Students who allege abuse at closed private school sue WA education agency
.jpg "The Northwest School of Innovative Learning was a school for students with disabilities in Tacoma that shut down in 2024 after an investigation from the Seattle Times and ProPublica outlined a lack of staff and licensed therapists at the school as well as excessive use of restraint, isolation and abuse.")
The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction faces allegations of enabling child abuse at a now-closed private school for disabled kids.
The Northwest School of Innovative Learning, or NW SOIL, was a school for students with disabilities in Tacoma that shut down in January 2024 after an investigation from the Seattle Times and ProPublica outlined a lack of staff and licensed therapists at the school and excessive use of restraint, isolation and abuse. Families of students who attended the school’s locations around Washington list NW SOIL and various school districts that recommended students to attend NW SOIL as defendants across five different lawsuits, alleging that they played a role in enabling the abuse, according to Whitney Hill, a lawyer representing the families.
NW SOIL had locations in Tacoma, Redmond and Tumwater, and families have come forward naming districts like Tacoma Public Schools, the University Place School District and the Bethel School District.
A new lawsuit filed in Pierce County Superior Court on March 5 adds the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, or OSPI, to that list of defendants. It calls for a judgment against OSPI in an amount to compensate plaintiffs A.M. and her son M.M. and T. H-S and her son K. H-S. – who are minors and are listed by their initials to protect their identity – and an award to cover attorneys’ fees.
Hill said she’s concerned with “how little action” the state agency took in response to numerous complaints about NW SOIL prior to its closure.
“It seems like an overwhelming number of complaints got to OSPI’s desk, and they did not take action on those complaints,” Hill told The News Tribune.
An attempt to reach a spokesperson for OSPI was not immediately successful.
The lawsuit alleges that OSPI was aware of poor conditions at NW SOIL campuses for roughly a decade but failed to take action, allowing NW SOIL to maintain its status as a “nonpublic agency”: a private school that received taxpayer dollars to teach students with disabilities free of charge.
The complaint outlines at least 12 instances of parents and education leaders notifying OSPI of poor conditions for students at NW SOIL’s various locations, after which OSPI maintained NW SOIL’s nonpublic agency status.
“By repeatedly renewing NW SOIL’s authorization and deferring to school districts to address complaints, OSPI allowed NW SOIL’s abusive, harmful, unsafe and educationally deficient environment to persist,” the complaint reads.
The lawsuit alleges that in repeatedly approving and maintaining NW SOIL’s authorization, OSPI allowed for “discriminatory treatment on the basis of disability.” It alleges that plaintiffs were denied “equal access to education” and that the plaintiffs in the case who were students at NW SOIL suffered “severe emotional distress” as a direct result of OSPI’s failure to protect them from “reasonably foreseeable harm.”
“OSPI knew or, in the exercise of reasonable care, should have known that NW SOIL presented a foreseeable and unreasonable risk of harm to vulnerable students placed there,” the complaint states.
