The hidden cost of separating 'emotionally disturbed' students

0:00I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. Across the U.S., there are more than 300 ,000 students categorized as emotionally disturbed. Emotional disturbance is a federally recognized special education category. It's for kids who struggle not with learning or mobility, but with their behavior and emotions. Like all kids with disabilities, students with the emotional disturbance label are guaranteed a free and appropriate public education. It's baked into a law passed more than 50 years ago, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. These kids are also legally entitled to services and specialized help.

0:48But there's a big question around whether the support they're getting is doing more harm than good. This week on The Sunday Story, a look at one student who was categorized as emotionally disturbed when he was just a young child and what that has meant for the rest of his education. At home, I knew how to act. But at school, it was problems. I was a bad kid. Stay with us.

1:21This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this spring? Prolon's 5-Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15 % off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash NPR. This message comes from ID Tech. ID Tech is where kids 7 to 17 find their people. The Camp Crunch Labs IRL, BattleBots, and Game Design people.

2:02Visit IDTech.com and use code IDTech to save$150. This message comes from ADT. Imagine you're enjoying your first free day in months, and the next second, your phone buzzes. A window has been broken at home, and you're miles away. That's why ADT offers professionally installed security systems backed by the most company-operated monitoring centers in the industry. With 24-7 monitoring, they're always keeping watch over your home, so you're always supported during an emergency. When every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com to learn more. I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is A Sunday Story. I'm joined by reporter Lori Stern.

2:45She spent years covering education and joins us now to talk about her long-term reporting on the disability category called emotional disturbance. Lori, welcome to the podcast. Ayesha, it's great to be here. So I know you have like a specific story to tell, but before we dive into it, can you just help us understand what emotional disturbance is? At least to me, this isn't something I'm familiar with.

3:16Laurie Stern:Yeah, and that's probably because emotional disturbance is a catch-all category. According to the law that created special ed, the criteria include, and this is some of the law's language, a pervasive mood of unhappiness, an inability to maintain healthy relationships, and inappropriate behavior and feelings under normal circumstances. The experts I talked to all said emotional disturbance is subjective. It's not a medical diagnosis. It's a label that's specifically created for special education. And in most cases, it's up to schools to decide who gets that label. So if a school gives a child an emotional disturbance label, what kind of support does that child get?

4:10It depends on a lot of things, including the state where the student lives and what school they go to and how many resources that school has for special education. But the goal in special education is always for kids to learn in, quote, the least restrictive environment. But more often than not, kids with emotional disturbance don't learn in regular classrooms. Okay, so if they're not in regular classrooms, where do they learn? They learn in separate classrooms. Federal data show students with that emotional disturbance label are three times more likely to be educated outside of regular classrooms than the overall population of kids with disabilities.

4:56Laurie Stern:And even the EBD kids who go to regular schools are often placed in their own separate classrooms. To give you a sense of what that's like, I want to tell you about a classroom I spent time in. It was at a high school about a mile from where I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's called Central Senior High School. It's this concrete building, pretty institutional looking, but it has a great reputation. It's known for accomplished alumni, lots of extracurriculars, and it's also super diverse. Minnesota employs more special ed staff than most other states. So Central has quite a few special ed teachers, including two who run classrooms specifically for kids with emotional disturbance.

5:44Laurie Stern:By the way, Minnesota calls that emotional or behavioral disorders, EBD. Other states have different names for the same thing. One of those EBD teachers is Jesse Quakenut. Everyone calls him Mr. K. Oh, come on in. Come on in. All right. Tell me about Mr. K's classroom. Okay, Aisha, it's tucked away on the corner of the fourth floor, and I went to his class for the first time back in May of 2024. Hey, guys, let's get that rock in here. Let's use the word. I'm going to get flying on it here. There were about a dozen kids in the class, and every one of them had an EBD label. Mr. K was the case manager for many of them, and also their English and social studies teacher.

6:32Laurie Stern:The day I visited, he started class with a vocabulary lesson. All right, dudes, so the word is lecture. I'm going to put it up here right now. Make sure that you get... Mr. K talks fast, so in case you missed it, the word class started with on this day was lecture. Did anyone look up left, just so I know? Did anyone look that up? No, we thought we'd wait for you, K. All right. Hey, Joel, tuck that foot up. Okay, so he's given a lecture on lecture. Yeah, he had the word up on a PowerPoint slide. Lecture, anything like that. That is to read, choose, or to gather. You good? And then the URE is act, process, or being, right?

7:14Pleasure, rapture. Mr. K asked me to jump in. Help me out, Lori. Other things that end with URE. Conjecture. Feature. Feature. Excellent. What's that? Pure. Pure. Nice. I don't know if you count on you dudes. Pure. All right. So make sure you get that. Okay. Well, I mean, it sounds like it's a fun class. The kids seem to be engaged, and I know that is hard.

7:40Laurie Stern:Yeah. And Mr. K is really good at keeping it social and fast-paced. But soon after this vocab lesson, he put on a video so that he could check in with each student, take their emotional temperature, make sure they knew he cared about them. So, Lori, it was in Mr. K's classroom that you met the student that you followed? Yeah, that's right. His name is Walt. And we're only using his first name in this story because of the stigma associated with being labeled EBD. When I met him, Walt was in 11th grade. And Mr. K had been his teacher and case manager since he started at Central in 9th grade. He's an amazing, incredibly intelligent, amazing human being.

8:28Mr. K had asked Walt to come up before class started. How you doing, man? Okay. You good? Yeah, I'm fine. Excellent. Thanks for swinging up.

8:35Laurie Stern:I really appreciate it. The three of us sat down at a table. Walt was tall and lean with a quick, bright smile. He had on the classic high school uniform, backpack, dark ripped jeans, sweatshirt. And he was also wearing a big gold medallion with four tiny photos in it. He was a kid and some grown-ups. I asked him about it. Do you wear that every day, special days? Every day. You do? I don't ever take it off. Aisha, he later told me those pictures were of family members who died. Oh, that's really sad. And that he has so many and he's so young. So why was Walt labeled with an emotional or behavioral disorder?

9:26Well, it was because of how he acted out. But in order to understand it, you have to understand his background. He has seen a lot of trauma. So what happened to Walt? So, Aisha, that medallion Walt wears, that's just a glimpse of what he's been through. Walt was born in 2006, and court records indicate his household was violent. Walt's father beat his mother, and he was in and out of jail when Walt was little. His father is now in prison, serving 25 years for sexual assault. Walt was in foster care for a time when he was just five years old after his mother had been hit by a car. She's been in a wheelchair ever since.

10:12I mean, that's a huge amount of trauma and just upheaval for anybody, but especially a child. It is. The teachers and psychologists I talked to said most kids with the EBD label have similar levels of trauma. In fact, they said if they could come up with a label for kids who end up in EBD classrooms, they'd call it PTSD. But PTSD is not a label that exists in special ed. And by the time Walt was six, he was placed in a school for kids with behavioral problems. So what was that school like?

10:54Laurie Stern:Well, it was this completely separate school for kids who administrators believed could not physically be with the general ed population. The students were mostly kids of color. In fact, federal data show black kids are twice as likely as white kids to be labeled EBD. And kids in EBD are disproportionately low income. Walt is both, black and from a low income family. The school had pretty intense security, padded timeout rooms, and a focus on behavior more than on academics. Walt said that at school he got in a lot of trouble. Or as he put it, he was rowdy with the staff. I was just a kid doing too much.

11:41Like, I was a bad kid. I was like, don't get me wrong, at home, I knew how to act. But at school, it was problems. A bad kid. You know, my brother had a lot of behavioral issues growing up. And one thing that my mother said that she was told by his grandmother, actually, it was that you don't label a child as bad. Their behavior may be bad, but the child is not bad. So even if you behave badly at school, that doesn't make you a bad person. No, it doesn't. But I did hear from a lot of experts that many kids with the EBD label really believe they are bad. They've brought it on themselves. Even though, Aisha, they usually get the label when they're really young.

12:30So, I mean, tell me more about Walt's family. His dad, you said, is in prison. So was he raised by his mom? He was.

12:42Laurie Stern:and his mom, Crystal Doremus, she's a big personality. I met her at the small house she was renting in a working-class neighborhood of St. Paul. A few of Walt's nine siblings also live there. Crystal is paraplegic, so she guided me up the walkway in her wheelchair. I don't think it's the push, it's the flipper.

13:10When we got inside, I could hear the smoke alarm going off, and I asked her if we could do anything about it. She said no, she was used to it, along with all the other issues in the house. It's a lot of problems with this house that the landlord don't want to deal with. We keep having a non-working stove or refrigerator. refrigerator. It's an ongoing thing. We're trying to get the trash bins emptied out. We talked more about her housing situation, and I got to know her preschooler, Deshaie. I did so five. How is it being five? Good. And meeting Deshaie put things in perspective for me. Remember, Aisha, Walt was around Deshaie's age, just five, when he started acting out.

13:57He started biting. He started throwing chairs and you didn't really have to do nothing. Like if you even touched his desk or you made fun of him or you just said hi to him, something like that, he'll just go off, explode. yeah I mean that type of behavior is so difficult I mean I've seen it and you know I hear about it from some of my kids classmates they'll say you know a certain kid is throwing chairs and even one of my kids was like you know this little boy in class he needs therapy because he keeps throwing chairs right like um he has some anger issues but it's it's disruptive to the entire class, you know, I've had like my friend's child got injured when a child pushed her.

14:45She had to get stitches. So, I mean, there's a lot of complications with having kids in the class who are kind of having this explosive behavior. But I think also for the mother of the child who's trying to, whose child gets that label, how challenging that must be for her as well. What was Crystal's reaction, and what did she think about him going to a separate school? Yeah, you're right. It's really complicated. She didn't like the padded timeout rooms and the heavy-handed way the school enforced discipline. But she also felt it was a bit of a safety net. And you know how you were talking about your daughter's classmate needing some help?

15:33Well, Walter did too, and he actually got some help outside of school. We did family therapy. They did individual therapy with him. He got a mentor, which took him places, which she still is his mentor to this day. It sounds like Walt was getting the help that he needed, the close supervision, therapy, a mentor. Did it help?

15:57Laurie Stern:You know, this is where we get back to how hard it is to measure EBD and progress for students with that label. Other special ed designations have measurable goals, but EBD doesn't have goals that are straightforward to measure. Like, how would you measure personal relationships or inappropriate feelings? The bottom line is Walt spent all of elementary school in this segregated school with no interaction at all with students in regular classrooms. So what happened after elementary school? Well, by seventh grade, the school team that worked with Walt decided he was ready for a less restrictive environment, a regular middle school.

16:43Laurie Stern:No more locked rooms and holds. The plan was, at his new middle school, he would be eased into regular classrooms. But still, he'd start out in a classroom with other kids in EBD, and that's where his home base would be. So how did he do in a regular middle school? Not great. His behavior was still a problem. He got into a lot of fights, and he wasn't really able to handle regular classes. But it could also be that the school didn't have the support he needed as he tried to adjust to a regular classroom. So if you're getting into fights, did that mean that he was also getting suspended a lot? That's what it meant.

17:30Okay. So if you're missing class from suspensions, then that's definitely going to interrupt your learning. And I would think that it would make it harder to successfully transition into a regular school, right? Right.

17:52Laurie Stern:You have put your finger on something I keep hearing from the education research world. Putting kids with EBD in separate classes creates a vicious cycle that actually makes it harder for them to improve their behavior. One of the experts I talked to was Chad Rose, an education professor at the University of South Carolina. He's also the head of an international group of academics and educators who work on behavior and emotional health in schools. We have these classrooms full of kids that have engaged in challenging behaviors, and we're not getting them acclimated to communicate and function and collaborate alongside their same age peer group without disabilities.

18:36Laurie Stern:And that's what happened to Walt. He was surrounded all the time by other students labeled EBD, so he didn't see how most gen ed students behaved, and he wasn't expected to act like them or make the same academic progress. There just wasn't that much time for academic learning when teachers had to focus on behavior. So Walt spent all of his elementary school years in a school for troubled kids. Then in middle school, he was segregated in classes for troubled kids. And now we're meeting him in high school. Where the pattern continued. He told me about it on a hot day with all the fans in the room on.

19:22I started getting suspended. Like 10th grade, I got suspended. say 160, 104, 30 times. You did not. I did too. Walt was exaggerating a bit. I checked and he'd actually been suspended dozens of times, not hundreds. But I mean, in a way, he's overselling it. He's a little cocky about all of these suspensions that he's had. Well, he's a teenager. And remember, he'd been in classrooms where that behavior was happening all the time. As a kid, you watch. You want to follow what other people does. Like, if somebody's doing something cool, you're going to do that automatically. So I say, like, why would you be the only person in the room trying to change, knowing that everybody else in the room is trying to follow the clown?

20:11But by the time I met him, Walt told me he had a really strong desire to change. And that's because the summer between sophomore and junior year, so the summer before I met him, Walt was arrested for stealing a car. A robbery he said he didn't commit. You can touch somebody's car. Touch it wrong. Just touch it any wrong, you can go to jail. You can do anything to go to jail. It's easy to go to jail. It's hard not to go to jail. And for Walt, that was a low point. That eventually became a turning point. He spent two weeks in juvie. And it was basically a preview of what he thought his future might be.

20:52When I got to jail, people knew who I was like. These were people that I already knew. I played basketball with. I knew these kids. So these were kids he knew from the EBD classes?

21:04Laurie Stern:Some of them were, and it's not that much of a surprise. There isn't recent data about outcomes for kids with EBD, but about 15 years ago, a study found that youth with EBD are more than twice as likely to get arrested soon after high school than kids with other disabilities. Walt told me he hated it in juvie. But a few months after he got out, he went on this trip with a non-profit that works with Black youth who'd been through the correction system. They toured a few historically Black colleges. And Walt said the trip shifted something for him. Back when I met Walt at the end of junior year, both he and his teacher, Mr.

21:46K, remembered how different Walt was when he came back. You were like a man on fire. You were on a mission. You had that look in your, like, you came back and you're like, okay, what are my classes? What have I got to do? What are we doing? What's my plan for after high school? And Walt had an answer to those questions. Central has taught me, like, you want to be successful after this place. That's what they're setting me up to do, to be successful after this. Like, I want to go to college. So it feels like at the end of Walt's junior year, he's sort of on a knife's edge. He's been exposed to some HBCUs, and I have to say HBCUs are known for giving students second chances for redemption.

22:34That is a story of HBCUs, and he's been exposed to that. He wants to turn his life around. He's motivated and smart, but to do that, you have to stay out of trouble, And that can be very hard when you've had a history of getting into trouble.

22:57Laurie Stern:That's right. And the odds were not in Walt's favor. More than a third of kids with the EBD label don't finish high school with a regular diploma. Their dropout rate is twice as high as it is for all students with disabilities. Walt was behind. He was missing half of the credits he needed to graduate. I asked Walt if I could tag along with my microphone for his senior year, and he said yes. How come you want to do this with me? Because a lot of people don't get hurt, don't get talked to. I don't get spoken to at all. I have a lot going on, and I've been through a lot, and people don't know. Of course I agree to it.

23:46Why not? I mean, it's nice to hear it. When we come back, it's Walt's senior year. I don't know. I think I'm starting to like school. And we meet another one of Mr. K's students from a decade ago and hear about a path Walter never got to take. Stay with us. This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this spring? Prolon's five-day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers.

24:35Get 15 % off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash NPR. This message comes from ID Tech. ID Tech is where kids 7 to 17 find their people. The Camp Crunch Labs IRL, BattleBots, and Game Design people. Visit IDTech.com and use code IDTECH to save$150. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and we're back with a Sunday story. Reporter Lori Stern has been talking to us about Walt, a student in St. Paul, Minnesota, who has a special education label called emotional or behavioral disorders known as EBD. Students labeled EBD tend to spend more time in their own separate classrooms than kids with other disabilities do.

25:26So one of the key questions is how does separating out these kids affect their future? Lori, you met Walt in an EBD classroom his junior year, and he agreed to let you check in on him during what he hoped would be his final year in high school. And he basically said he wanted to be heard, which is a beautiful thing. What did checking in on him look like? Well, I went to his classroom. I talked to his teacher, Mr. K. I talked to Walt outside the classroom a few times, and he and I texted back and forth. And the theme, more than anything, he kept telling me he just wanted to graduate with his class.

26:11And as we know, he had a lot of catching up to do since he was really behind in his credits that he needed to graduate. That's right. And then, Aisha, in November of his first semester, I saw this other side of Walt. That doesn't sound good. It wasn't. So picture this. Mr. K was about to start a social studies class when Walt stepped out for a bathroom break. Then, all of a sudden... Let's slow, let's slow, let's slow, let's slow. Hey, real quick, real quick, real quick. There was a commotion outside in the hallway. Then Walt and this other teacher I'd never seen before came into class yelling at each other.