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How a staffing shortage can make special education jobs more dangerous

Published

1 month ago

December 5, 2024

How a staffing shortage can make special education jobs more dangerous

Margo Jimenez cries as she talks about the moment she realized her husband, Fred Jimenez, would never wake up. According to his death certificate, Fred died of “blunt force head injuries” on Feb. 17, 2024. His injuries were caused by a push from a student 10 days earlier. His death was ruled a homicide.

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Every so often, Margo Jimenez says, her husband would come home from work with injuries.

“One day, he came home with a black eye, his glasses were broken, and he had bites on his arm,” Margo recalled. “I said, ‘Well, did you report it?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘Margo, because it happens all the time.’”

Schools are struggling to hire special education teachers. Hawaii may have found a fix

Fred Jimenez worked as a special education instructional assistant for the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio. He helped students with disabilities meet their learning and physical needs, and his job involved everything from diaper changes to helping students with hands-on instruction to managing violent outbursts.

On Feb. 7, one of those violent outbursts sent Fred to the hospital.

Fred was pushed by a high school student who has a cognitive disability. He fell and hit his head, and it led to a brain bleed.

He died 10 days later without ever waking up.

Margo Jimenez points out a memorial to her late husband, Fred Jimenez, in her yard – a stone with his name engraved on it. Next to it stands another stone, in remembrance of her son who died in a car accident.

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A workers compensation form describes Fred Jimenez’ injury. It reads, “Employee was pushed by a student and fell hitting his head.”

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“I literally have no one since Freddy passed away,” Margo said.

“Every day is a challenge for me, every day, every single day, all day. So I just do the best that I can with what God’s given to me.”

Fred’s story is an extreme case, but the situations he faced in the classroom are a common story.

Students receive special education services for a wide variety of disabilities. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most students with developmental disabilities aren’t any more aggressive than other students. But for some, their disability can lead to frustration and, in turn, aggression. Other students may have disabilities that include a tendency toward aggressive behavior.

“It’s not surprising,” said Susan Dvorak McMahon after hearing about the injuries Fred received before his death.

McMahon, a psychology professor at DePaul University, studies violence against educators and has conducted national surveys of educator experiences. Among her findings, published last year: Special educators are more likely to experience violence or aggression from students.

A Northside special education teacher who spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity said her leg was injured so badly while a student was in the middle of an aggressive outburst that she required surgery. She provided this photo of the bruising that developed after the injury. She asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.

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“These issues have been going on for a while, and because we asked teachers about their worst, those most upsetting experiences, we read a lot of responses that are really – they’re very difficult to read,” McMahon said.

There isn’t a lot of research into how often special educators are hurt at work, but a Pennsylvania study published in 2014 found special educators were nearly three times as likely as general educators to be physically assaulted by students.

That can make it harder for school districts to hire special education staff, at a time when schools across the country are struggling to fill these positions. A recent federal survey found, nationwide, special education vacancies are the most difficult for schools to fill. District officials told NPR that’s also been true in Northside.

How staffing shortages can lead to unsafe conditions

After Fred’s death, his colleagues filed an internal complaint with the Northside Independent School District alleging that his death was part of a widespread pattern of student-caused injuries in special education classrooms.

Exhibits full of photos and email exchanges paint a picture of how the district’s staffing shortages can lead to unsafe conditions and serious injuries.

Special education teacher Sheree Kreusel signed the complaint.

Special education teacher Sheree Kreusel worked with Fred Jimenez before he moved to his final job at a high school. “I’ve had so many injuries,” she said.

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“I’ve had so many injuries,” Kreusel said. “I’ve had three concussions, two broken noses, stabbed in the stomach, numerous bites, scars from bites. And that’s just kind of a normal thing, unfortunately.”

Kreusel worked with Fred before he moved to his final job at a high school. She teaches middle schoolers with cognitive disabilities, and for the past 15 years she’s worked in a classroom that’s only for students with higher levels of need.

Sam, age 6, and his mother, Tabitha, attend a virtual class with Sam’s teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing.

She said she loves her students, and doesn’t blame them for hurting her. Many of them have their own triggers, and Kreusel says she does her best to learn them. But she isn’t always able to avoid an outburst.

“The student may be aggressive, but it doesn’t mean they are targeting you because they hate you,” Kreusel said. “That’s usually not the case. It’s usually something that has happened, and they might be nonverbal. They can’t express it, and they just blow up.”

When that happens, the teachers’ complaint says, there isn’t enough staff to address it.

Kreusel has documented her injuries in photos. “I’ve had three concussions,” she told NPR. She said her last concussion caused permanent nerve damage on her forehead. Kreusel has also documented bite marks and scars after being bitten by students.

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Boston University researcher Elizabeth Bettini studies special education. She says when it comes to students who are prone to aggressive behavior, “You really need three people to be involved. You need two people to be part of keeping the students safe, and then you need a third one to collect data,” or document what’s happening.

But Kreusel said the district’s staffing shortages means educators are sometimes alone in the classroom. The district acknowledges this does happen.

Low pay makes it hard to hire and retain staff

Northside Independent School District officials said they can’t comment on the complaint while it is ongoing. However, Tracy Wernli, who oversees special education services for the district, agreed to answer more general questions.

Why children with disabilities are missing school and losing skills

She said Fred Jimenez was a “very well-loved instructional assistant in our district,” and described his death as a “horrible, horrible event” and “absolutely devastating.”

She also acknowledged the district has been struggling to hire the special education staff it needs, and a big reason for that is money. Wernli said the special education funding they get from the state and federal government isn’t enough to cover their costs.

“That’s a big key part,” Wernli explained. “We spend a lot more than what we’re given.”

Northside’s starting pay is less than $16 an hour for instructional assistants. Wernli said they can’t afford to pay more. But for a lot of people, that’s not enough compensation for a job that can be physically and emotionally demanding.

Margo Jimenez’s home is full of mementos and memorials to her husband, Fred. He was known as “Mr. Fred” to students and colleagues at the school where he worked.

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“There are people that do that and do it with passion and love it, and there are people that it’s just not for them,” Wernli said.

Kreusel, the teacher who worked with Fred, says she knows limited funding and staffing shortages are a challenge for many districts. But it doesn’t change her reality.

“I’m afraid what happened with Fred – people hear about that, and they don’t want to do this job. I mean, they can get paid more working at Chick-fil-A than being an instructional assistant,” Kreusel said.

She thinks she and her colleagues will continue to get hurt until the district hires more instructional assistants and pays them well enough that they’re willing to stay.

Audio story produced by: Janet Woojeong Lee
Audio and digital stories edited by: Nicole Cohen

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Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

Published

4 hours ago

January 11, 2025

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Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report released Friday.

The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”

The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.

Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.

The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.

The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.

According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.

The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.

The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.

In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.

In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.

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The strange world of the Euro-Gulf

Published

6 hours ago

January 11, 2025

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Waiting for the Tube, I see a poster for an upmarket gym chain. Locations? “City of London. High Street Kensington. Dubai.” What a shame to choose a setting that is so disfigured with bad taste and clueless expats. Still, the City and Dubai branches must be first-rate.

Soon after, I am in Doha, and again the Euro-Gulf linkage is inescapable. The emir of Qatar is back from a state visit to Britain, where the hosts were angling for a trade deal. Swiss-headquartered Fifa has just given the World Cup hosting rights to Saudi Arabia. Even in skyscraper-free Muscat, where alleys that might have been rationalised elsewhere in the Gulf twist freely behind the corniche, three restaurants in my hotel are outposts of Mayfair brands.

What a shame the word “Eurabia” is taken. And by such cranks. (It is a far-right term for a supposed plot to Islamise Europe.) Because we are going to need a word for this relationship. The Arabian peninsula has what Europe lacks: space, natural wealth and the resulting budget surpluses to invest in things. For its part, Europe has “soft” assets that Gulf states must acquire, host or emulate to carve out a post-oil role in the world. This isn’t the Gulf’s deepest external connection. Not while 38 per cent of people in the UAE and a quarter in Qatar are Indian. But it might be the most symbiotic, if I understand that word correctly.

True, the US has a defence presence in all six Gulf Cooperation Council states. This includes the Saudi footprint that Osama bin Laden wasn’t super-stoked about. But everyday contact? America is a 15-hour flight away. Its soft assets are either harder to buy or less coveted. Its citizens have little fiscal incentive to live in tax havens, as Uncle Sam charges them at least some of the difference.

In the 1970s, when Opec profits gushed through London, Anthony Burgess wrote a dystopia in which grand hotels became “al-Klaridges” and “al-Dorchester”. What a mental jolt it was for even the worldliest Europeans to see — we mustn’t pussyfoot around this — non-white people with more money than them. Still, they could condescend to the Gulf as being no place to live. Half a century on, their grandchildren would call that copium. In fact, their grandchildren might literally live there for economic opportunities. (Al-Dorado?) As a banker friend explains it, the time zones allow you to sleep late, trade the European markets, then dine late, so it is the young ones who do a Gulf stint, not the burnouts who are my age.

For how long, though? It is the sheer unlikelihood of this tryst, between a universal rights culture and monarchical absolutism, between a mostly secular continent and the home peninsula of an ancient faith, that distinguishes it from anything I can think of. A relationship can be both necessary and untenable. It wouldn’t take much — some intra-GCC violence, say, which seemed close in 2017 — for Europe’s exposure to the Gulf to age as badly as its former openness to Russia. If Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City are found to have committed financial chicanery, a chunk of Premier League history will be tainted. Because it is “just” sport, I sense people are underprepared for the backlash.

And it is parochial to assume that the relationship could only ever break down on one end. It is the Gulf side that has to make the awkwardest cultural adjustments. Because Europeans associate 1979 with Iran and perhaps with Margaret Thatcher, they sometimes pass over the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by zealots who thought the House of Saud had grown soft on western habits. Governments in the region assuredly don’t forget.

How far a place can liberalise without tripping a cultural wire occupies (and is answered differently in) each state, or emirate. Everyone is very nice to “Mister Janan” in his Doha hotel. But the metal scanners that must be passed on each re-entry to the building stand as a reminder of the stakes here. I wonder if Europe and the Gulf throw so much into their liaison out of a niggling doubt that it can last.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

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Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Published

6 hours ago

January 11, 2025

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Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Fox News appears headed for trial over false election fraud claims made after the 2020 election, after a New York state appellate court chose not to dismiss a lawsuit brought by voting tech company Smartmatic.

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Fox News appears to be headed once more to court over the lies involving election fraud it aired about the 2020 presidential race. This time, it’s over the false claims that election tech company Smartmatic sabotaged the re-election of then-President Donald Trump.

In April 2023, on the eve of a trial in Delaware in which Fox founder Rupert Murdoch was set to testify, the network and its parent corporation agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems.

Fox News settles blockbuster defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems

A flood of revelations from the pre-trial process of discovery yielded damning internal communications. The judge found that network figures from junior producers to primetime hosts, network executives, Murdoch and his son Lachlan knew that Joe Biden had won the election fairly. Yet, they allowed guests to spread lies that Trump had been cheated of victory to win back Trump viewers. Some hosts amplified and even embraced the claims.

Now, an appellate court ruling in New York state is allowing Smartmatic’s parallel, $2.7 billion suit to press ahead. The same ruling also dismissed some counts against the network’s parent company, Fox Corp.

Pro-Trump Fox hosts including Maria Bartiromo and the late Lou Dobbs invited guests making unsubstantiated and wild claims about Smartmatic on the air, and at times appeared to endorse those allegations themselves.

Fox forced Dobbs off the air just a day after Smartmatic filed its suit in February 2021. Two weeks later, Fox News and Fox Business Network ran an awkward segment with a voting tech expert, Edward Perez, to present viewers with a rebuttal to those outlandish claims. Newsmax, a right-wing channel in competition with Fox for viewers who supported Trump, did much the same.

“Today, the New York Supreme Court rebuffed Fox Corporation’s latest attempt to escape responsibility for the defamation campaign it orchestrated against Smartmatic following the 2020 election,” Smartmatic’s lead attorney, Erik Connolly, said in a statement. “Fox Corporation attempted, and failed, to have this case dismissed, and it must now answer for its actions at trial. Smartmatic is seeking several billion in damages for the defamation campaign that Fox News and Fox Corporation are responsible for executing. We look forward to presenting our evidence at trial.”

Unlike Dominion, whose voting machines were used in two dozen states, Smartmatic says its technology was used only in Los Angeles County in 2020. Fox has sharply questioned the value of Smartmatic and the contracts it says were jeopardized and lost.

“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial,” a network spokesperson said in a statement. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on their face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

In the Dominion case, Fox also relied on arguments that its shows and hosts were simply relaying inherently newsworthy allegations from inherently newsworthy people — the then-president and his allies. The presiding judge in Delaware, Eric M. Davis, rejected that argument; he found that Fox’s executives, stars, and shows had broadcast false claims and defamed Dominion in doing so.

Fox has said that the New York case offers a new venue, with slightly different implications, although Davis applied New York defamation law in his Delaware proceedings.

Fox settled, as it has in many other cases, before opening arguments of the trial with Dominion. It maintains it will fight the allegations Smartmatic is making in court.