The Shocking Truth

Something else you don't know about what the parents go through: You don't know what passes for treatment, for established science, at other schools. And you don't know that because few people in the behavior world will discuss it.

The documented success of positive-behavior support is, of course, the main argument against JRC. Yet that success is open to interpretation. Start with the patriarch of the movement, O. Ivar Lovaas, the one who used cattle prods on children before publishing a study in 1987 saying there was a better way. Lovaas's therapy, even then, worked only half the time. You'll find the same lackluster results in the definitive study of positive-behavior support, published in 1999 by the American Association on Mental Retardation. It found that only 68 percent of the subjects showed a dramatic decrease in problematic actions. Moreover, a 2004 book edited by academics at Ohio State, Penn State Harrisburg, and the Sage Colleges Center for Applied Behavior Analysis shows that positive-behavior support practitioners generally don't attempt to treat the most difficult cases. Presented with such children, they find another school for them.

JRC gets these kids. That's really what no one talks about. On average, its students have been to five other treatment centers. JRC will let you look at some of the redacted transfer forms from positive-behavior support schools along the Atlantic seaboard. Schools like these have sent at least 10 of their students to JRC within the past eight years. One of the schools, the prestigious New England Center for Children in Southborough, acknowledges in its report that the child it transferred to the Judge Rotenberg Center might need aversives. Even more surprising: JRC beats the positive-behavior schools at their own game. Another student in the placement files, a highly violent child from the May Institute in Arlington, has not needed the GED in JRC's care.

You'd think the state's Department of Mental Retardation would acknowledge such accomplishments. Louisa Goldberg of Newton says after a New Hampshire school told her it would no longer take her son Andrew—staffers were afraid of him—she looked for more than two months at roughly 40 schools from a roster provided by the state. None wanted Andrew. And JRC was not on the list. "That happens with loads of Massachusetts parents," she says.

Such are the politics of mental health. Politics that allows the state of New York to author that scathing 2006 report about the school when, seven months earlier, in November 2005, it had issued another report finding little wrong. What changed between the dates was the media attention brought by Evelyn Nicholson's lawsuit, the mother of Antwone. Her attorney, Ken Mollins, made sure the case received maximum exposure: on WNBC Channel 4 in New York, Newsday, CNN. What the media failed to report, however, is that Nicholson and Mollins had done this before—specifically in 2005, when Mollins complained to New York's Department of Education about the small size of the time-out room at Nicholson's younger son's school.

Given the popular conception of JRC, "you'd think I'm a monster," says Kate VanOrden. But you'd be wrong. VanOrden is the sort of mother who, long before she had kids, or even a husband, interviewed teachers and principals in the various towns of suburban Syracuse, eventually settling in Fayetteville, 15 minutes to the east, solely for its school district. A short-haired, big-bifocaled Jewish woman, VanOrden has five adopted children, all of them black, and, because she never found that husband, a sixth child, a daughter now 17 years old, through artificial insemination. What makes VanOrden's vantage point unique is that she's an Ivy League–educated psychiatrist. She has worked in a violent inpatient ward at a state psychiatric hospital. And she sought out JRC.

The trouble for VanOrden's oldest child began in kindergarten. Carino stood out—and not just because he was a young black kid in the suburbs of Syracuse. Carino couldn't color within the lines; he couldn't cut and paste where he wanted to. He lacked fine motor skills.

He was otherwise smart; he read voraciously, in the years to come inhaled history. But his impediment kept him from excelling in math, and that led him to despise school, which only worsened his grades, which only further hurt his self-confidence, until Carino found that misbehaving in class was an effective and sometimes fun way to vent his frustrations.

VanOrden saw where this was heading. A problematic black kid with an aggressive streak and academic difficulties? These were some of her patients. The Fayetteville school district ultimately wanted nothing to do with Carino. Neither did a day school more than an hour away, where Carino, then 13, ate his way through his unhappiness until he weighed 260 pounds. He spent the majority of each day in a 4-by-6-foot padded cell, throwing himself against its oak door, an even larger man on the other side, pinning him in there. The aggravation at school became anger at home, and the anger violence, and the violence one awful night in the bathroom, during which Carino tore from the wall a plastic towel hook, taking its broken end and putting it to his mother's neck.

She yelled to the other kids to stay in the bedroom, lock the door, and call 9-1-1. VanOrden knew all the proper restraints and takedowns. So even though Carino had her in a bear hug of sorts, still holding that towel hook, "saying he's going to shove it in my bleep, bleep, bleep," it wasn't long before VanOrden backed him into a corner from which he could do no damage. They struggled like that until police came.

It killed her, but she put him in juvenile detention. When he got out there was only one place she wanted him to go.

VanOrden might never have found JRC had a social worker she'd known from another mental hospital, whose son was there, not raved about the place. True to form, VanOrden had called before there was a need to. "Remember how I told you I interviewed before my children were born? Well, when I saw any hint of the freight train coming, I talked with JRC—about two years before I thought he might actually go." When she called the school, officials there insisted they meet. VanOrden said she didn't know when she could get off work. No, the school said, we're coming to you.

They spoke for more than four hours in VanOrden's office. "Two guys with this great big PowerPoint thing and their papers and portfolios and all that stuff," she says. "I'll never, never forget it. They had a thoughtful, coherent, fully developed answer to every legal, psychiatric, medical, worst-case scenario. They had the whole thing." Carino's school district finally approved his placement with JRC in 2004.

This month will mark Carino's fourth year at JRC. He is 19. He is learning at his own pace and is scheduled to receive his high school diploma before he turns 21. He isn't on the GED; the school's reward system was enough to decrease his outbursts. But he's wanted to be on it. "My son begged for it for two years," VanOrden says. "He said that it was like going into the Marines. If he had the GED, he knew that he would stop behaving badly."