracted fewer students and became the center of an abuse investigation.

In 2013, the last year Dion served as head of school, Rilla earned $149,000 in total compensation. Lagoy took in $103,000, and Chief Financial Officer Leo Audette earned $124,000, according to federal tax records.

By 2017, Rilla was making $171,000, Lagoy $128,000 and Audette $153,000.

While their annual raises were not extreme, they received steady increases as pay for support staff was cut -- and both spending and revenue at Tri-County dropped dramatically.

In 2012, instructional aides at Tri-County earned an average of $31,686 per full-time equivalent position, according to state financial filings. There were 23.8 full-time equivalent aides, and nearly six full-time equivalent clinicians and counselors on staff.

The next year, there were four fewer aide positions and their average salary had dropped to $29,516. Numbers of aides and teachers continued to drop as enrollment and revenues plummeted, and by 2017 there were the equivalent of 7.6 full-time teachers and special-ed teachers -- down from 21 six years earlier.

The cuts coincided with broader setbacks to the nonprofit's financial fortunes. In 2013, the Northeast Center for Youth and Families took in $16.7 million, almost entirely from program revenue, according to federal tax documents. Each of the organization's services -- residential programs, foster care programs and Tri-County -- took in hundreds of thousands more dollars than they spent on operational costs, the organization reported.

At Tri-County, revenue dropped as the student population began to decline. In the 2011 to 2012 school year, 98 students attended Tri-County, according to state data. The number of students steadily dropped in the following years -- 92, 81, 73, 63. And in the 2016-2017 year, referrals plunged, with the school only serving 38 students.

By 2017, total revenue for the Center had dipped to $12.5 million, and both Tri-County and the residential programs were barely breaking even.

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An overgrown greenhouse on the grounds of Tri-County Schools in September 2018. (Dan Glaun/MassLive)

Missed warnings

It took until May of this year, with a Disability Law Center investigation underway, for Tri-County Schools' leadership to decide to shutter the school for a year.

But top administrators had years of warnings from staff about conditions at the school, according to interviews with former staff members.

In 2013, the union for Tri-County's teachers and teacher's aides released an open letter describing the school as an "increasingly hostile" employer who had terminated five teachers and instructors that year -- including a union steward.

"We are understaffed, and this puts in jeopardy the safety of our students and staff and our ability to provide the quality education to which we aspire. Despite all this, NCYF has proposed dramatic decreases in our benefits and compensation," the letter said. "We see clearly that NCYF believes that we are each easily replaceable and not the skilled, highly trained professionals that we are."

Those five terminations became a flood of turnover, both from firings and staff leaving due to pay cuts or demoralization, former staffers told MassLive.

Crescione said she contacted the state Department of Elementary and Secondary education in 2012 or 2013, complaining about cuts, the slashing of clinical staff and Dion's firing.

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education did not respond to a request for records of complaints and inspections at Tri-County prior to publication.

And Crescione alleged that Lagoy and administrator Amy Craig could not have remained ignorant of the increase in restraints and injuries to both staff and students. All restraints were logged on report forms which included justifications for why the use of force was necessary.

"I don't doubt for a second that those things happened, but Meredith and Amy -- their offices are in that building. They knew what was going on," Crescione said of the allegations of restraint abuse in the Disability Law Center investigation. "We had all been trying to tell the board that there were some very severe safety issues with our students."

The union said in 2013 that the Northeast Center for Youth and Families board declined to act on their concerns -- an allegation echoed by Crescione.

"They all knew what was going on this school, and nobody did anything to help the staff," she said.

Board president Kevin Day did not return an email seeking comment.

Rilla denied that concerns went unheeded, saying that attempts to provide more support to staff were hindered by difficulties in finding qualified teachers and aides.

"I think it was a recruitment issue," Rilla said in an interview.

Cavanaugh-Green sent letters to Rilla complaining about her treatment at the school and received no response, according to both her and her mother.

And while the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's 2015 review did not uncover the visceral claims of emotional and physical abuse featured in the Disability Law Center's investigation this year, it did specifically note deficiencies in the school's restraint policies.

For now, Tri-County's future is unclear. The Disability Law Center's report suggested a path to reopening the school, if the administration submits a remedial plan and reworks its procedures.

But four people interviewed by MassLive -- Dion, Crescione, Cavanaugh-Green and another student who asked for his name to be withheld -- all voiced the same concern: that Northeast Center for Youth and Families' current leadership cannot be trusted to run the school again.

"I don't think it's possible, judging by what's happening to them," Dion said. "I don't know why anybody would send kids to them."

Note: Following publication of this story, a former Tri-County Schools staffer reached out to provide additional context about the school's agricultural programs. This story has been updated with her account.