ProPublica

by Jennifer Berry Hawes, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

This story contains a racial slur.

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Join us for a virtual discussion of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.

Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.

The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a “segregation academy” due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of its opening. It’s down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.

Wilcox Academy in Camden, Alabama

Down the road, the county’s public high school has more students and course options. Wilcox Central High’s building, with a medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house 1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.

Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.

Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.

But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.

Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their resources were combined.

“You’re dividing money you don’t have in half,” said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation and school choice.

And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools. Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It’s part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the Southeast — where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation academy may be the only nearby private school option.

In March, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox County, signed the CHOOSE Act. It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay for private school tuition, among other costs.

Since the start of 2023, North Carolina, Arkansas and Florida have joined Alabama in opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years, as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in low-performing schools. South Carolina created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income families. Georgia adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools. Governors in Texas and Tennessee pledged to continue similar fights next year.

To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.

After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.” Even the language used — framing the movement as parents’ right to “freedom” and “private school choice” — was the same then as it is now.

“I cannot see how there will be any difference,” Suitts said of recent laws. He dubbed Alabama’s new voucher-style program the Segregation Academy Rescue Act.

Republican lawmakers strongly disagree. They argue that today Black and white students alike can use the money to attend private schools. The new law bars participating schools from discriminating based on race, though it does allow them to choose which applicants they want to admit.

During House debate earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Danny Garrett, the education budget chair, heard many Black legislators argue that the law is about race, its aim to bolster segregation. “Of course, neither of these statements are true,” he told them.

In Camden, the pastoral county seat of Wilcox, Black and white residents said they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to best do that.

High school juniors Jazmyne Posey and Samantha Cook hadn’t met until they started working at Black Belt Treasures, a nonprofit in downtown Camden that sells the wares of hundreds of Black Belt artists.

On the surface, the teenagers appear to have little in common. Jazmyne is Black; Samantha is white. Jazmyne likes rap and hip-hop; Samantha likes indie pop. Jazmyne goes to the public school; Samantha goes to Wilcox Academy.

But they soon bonded over similar life experiences and problems, both teenagers navigating high school relationships. They wonder what it would be like to be in class together. Would their friends get along?

High schoolers Samantha Cook, left, and Jazmyne Posey talk about their favorite music while working at Black Belt Treasures, a cultural arts center in downtown Camden.

Once, when they hadn’t worked together for a while, Jazmyne missed talking to Samantha. “I caught word that she said she missed me too,” she said.

Samantha has watched her class at Wilcox Academy shrink from 22 to 13 students. She likes her writing classes but wishes the school offered more, especially a theater program. “I definitely would have been a theater kid,” she said. One day, she hopes to join her sister in Atlanta: “There’s so many different cultures, so many people to meet.”

Jazmyne’s grandmother, who died this spring, attended the public high school a few years after desegregation. By then, most white students had left for the new academies. Although racism caused segregation, Jazmyne doesn’t think it’s the cause of the ongoing divisions.

“Nobody around here is really racist,” she said. “We just haven’t come together. We’ve been doing our own thing all the time.”

Roots of Division

Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews grew up immersed in the urgency and hope of the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was a prominent activist and chaplain of Camden Academy, a private Presbyterian school for Black children. Her mother taught at the school. The entire family lived, learned and worshiped on the campus, perched atop a grassy knoll called Hangman’s Hill.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of her father’s college classmates, spoke at commencement in 1954. The grounds soon became a hub for staging civil rights marches and boycotts — landing it in the crosshairs of white school officials.

In 1965, the Wilcox County school board exercised eminent domain to take over the property. They kept the school open for several more years but evicted the Threadgills from their home and forced her father and his parishioners to tear down the school’s church.

She witnessed the dismantling. Someone burned a cross in their yard.

The family pressed forward. A year later, when she was a freshman, Threadgill-Matthews arrived at Wilcox County High, then a public school for white children. It was Sept. 23, 1966, and she would become one of the first nine Black students to cross the county’s racial line that day.

Sheryl Threadgill (pictured on the far right with her mother behind her) was among several Black students who integrated Wilcox County schools. (Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library) Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews looks through her old yearbook from Camden Academy.

Grand white columns flanked the front door to the red brick building. She was grateful that her father walked her inside. Even after he left, the morning passed quietly. But it was a fleeting relief. Over the coming months, students rammed her desk with their chairs. They ripped her books apart. They brushed chalk dust into her hair. They smacked her head with crutches.

One day in science class, a boy sneered: “Nigger, if you make more than me on the test, I’m gonna kill you.” When she did so, he hurled something at her head so hard that she fell unconscious in the hallway.

She endured for the school year, then pleaded to return to Camden Academy. So did most of the students who’d come with her.

By then, white families across the South had launched the segregation academy movement.

In Alabama, it ramped up after a federal court ordered Tuskegee High School to desegregate. White parents scrambled to open a segregation academy, which Gov. George Wallace soon toured. He urged more like it to open — and called on state lawmakers to help.

In 1965, the state’s legislature approved $3.75 million — worth about $36 million today — to fund tuition grants that paid for students “to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes,” the Alabama Journal reported.

Six other Southern states adopted similar programs, which “enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South’s history,” Suitts wrote in the journal Southern Spaces.

Across the old Confederacy, newspaper headlines announced private schools opening with names like Robert E. Lee Academy, Wade Hampton Academy, Jefferson Davis Academy. The Rebels were a favored mascot.

In March 1970, Camden’s local newspaper reported, “Promoters of additional private school facilities in Wilcox County got a shot in the arm this week.” The federal government had filed a plan for desegregating the local schools.

“The action is expected by many to spur interest in the construction of new private school facilities at Camden and Pine Hill,” the article said.

Two weeks later, another headline reported: “Private School Plan Shaping Up.” The story said 119 families in Wilcox had formed a new foundation, voted to start a private school, and secured 16 acres of land in Camden. It was the birth of Wilcox Academy.

Despite the obvious implications of the timing, many white people across the South argued their motives for embracing the new academies weren’t racist. Publicly, they cited “choice,” “freedom” and higher-quality (often Christian) education.

But those sentiments were hard to square with the fact that many academies opened hastily, often in people’s homes, churches or vacant buildings. Researchers who visited some of the new schools in the 1970s wrote that most were “dilapidated, worn, a little dirty, short on supplies and materials, cramped, offering few opportunities for enrichment.”

Wilcox Academy, however, enjoyed substantial financial support from the start. When it opened in September 1970, it was “generally regarded to be one of the most beautiful and well-equipped new schools in the area,” the Wilcox Progressive Era newspaper reported.

The nearby public school started the year with half the students it had the year before. Just two years later, Wilcox County public schools enrolled 3,733 Black students and only 109 white ones.

Now five decades later, only a handful of white students are enrolled.

Under drizzly clouds one day this spring, Threadgill-Matthews accelerated up the grassy knoll where Camden Academy once stood. With her 5-year-old great-nephew in the back seat, she approached J.E. Hobbs Elementary, a public school that now operates on the academy’s former campus in a hodgepodge of structures. Her nephew’s classroom was to one side in a low-slung building, painted blue with sunshine-yellow doors.

On her other side, a timeworn sidewalk leads to nothing but a stand of pine trees. Before the school district evicted her family and condemned it, their home stood in that spot.

Her nephew slipped from the car with his Spiderman backpack, gave her a hug, and headed into a classroom filled with Black children — just as she once did on this campus.

Now 71, she tries not to dwell on the disappointment. So little has changed since Brown v. Board, or the day when she and other Black children made history and suffered terribly for it.

“It is really heartbreaking,” she said.

Patrick Wheeler Jr., 5, is dropped off by Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews, his great-aunt, at the same campus where she attended an all-Black school in the 1960s. Threadgill-Matthews stands beside a sidewalk where her childhood home once stood outside of Camden Academy, a Presbyterian school for Black students. J.E. Hobbs Elementary now stands on the former site of the academy. Tools of Resistance

Several years ago, an Auburn University history student reached out to Threadgill-Matthews, hoping to interview her for a master’s thesis. Amberly Sheffield had taught at Wilcox Academy, an experience that left her so intrigued by the school and its origins that she was devoting her thesis to the topic of segregation academies.

Sheffield grew up in the early 2000s in a neighboring county. Her hometown was down to 1,800 people. Despite the small population, she said, two segregation academies operated within a 20-minute drive of her house.

Sheffield didn’t go to either of them. Although she is white, her parents chose the public high school. About 70% of her classmates were Black.

She liked it there. An honors student and cheerleader, she had Black and white teachers. She hung out with a mix of friends and got to learn about their different backgrounds. So she often wondered: Why did so many other white parents pay to send their kids to the academies?

She decided to find out.

In 2019, fresh off earning her bachelor’s degree, she landed a job teaching high school history at Wilcox Academy. She moved to Camden, 40 miles south of Selma, and rented an old plantation house.

Heading into downtown, she saw attorneys, restaurants and clothing boutiques operating from rows of storefronts adorned with flower boxes. At one of the three stop lights, she passed the antebellum red brick county courthouse. Down the road, the white paint peeled on Antioch Baptist Church, where the KKK had once harassed congregants and a white man shot a Black man dead as people gathered for a funeral.

Antioch Baptist Church sits along a quiet road in Camden.

On her first day at work, Sheffield headed into the academy’s building, which was flanked by athletic fields and stands of trees. Although the county is more than two-thirds Black, the classrooms inside bustled with white children and teachers. The only Black staff she saw were two custodians.

It felt like 1970, the year the school opened.

As she got to know her students, she probed: Why didn’t they go to the public schools? She expected them to cite the academy’s Christian education or the alumni in their family. And some did.

Others figured Wilcox Academy’s academics were better. But it was hard to know. Unlike the public schools, private schools don’t have to release test scores that would allow for comparisons.

To her surprise, many of her students spoke of fear. The public schools were dangerous, they said. They might get shot. They didn’t say it was because the students there are Black, “but that was the sense I got,” Sheffield said.

Wilcox Central High School has space for 1,000 students but its enrollment is down to 400. Now 70 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Wilcox Central High School’s student population remains nearly all Black.

She realized her students moved in bubbles of whiteness. Virtually all of their friends were white. Their parents’ friends were white. And they were never mentored or disciplined by Black teachers.

By then, Alabama was several years into a tuition scholarship program for lower-income families that was used mostly by Black students and could have helped more African American families apply to mostly white private schools. But Wilcox Academy has chosen not to participate.

Nor have many of the segregation academies in neighboring counties, state records indicate. Private schools in Alabama whose student bodies are more than 94% white have been least likely to opt in, one researcher found.

Wilcox Academy’s principal did not respond to ProPublica’s multiple emails and calls seeking to discuss the academy’s impact on local school segregation, why it doesn’t participate in the existing tuition-grant program and whether it will participate in the new program.

Sheffield concluded that many families still chose the academy due to race — the comfort of their own, discomfort with another — even if they didn’t recognize it as such.

She stayed for one school year, then got to work on her master’s degree. (She’s now a doctoral student at the University of Mississippi studying segregation academies.)

In her master’s thesis, she tracked the formation of these schools across Alabama, particularly “a tidal wave” of openings in 1970. That fall alone, 23 sprang up across the state, including Wilcox Academy. By 1978, public school enrollment in seven Black Belt counties — including Wilcox — was more than 90% Black.

“These segregation academies proved to be white resisters’ most successful tool of resistance,” Sheffield wrote.

The Persistence of Division

In small towns like Camden, where everyone could know one another well, people often don’t. It’s been that way since white settlers arrived to bankroll new cotton plantations. They brought so many enslaved laborers that the county became, and remains, predominantly Black.

Descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved still share the community. But in so many ways, they remain separated. Because they go to school apart and always have, only a few white children ride the buses to school with Black peers. Black and white parents rarely build friendships at high school football games or PTA meetings. They don’t often carpool or invite each other over for a meal.

Wilcox County Superintendent André Saulsberry has lived this. He graduated from the public schools he now leads. “Will we ever know each other as people here?” he asked. “I’m not sure.”

He noted that it’s difficult to imagine how to create an integrated school system where one has never existed. Black and white residents in Willcox still eye each other across a chasm formed by centuries of history.

“We don’t trust one another because we are so separate,” he said.

Two years ago, some of the county’s mostly white large landowners got Alabama legislators to derail the county and school board’s request to bring a property tax increase to a local vote. Half of the money would have gone to the nearly all-Black schools, including a new building for the elementary school Threadgill-Matthews’ nephew attends. Its aging structures have suffered two fires.

People who don’t send their children to public schools can lack a reason to invest in them, Black residents here lamented. Many wonder how Wilcox County would have fared if, instead of investing in the academies, white families had devoted their time and resources to the public schools.

“If people are together, they will understand each other in more ways — and trust more,” Saulsberry said. “And we won’t continue to die as a county.”

But some places in Camden have begun to draw Black and white people together in ways that foster deep relationships. One is Black Belt Treasures, where employees coordinate arts programs for public and private school students. They make a point of welcoming all comers. A Black artist, Betty Anderson, who runs a small civil rights museum across the street, has become close friends with the white women who work there.

Kristin Law, left, and Vera Spinks look at new artwork at Black Belt Treasures.

One recent day, two of those women stood in the gallery judging a public school’s art poster contest. Both were active with a local racial reconciliation group that halted during the early days of COVID-19. Both want the community to come together more.

Both also sent their children to Wilcox Academy. The decision, they said, wasn’t easy or simple.

One of them, Vera Spinks, knows that people wonder: Why not just send your kids to the public schools?

“It’s not as cut-and-dried,” she said.

The women vehemently deny the decision had to do with race. The schools had long been divided by the time they faced the decision of where to enroll their children. Both are Christians and said the academy’s religious education was a key factor, along with its small class sizes and personal attention from teachers.

Strong family ties also bond people to the academy. Kristin Law, the other woman working with Spinks at the gallery that day, is an alumna herself. “You now have three and four generations of students that have gone to the school,” she said. “It’s become more about school pride or tradition.”

Then there is the tremendous sweat equity parents put into the school. There’s almost always fundraising underway. The academy’s annual turkey hunt that raises money for the school dates back to 1971. Parents and students create, haul, assemble and gather donations for an annual prom extravaganza. The tradition has been passed down for 40 years.

Both women also said they are glad to see more Black and other nonwhite students at the school. “We’re ready for coming together,” Law said. “How do we do that?”

Crossing the Broken Bridge

Integration may yet come to places like Wilcox County — though not in the public schools.

Alabama’s new school-choice program will be open to most of its students in January 2025 and to all students in 2027. Under Alabama’s existing tuition-scholarship program, about 60% of students who have received the money in recent years have been Black. The new program, which will open the door to wealthier families, could fund more than four times as many students.

In places like Wilcox and many other Black Belt counties, the largest pool of potential new private school enrollees is Black children.

In 2019, the year Sheffield arrived there, Wilcox Academy hired Michael Woods, its first Black coach, to revitalize the basketball program. Four years into the job, he now wrestles with the thorny implications of the new voucher opportunities.

Black children still account for barely 5% of students in more than half the schools in the South that likely opened as segregation academies. That leaves white parents and students still firmly in control, even in majority-Black communities. Now these academies will confront an important question: If more Black students apply, how many will white leaders accept?

Woods grew up in Camden’s public schools and describes the “broken bridge” between the two communities. He never imagined that he’d one day work at the academy and was surprised when its leaders reached out to him. He arrived to see two Black students and no Black teachers.

But he felt welcome enough that he brought his niece and nephew to the academy, along with another Black student. Some have told him about hearing racially insensitive comments but nothing he considers outright racism.

“We are still set in those old-time ways,” he said. “But God has made it better, and it’s time to let it go.”

He wants Black children to have the same opportunities that white kids have long enjoyed. But for them to have a real choice, they need to feel valued at the academy. Woods said he’s told the staff, “We still have to give something to show these kids that we appreciate them to get them there to the school.”

Saulsberry, the superintendent, doesn’t expect many to apply regardless. “I’m not sure how comfortable, in some cases, it will be if the Black child went there.”

Given that few public school students score at the proficient level on math or reading assessments, leaders there know the district’s standardized test results could be used against it. But Saulsberry contends his schools provide far more than test scores can capture.

His teachers must be certified, unlike at some private schools. Students at the public high school also can become certified nursing assistants, patient care technicians, medication assistants, welders, brick masons and heavy equipment operators. They can get certified to work in forestry. Plumbing is coming in the fall.

Alexis Lewis, a junior, works on a project during welding class at Wilcox Central High School, which offers a number of job training programs.

His students also can get mental health care, special education services, bus services and free meals — which few area academies offer.

“We try to look at the total child, not just the academic side,” Saulsberry said.

Public school leaders know they will have to do more to sell strengths like these. Wilcox Central High Assistant Principal Donald Carter expects private schools to follow the college football playbook: “They’ll be out to recruit now.”

When Woods coaches the academy’s teams, the stands in the gymnasium fill with mostly white parents. The other teams are mostly or entirely white as well. He wonders how it would feel if more Black families filled those seats.

Woods said that he fields almost daily phone calls from Black parents. “A lot of parents I have talked to want their kids in a private school,” he said. “But they just couldn’t afford it.” Now, in cautiously curious tones, they ask a question that echoes back 70 years: How would “the white school” treat their children?

How We Counted Segregation Academies

To identify schools that likely opened as segregation academies, ProPublica adapted existing research using data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Private School Universe Survey to identify K-12 schools that were founded in the South between 1954 and 1976 and were more than 90% white as recently as 1993-1995, the earliest years for which student demographic data is available. We also filtered out schools with certain unique focuses, such as special education, or that were opened around the same time for reasons that may not have primarily been due to desegregation — many Catholic schools, for example, met this criteria. To determine which schools were still operating, we compared those schools to the most recent Private School Universe Survey data, from 2021 to 2022. Our estimates may be an undercount, since data about private school demographics was not collected until 1993, almost two decades after desegregation ended, and because not all private schools respond to the survey. To determine which schools were both still operating and still disproportionately white, we compared their demographics data to U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the counties in which each school was located.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Mollie Simon contributed research. Sergio Hernandez contributed data analysis.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Two years ago, Illinois lawmakers tried to help students with extreme needs who had a limited number of schools available to them.

They changed state law to allow public money to fund students’ tuition at special education boarding schools, including those out of state, that Illinois had not vetted and would not monitor. School districts, not the Illinois State Board of Education, would be responsible for oversight.

In solving one problem, however, Illinois created another: Districts now can send students to residential schools that get no oversight from the states in which they are located.

The facility that has benefited the most has been a for-profit private school in New York that’s now under scrutiny by disability rights groups. A ProPublica investigation uncovered reports of abuse, neglect and staffing shortages at Shrub Oak International School as it tries to serve a population of students with autism and other complex behavioral and medical issues. Shrub Oak has never sought or obtained approval from New York to operate a school for students with disabilities, which means it gets no oversight from the state.

The ProPublica investigation further found that some districts in Illinois have abdicated their own responsibility to monitor students’ education and welfare. Unlike some other states, Illinois law doesn’t require districts to visit the out-of-state facilities that students from Illinois attend, and some districts have never visited Shrub Oak. Records and interviews also show that districts in Illinois and other states have not always held Shrub Oak accountable for notifying them when students are injured or physically restrained, even though a provision in some contracts requires that the school let districts know.

Sixteen Illinois students have enrolled at Shrub Oak this school year, more than at any of the other 24 unapproved residential schools that Illinois students are attending. With the school charging $573,200 per student for tuition and a dedicated aide for most of the day — one of the highest price tags in the country — Illinois districts are on track to pay Shrub Oak more than $8 million this year. The state reimburses districts for most of the cost.

More of Shrub Oak’s out-of-state students come from Illinois than from any other state.

One Illinois school district official who lobbied his legislator to fund more residential schools said he now is second-guessing that work.

“I felt good at the end of this that we were able to help pass a law that had a profound impact,” said Sean Carney, assistant superintendent for business at Stevenson High School, north of Chicago. “But I’ll be honest, knowing that this particular state, New York, doesn’t really have oversight of the facility, it kind of squashes my enthusiasm for the efforts I went through to make change.”

In written responses to questions from ProPublica earlier this year, Richard Bamberger, a communications specialist hired by Shrub Oak, said the school accepts high-needs students from across the country who struggle with self injury, aggression and property destruction. He said the tuition rates are reasonable, especially given all the services it provides.

Bamberger also said the school plans to seek approval in New York, though the New York State Education Department and other state agencies say Shrub Oak has not filed applications with them. Shrub Oak has no plans to seek approval from other states that send students there, Bamberger said.

Shrub Oak this week declined to answer additional questions from ProPublica specifically related to this story. Bamberger said ProPublica had not included enough of Shrub Oak’s perspective in the previous story, and said the news organization “has no intention of being fair and balanced with this article.”

“We proudly stand by our staff, passionately care for our students, and value the input and collaboration with both our parents and school districts,” he wrote. The school also posted a message online responding to the previous article and saying Shrub Oak is a “safe, supportive educational placement opportunity.”

The farm on the Shrub Oak campus includes donkeys, pigs and goats. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

Many Illinois parents specifically requested their children be placed at Shrub Oak, and some took legal action to force districts to pay the tuition. Families, in Illinois and elsewhere, have described their desperation to find a school for children who had been rejected from or kicked out of other schools. They shared their relief that Shrub Oak would take their kids and that the state and school districts, legally obligated to educate all students, would pay the costs.

But in Illinois, unapproved schools like Shrub Oak don’t get the same scrutiny as schools the state approves both inside and outside its borders. For example, unlike in other states, Illinois law doesn’t require the schools to disclose to the state when students are physically restrained. They aren’t subject to financial audits. And they can set their own tuition, unlike approved schools that have to negotiate with the state.

To get state funding for unapproved schools under the 2022 law, districts in Illinois must make some basic assurances to the Illinois State Board of Education. They have to certify that there were no other suitable schools for the student. They also must show “satisfactory proof” that teachers at the unapproved school are appropriately certified. Districts must guarantee that the program can meet a student’s educational needs and provide services such as behavioral support and speech therapy. ISBE also requires superintendents to sign a form that says the district won’t hold the agency liable for “any safety and health concerns” that arise.

“The school district assumes all responsibility for the student,” said Jackie Matthews, an ISBE spokesperson.

Districts, for the most part, have not dug deep into Shrub Oak’s assurances, records show. For instance, they have sent the state board of education boilerplate language from Shrub Oak that said teachers had certification or were on a path to get it.

Community Unit School District 300, northwest of Chicago, has had a student at Shrub Oak since 2022, but its employees have never been there. According to his father, the student has been restrained by Shrub Oak workers on many occasions, and his father is aware of that and OK with it. It was only this week, however, that the district got its first notice that the student had been restrained, a district spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also confirmed that the district has never checked the credentials of Shrub Oak employees who work with its student. The spokesperson erroneously suggested that such checks are conducted at the state level, saying that ISBE reviews Shrub Oak staff credentials, which it does not.

When districts have tried to get more complete information from Shrub Oak, such as the names or credentials of employees who would be working with the students, some have struggled to get answers. Woodstock Community Unit District 200, outside of Chicago, asked Shrub Oak for staffing details after receiving questions from ProPublica, but the district said it never got them.

The district has “requested information from Shrub Oak on more than one occasion that it never received,” an attorney for the district told ProPublica.

Lincoln-Way Community High School District 210 in suburban Chicago got state approval to send one student to Shrub Oak in 2022, after telling ISBE that the student’s teacher would be certified and licensed, as required. About eight months later, after visiting Shrub Oak, district officials told the state that Shrub Oak had misled them about the teacher’s certification.

During that visit, district officials identified other concerns, including that “the curriculum is not age appropriate,” the district’s special education director wrote to a state official in March 2023. They questioned whether the student was learning, found he rarely left his bedroom after school hours or on weekends, and noted that his bedroom and bathroom “did not smell clean,” according to district records of the visit.

A portion of the notes taken by Lincoln-Way 210 district officials summarizing their observations from a visit to Shrub Oak in January 2022. (Obtained by ProPublica)

After district officials visited again last September and December, they noted in records from those visits that “all was good” and the student “appears to have made progress.”

District Superintendent Scott Tingley wouldn’t say whether he thought Shrub Oak was providing an appropriate education or experience for the student. He lamented the lack of options in Illinois and said parents have asked districts to pay for their children to go to Shrub Oak. Some have taken legal action.

“These aren’t districts that are going out and saying, ‘Here is an option,’” Tingley said. “We wish there were more facilities readily available in the state of Illinois.”

Officials from Chicago Public Schools, which has had three students at Shrub Oak, visited the campus for the first time in December even though, by then, Chicago students had been at the school for more than two years.

The trip came after a Chicago student allegedly was abused by a Shrub Oak worker this past fall. The district learned about the alleged abuse months later from the student’s mother and not from Shrub Oak, which was supposed to report such incidents.

Chicago Public Schools reminded Shrub Oak in September and again in January that it must notify the district after a student is physically restrained by staff, injured or a victim of suspected abuse or neglect.

“This violation of the terms of our agreement is concerning and requires immediate attention,” CPS wrote to Shrub Oak in January about the failures to notify the district.

The contract also requires Shrub Oak to notify the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services of any suspected child abuse or neglect, but the agency has no record of any contact from the school. Shrub Oak told ProPublica that if it failed to notify DCFS, “this was an oversight.”

Chicago school officials said in a written response that they work “to ensure these facilities meet a comprehensive set of criteria and standards.”

The mother of the Chicago student said if she’d had more information, she would have withdrawn her daughter from the school sooner. “That would have made a world of difference. And my child suffered because of it,” the mother said.

Illinois’ scant oversight of unapproved schools troubles Betsy Crosswhite, a Chicago area mother whose son was one of the first Illinois students to enroll at Shrub Oak.

“They are not accountable to anybody. That’s concerning for sure. You have students there who can’t advocate for themselves,” said Crosswhite, whose 17-year-old son went to Shrub Oak for 14 months in 2022 and 2023. She said he had a good experience during the school day but that there wasn’t enough staff during the nights and weekends. He transferred to another school.

She said Illinois education officials should be required to regularly visit the residential schools and examine staffing levels and other operations to protect both students and taxpayer dollars.

Peter Jaswilko’s son, Kyle, was 16 years old when he enrolled at Shrub Oak in early 2022 after months of turmoil. Kyle’s behavior was so aggressive that he spent months, on and off, in a hospital emergency room to keep himself and his family safe. He had been rejected from schools and other facilities. Jaswilko said students like Kyle should have more access to schools like Shrub Oak.

“Illinois is not good at having a lot of resources,” he said. “You can’t imagine what we had to go through knowing there was nothing.”

He is grateful the Illinois law change made Shrub Oak an option, and he said the school has given him hope and his son is thriving.

“I believe they not only saved our lives but are giving our son a chance at a future,” Jaswilko said of Shrub Oak. “When people ask about Kyle, I always say: ‘He’s safe. We are safe.’”

Other states, each with their own oversight rules, also have grappled with monitoring from afar.

Massachusetts acknowledged to ProPublica that it signed off on Shrub Oak as an option for its students two years ago in violation of its own requirements. The state allowed public money to pay students’ tuition there, not realizing that New York has a school approval process — and that Shrub Oak had not sought that approval.

The Massachusetts education department discovered the error last fall and gave the seven districts with publicly funded students at Shrub Oak until July to find other placements for them.

Until recently, the Massachusetts education department also failed to hold Shrub Oak accountable for following a state law that requires all public and private schools to tell the state when students are physically restrained. The department then makes the data public.

The department recently asked Shrub Oak to submit the data so it could “enhance its monitoring” of students there, a department spokesperson said.

Uxbridge Public Schools, southwest of Boston, learned from the mother of a student named Matthew — not from Shrub Oak employees — that the student had unexplained bruises, according to records and interviews. When the district asked Shrub Oak to send details of all incidents, a Shrub Oak official responded, incorrectly, that it did not need to.

“Your contract with us does not state that we are required to send you incident reports,” Lauren Koffler, a member of the family that operates the school, wrote in an email in January 2023, about three months after the student enrolled.

“It was stressful,” Matthew’s mother said. “I felt like we were helpless because the district couldn’t get them to comply.”

Through its spokesperson, Shrub Oak said it “works diligently to ensure it is adhering to individual contracts.”

Matthew left Shrub Oak in October. Uxbridge Superintendent Mike Baldassarre said: “We moved as quickly as we possibly could as soon as we understood there was stuff going on over there.”

Help ProPublica Report on Education

by Asia Fields, Maya Miller, Nicole Santa Cruz and Ruth Talbot

We are reporters at ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization. We write stories that hold powerful institutions accountable. This year, we’re investigating what happens when local agencies take belongings from people experiencing homelessness during sweeps. (Cities use terms like “abatements” and “cleanings” to describe this practice, but dozens of people who have experience with this issue said the practice is commonly described as sweeps.)

Across the country in recent years, cities have been conducting these more often. We’ve spoken to people who have lost valuable possessions, like notes from loved ones, tents and IDs. Sweeps can make it harder to stay on medications and send more people to the hospital.

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by Nicole Santa Cruz

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Update, May 17, 2024: An Albuquerque judge on Friday vacated his injunction ordering the city to stop destroying the property of unhoused people, saying although it's clear the city was doing so, the court faced "considerable challenges" in remedying the matter. Read the order.

On a recent morning, Christian Smith ran an errand, leaving a shopping cart carrying everything she owned near the Albuquerque, New Mexico, underpass where she’d been sleeping.

When she returned, the cart was nowhere to be found.

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Most of the belongings, such as clothing, makeup and blankets, could be replaced in time. But she panicked when she realized that her dentures, acquired after months of dental appointments, were also gone. Without them, Smith believed, it would be more difficult to find a job, prolonging her time sleeping on the street.

“It’s hard to eat, it’s hard to talk — I sound like a little kid,” said the 42-year-old native New Mexican. “It’s embarrassing.”

The dentures and the rest of Smith’s belongings had been thrown away by city workers as part of an aggressive effort to rid Albuquerque of homeless encampments.

Christian Smith, in a handwritten response to a prompt from ProPublica, described the loss of her dentures, amid Albuquerque’s effort to get rid of homeless encampments. Also depicted is the lost denture case. (Illustrations by Matt Rota for ProPublica. Handwritten card by Christian Smith.)

As housing costs soar across the country, even once-affordable cities such as Albuquerque have experienced unprecedented rent increases and severe shortages of affordable housing. The number of homeless people has risen to record levels, and Albuquerque, with a population of about a half million, is no exception. Last year, a survey found the highest number of homeless people in recent years.

Tents, makeshift structures and shopping carts have sprung up in parks, arroyos, ditches and empty lots and on sidewalks. The city has deployed workers from multiple departments to remove them. In 2023, crews visited more than 4,500 locations where people were camping, more than double the number from the previous year, according to data obtained from the Solid Waste Management Department. The city is on pace to clear nearly 6,000 encampment locations this year, according to the data. Over three years, the effort has cost the department nearly $1 million in labor and equipment, according to records.

Albuquerque has escalated this work in spite of a court order prohibiting it from destroying the possessions of people who live outside without providing an option to store them. In doing so, the city also has violated its own policies, including that personal property should be preserved even when the owner isn’t present. The city operates a facility to store property removed from encampments, but ProPublica found it is rarely used.

As a result, thousands of homeless people have lost personal property, according to interviews with community advocates, service providers and those who have had their possessions discarded.

Some said their belongings had been taken by city crews multiple times. They described losing medication, birth certificates, identification cards, cellphones, chargers, carpentry tools, clothing, a car title, a dog kennel, treasured family photos and the ashes of loved ones. Nearly all of them said the city had thrown away their survival gear, such as blankets, sleeping bags and tents, even during cold weather and snowstorms.

“It’s the equivalent of having your house burned down multiple times a year — just over and over again, you’re losing everything and starting from scratch each time,” said Alexandra Paisano, the coordinated entry director at the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, which assists communities with solutions to homelessness. “I don’t think people always see it that way, which is unfortunate because if I went home to find just an empty lot and my house was completely burned down ... that’s devastating.”

People who are living unsheltered told ProPublica that the city’s campaign has made them afraid to leave their belongings to run errands, harmed their mental health and made it harder to find housing and jobs and access services.

The Solid Waste Management Department and Mayor Tim Keller did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the city’s actions. In a written statement, a spokesperson said Albuquerque is “actively investing in programs and resources that get at the root causes of homelessness and provide sustainable solutions.”

“We will keep supporting and expanding these programs as part of our ongoing efforts to help people experiencing homelessness, while continuing the essential work of keeping our city clean and accessible for all of our families,” a spokesperson for the mayor said.

The Solid Waste Management Department said it provides notice before removing an encampment, works to help people move their personal items and recommends resources for them.

The department’s employees recently discarded Leandra Holt’s cold-weather sleeping bag, clothing, camping toilet, identification card application and cellphone. She said the loss makes it hard to focus on anything but guarding her belongings.

“I live in a constant state of fear of losing something,” she said.

“Hammer the Unhoused”

The city has for years dismantled encampments, but it escalated those efforts as residents complained about the increase in people living outdoors near businesses and homes.

In August 2022, the city closed Coronado Park in northwest Albuquerque, where more than 100 people had been sleeping, saying it was a “hotbed for narcotic usage, trafficking and organized crime.” A text exchange between Keller and police Chief Harold Medina, which was first reported by City Desk ABQ, reflected the city’s aggressive approach. In the texts, the city leaders discuss their plan to “hammer the unhoused.”

In his State of the City address last May, Keller said “tent cities” will not be tolerated. Albuquerque “cannot allow large encampments to grow unchecked. They become hot spots for illegal activity, hazards to public health and safety for our community,” he said. “These are the steps we must take to keep everyone safe but also so that everyone can feel safe.”

Keller’s comments came as the number of people experiencing homelessness reached the highest point in recent years. A federally mandated count found that Albuquerque had 2,394 people experiencing homelessness in 2023. (The survey is considered to be an undercount.)

ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen people who in recent months lost property to the city’s efforts to clear encampments. They gave similar accounts: Blue sanitation trucks roam the streets searching for occupied encampments. They are joined by sanitation workers, police officers and sometimes outreach workers. When they come upon an encampment, they order the people to move their belongings or have them thrown away. Some of the people who were interviewed said they were given notice of an encampment removal, but none said they were offered a place to store their property or other resources.

City policy instructs workers to give notice before removing personal items; to try to find people whose possessions have been left unattended; and to offer to connect them to services. If they cannot find the individual, the city is supposed to store property for 90 days.

Records from November 2023 through mid-May show Albuquerque stored the property of only 80 people. Just 11 retrieved their possessions, according to data obtained through a public records request.

On a recent afternoon, Gabriel Rodriguez left a black duffel bag outside an Albuquerque shelter while he grabbed lunch. It contained a sleeping bag and clothing, as well as handwritten letters from his grandmother, who has since died.

Gabriel Rodriguez described the loss of letters from his grandmother. (Illustrations by Matt Rota for ProPublica. Handwritten card by Gabriel Rodriguez.)

When Rodriguez returned, it was gone and city workers said it had already been hauled away. Rodriguez said he had carried the letters from his grandmother as a reminder that even when he was going through a rough period, she had continued to check up on him.

“Everyone else in my life had forgotten about me,” he said.

“A Right Against Unreasonable Seizures”

Soon after the city closed Coronado Park in August 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union, joined by the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty and two private law firms, filed a lawsuit on behalf of several homeless people, alleging the encampment clearings and confiscation of personal property amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and deprivation of property rights.

The lawsuit hasn’t been scheduled for trial, pending the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court case that deals with some of the same legal questions. In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, justices will decide how far cities can go in criminalizing camping on public property. Albuquerque and other cities have filed briefs arguing their ability to address homelessness is limited by case law that prohibits citing or arresting a person for sleeping outside unless they have access to shelter.

Lawsuits nationwide have argued that the destruction of property in encampments violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable seizures. In Los Angeles, a lawsuit decided in 2012 forced the city to stop destroying unattended property in the Skid Row area.

In the Albuquerque lawsuit, attorneys asked for an emergency injunction to stop the city from citing people for sleeping outdoors and destroying their belongings, referencing statements from people claiming the crews routinely discarded their possessions.

District Judge Joshua Allison granted the injunction request. He wrote in an order that went into effect Nov. 1 that the city “cannot punish the mere presence of homeless people and their belongings in outdoor public spaces when there are inadequate indoor spaces for them to be,” a legal precedent that is being challenged in the pending Supreme Court case. Allison also noted the unequal treatment of homeless people, comparing the city’s hasty seizure of their belongings to its careful handling of vehicles that have been abandoned on public property.

“Homeless people, just like people with homes, have a right against unreasonable seizures of their unabandoned property, even if that property is left in outdoor public spaces,” Allison wrote.

The city appealed to the state Supreme Court, arguing that the injunction “strips the City of the prerogative to enforce its laws and perform the basic functions for which city government exists.” The city also stated that its encampment team tries to find the owners of unattended property, but if city workers are unsuccessful they can deem it abandoned and destroy the items. The case and the appeal are still pending.

City Attorney Lauren Keefe said that Albuquerque is not violating the injunction, which has been modified several times. “We make extraordinary efforts to provide notice, we make extraordinary efforts to offer shelter,” Keefe said. “But when we provide a notice, and we come back and there’s no person there, we don’t have the ability to store everything that’s in an encampment.”

In a March 1 order modifying the injunction, Allison wrote that the city’s encampment policy is “not very straightforward” and “leaves much to the discretion of the City representatives who are enforcing it.”

Since the injunction took effect, the city has accelerated its pace of clearing encampments.

Christine Barber, the executive director of AsUR, an organization that serves women living on the street, said that during a recent outreach, when the city was dusted with snow and overnight temperatures dipped into the low 30s, people didn’t have tents. They bundled in blankets or slept huddled together to try to stay warm. Several people showed signs of frostbite.

“How does that not cause desperation? How does that not cause immense suffering?” Barber asked.

Video shows a city crew throwing away a tent and other belongings from an encampment in Albuquerque’s International District. (Nicole Santa Cruz/ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

In video captured by a ProPublica reporter in February, crews made no attempt to find the owners of belongings as they cleared an encampment in the International District, a neighborhood along Route 66 with one of the highest homeless populations in Albuquerque.

At a recent Albuquerque City Council meeting, Nichole Rogers, the council member who represents the International District, said she had witnessed an encampment “operation” in the area. She said she had stopped and asked the people if they had been given notice of the clearing or offered shelter or storage for their possessions. She said they told her no.

“I understand we have to move folks for safety and they can’t be on the sidewalks, I get that … but we aren’t doing what we say we’re going to do,” Rogers said. “I’m at a loss of how we just continue to disregard civil rights,” she said, adding that the city can “do better.”

Prolonging the Time People Spend on the Streets

People experiencing homelessness and their advocates told ProPublica that by routinely discarding belongings, Albuquerque is prolonging the time people spend living outdoors and making its encampment problem worse.

The encampment removals further destabilize people’s lives, making it harder to keep appointments for services, which include housing and medical care. If people have had their belongings thrown away repeatedly, the disruptions can cause a sense of hopelessness.

Losing possessions and relocating can take “days, weeks and sometimes months” to recover from, said Jamie Chang, an associate professor with the University of California, Berkeley, who has researched the impacts of encampment removals on unhoused people. “And sometimes you don’t recover. Sometimes folks lose their ID and they decide never to get ID again.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, Margarita Griego walked from where she’d set up her tent on a sidewalk in southeast Albuquerque to get food for her dog, Safari. When she returned, her belongings were gone, including the tent, a new cellphone and a cold-weather sleeping bag that a good Samaritan had recently gifted her. Inside her tent was a backpack containing important documents, including her Social Security card and identification.

Margarita Griego tallied the belongings she lost during an encampment clearing. (Illustrations by Matt Rota for ProPublica. Handwritten card by Margarita Griego.)

“All the paperwork I need for every day,” Griego said. “I can’t go get an ID without my Social Security card; I can’t get a Social Security card without an ID.”

It was a “setback,” she said, and the third time the city had thrown away her belongings. Money that could have been saved for an apartment deposit would now go to a new tent and blankets and replacement IDs.

“Now while I’m still in the streets I have to go and get everything again,” she said.

Have You Experienced Homelessness? Do You Work With People Who Have? Tell Us About Encampment Removals.

Ruth Talbot contributed reporting.

by Jessica Priest, Jeremy Schwartz, Lexi Churchill and Dan Keemahill

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are committed to telling overlooked stories about public schools. This election season, we want to understand the effects of heated political races on the people living, learning and teaching in districts across the state.

To see the full picture, we need to hear from people from across the political spectrum with a vested interest in public schools. You can help us identify important stories and ask the right questions as we report. Fill out the form below to join our source network. We also welcome specific tips, campaign finance reports and political mailers related to school district elections.

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by Jeremy Schwartz

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues

When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools.

Gore points to West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, who have contributed to various political action committees that have poured millions into legislative candidates who have promoted vouchers. The men also fund or serve on the boards of a host of public policy and advocacy organizations that have led the fight for vouchers in Texas.

In recent years, the largesse from Dunn and the Wilks brothers has reached local communities across Texas, including Granbury, near Fort Worth, where fights over library books, curriculum and vouchers have dominated the community conversation.

Gore said that she believes school board candidates are being recruited, at times without their full knowledge, in an effort “to cause as much disruption and chaos as possible” and weaken community faith in local school districts.

In 2021, two local men — former state representative Mike Lang and political consultant Nate Criswell — asked Gore to run for school board. At the time, the three were co-hosts of a web-based talk show that targeted local officials they believed were insufficiently conservative and were straying from GOP platform positions. They took frequent aim at the Granbury school district, which they alleged was allowing explicit sexual content into school libraries and teaching divisive ideas about race.

Gore broke from the group shortly after taking office in January 2022, when she concluded that the materials she had warned about on the campaign trail were not present in Granbury schools. She claims the men and other leaders of the far-right faction in Hood County, home to Granbury, dismissed her findings. They continued to pummel the district over books and curriculum, supported school board candidates who sought to remove a growing number of titles from library shelves, and worked to derail three bond elections that would have funded new and renovated buildings for the overcrowded district.

That’s when Gore said she began to piece together connections that hadn’t been previously apparent to her.

Lang, a Republican who represented Hood County in the state Legislature for four years, received more than $600,000 in campaign contributions — more than half his total — from direct donations from or PACs funded by the Wilks brothers and Dunn. On the campaign trail, Lang supported providing public money for private schools and, in 2017, voted against a House measure that prohibited funding for school vouchers. He did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition, in January 2022, Criswell’s political consulting company received $3,000 from Defend Texas Liberty, one of the PACs funded by the Wilks family and Dunn. The PAC donated another $3,000 to Criswell this year when he unsuccessfully ran for Hood County commissioner.

Criswell declined to answer specific questions but said he has closed his consulting firm, Criswell Strategies, and has “stepped away from the local political scene, aside from occasionally sharing posts on social media.”

According to her campaign finance reports, Gore did not receive any money from the men. But another school board candidate, her then-ally Melanie Graft, received a $100 in-kind contribution from Defend Texas Liberty for advertising expenses. Graft did not respond to written questions or requests for comment.

“I was knee-deep in it,” Gore said about the local connections to the billionaires. “I guess I was just too naive. I should have known better.”

Neither Dunn nor a representative of the Wilks family responded to questions. Dunn recently penned an opinion piece in the Midland Reporter-Telegram arguing that he was not the leader of the statewide push for vouchers and has never made public statements on the topic.

Nearly two decades ago, however, Dunn argued in favor of a voucher-like program, saying that the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank on whose board he has served for more than 20 years, supported such an idea “as long-time advocates of eliminating the government monopoly in public education.” In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is among the state’s fiercest advocates for directing public education funds to private schools, credited the organization’s longtime advocacy with bringing the state to the “threshold” of a voucher-like program.

Dunn is also the founder of Midland Classical Academy, a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a “Classical Education from a Biblical Worldview,” according to its website. The school believes in interpreting the Bible in its literal sense, which it takes to mean that marriage can only be between a man and a woman and that there are only two genders.

Zachary Maxwell, Lang’s former chief of staff who later worked for Empower Texans, a pro-voucher public policy organization whose associated PAC was largely funded by Dunn and the Wilks brothers, would not speak about his time there, citing a nondisclosure agreement he signed when he left the organization.

Maxwell, however, said he has become disenchanted by Dunn and the Wilks family’s efforts to exert control over the state’s politics. He said Hood County hard-liners, some of whom have close ties to PACs funded by Dunn and the Wilks brothers, were trying to use Gore and Graft to drive a wedge between rural residents and their school district in an effort to build support for vouchers. The women’s presence on the school board enhanced the legitimacy of the group’s claims about pornography in libraries and Marxist indoctrination, Maxwell said.

“It’s all about destroying the trust with the citizens to the point where they would tolerate something like doing away with public schools,” he said in an interview.

Over the past two years, Abbott has teamed up with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, embarking on a tour of Texas towns to promote vouchers. Following the narrow defeat of voucher legislation in November in the Texas House of Representatives, the Republican governor campaigned to unseat lawmakers in his party who opposed such legislation. He successfully ousted five of them.

One of the Republicans who lost in the primary was Glenn Rogers, whose rural district sits just north of Hood County and whom Abbott endorsed in 2020. This time around, Abbott gave $200,000 in campaign support to Rogers’ pro-voucher opponent. Dunn and the WiIlks brothers donated another $100,000.

Rogers, who represented Hood County until 2021, when lawmakers changed the boundaries of his district, said he believes privatizing public education is at the core of Dunn and the Wilks brothers’ political efforts in Hood County and across the state.

“Whether it’s at the school board level or it’s what’s happening in the Texas Legislature right now, that’s their end goal,” he said.

Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on School Board and Bond Elections in Your Community

Dan Keemahill contributed reporting.

by Jeremy Schwartz

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Weeks after winning a school board seat in her deeply red Texas county, Courtney Gore immersed herself in the district’s curriculum, spending her nights and weekends poring over hundreds of pages of lesson plans that she had fanned out on the coffee table in her living room and even across her bed. She was searching for evidence of the sweeping national movement she had warned on the campaign trail was indoctrinating schoolchildren.

Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”

But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

So, in the spring of 2022, Gore went public with a series of Facebook posts. She told residents that her backers were using divisive rhetoric to manipulate the community’s emotions. They were interested not in improving public education but rather in sowing distrust, Gore said.

“I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” Gore wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer. It’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

After Gore reviewed hundreds of pages of the school curriculum, she was shocked that the pervasive indoctrination she had railed against as a candidate did not exist. She has since helped form a group that supports Republican candidates who have been alienated by the local GOP’s far-right faction. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Gore’s open defiance of far-right GOP orthodoxy represents an unusual sign of independence in a state and in a party that experts say increasingly punish those deemed disloyal. It particularly stands out at a time when Republican leaders are publicly attacking elected officials who do not support direct funding to private schools.

“It’s a rare event to see this kind of political leap, especially in a world that’s so polarized,” said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. “You rarely see these kinds of changes because the people who are vetted to run tend to be true believers. They tend not to be people who are necessarily thinking about the holistic problem.”

“With the presence of Donald Trump, fealty to cause has amplified, so this kind of action is much more meaningful and much more visible than it was a decade ago,” Rottinghaus said about Gore.

In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, was victorious in unseating five lawmakers in his own party and forcing another three into runoff elections after they voted against voucher legislation that would allow the use of public dollars for students to attend private and religious schools. His efforts sent a message that those who did not unflinchingly support his priorities would face grave political repercussions.

Gore was part of a similar movement of hard-liners who pushed out the Republican Hood County elections administrator in 2021 after determining that she was not conservative enough for the nonpartisan position. Now Gore and other disillusioned local Republicans have formed a group pushing against an “ultra-right” faction of the party that it says has become obsessed with “administering purity tests” and stoking divisive politics.

The former teacher and mother of four was influenced by such politics when she decided to run for office. She was motivated to seek a school board seat after a steady stream of reports from the right-wing media she consumed and her social media feeds pointed to what she saw as inappropriate teachings in public schools. She, too, had been outraged by school mask mandates and vaccine requirements during the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Gore said she feels that she was unwittingly part of a statewide effort to weaken local support of public schools and lay the groundwork for a voucher system.

And she said that unless she and others sound the alarm, residents won’t realize what is happening until it is too late.

“I feel like if I don’t speak out, then I’m complicit,” Gore said. “I refuse to be complicit in something that’s going to hurt children.”

Because of that outspokenness, Gore is facing backlash from the same people who supported her race. She has been threatened at raucous school board meetings and shunned by people she once considered friends.

School marshals escort her and her fellow board members to their cars to ensure no one accosts them.

Gore has faced backlash and threats since speaking out against the people who supported her school board race. School marshals now escort her and other board members to their cars after meetings. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

When things get particularly heated, a fellow trustee follows her in his car to make sure she gets home safely.

“None of It Was Adding Up”

Before Gore decided to seek office for the first time, prominent GOP operatives had been pushing for like-minded allies to take over school boards, framing the effort as necessary to maintain conservative Christian values.

In May 2021, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told followers on his podcast that school boards were the road back to power for conservatives following the 2020 presidential election. Two months later, North Texas-based influential pastor Rafael Cruz, the father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, amplified that message on social media, saying that getting candidates on school boards was critical.

“We need to make sure that strong, principled Americans, those who uphold our Judeo-Christian principles that have made America the greatest country in the world, are elected to school boards,” Rafael Cruz said in a July 2021 video posted to his Facebook page. “Because I’ll tell you the left is controlling the school boards in America.”

Those messages reached Granbury, where former Republican state Rep. Mike Lang and political consultant Nate Criswell asked Gore to run for the school board. Gore recalls hearing Cruz give a fiery speech while she was campaigning. In the speech, which reinforced her decision to run, she said Cruz boasted about flipping the school board in Southlake, Texas, by getting the churches involved in helping to install Christian candidates.

“When you put in the minds of parents that there is an agenda to indoctrinate their children … and the only answer is to get conservative Christian people elected to the school board,” Gore said, “it’s a very powerful message”

Gore, now 43, first became involved in local politics in 2016 when she campaigned door-to-door for Lang, a former constable who successfully ran for the Texas Legislature. She then served on a leadership committee for the Hood County GOP.

After Lang decided not to run for reelection in 2020, he asked Gore to join the “Blue Shark” show, a web-based program he founded and co-hosted with Criswell that produced videos taking aim at local politicians and officials considered insufficiently conservative. Criswell later ran campaigns for Gore and Melanie Graft, another school board candidate who previously tried to remove LGBTQ-themed books from the children’s section of the county library.

Soon after the women won their elections, the Granbury school district descended into a high-profile fight over school library books.

Administrators pulled 130 library books from the shelves after Matt Krause, a Republican representative from Fort Worth, published a list of 850 titles that he said touched on themes of sexual orientation and race. At the time, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News obtained audio of the district’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, making clear to librarians that he had concerns about books with LGBTQ themes, including those that did not contain descriptions of sex. After the reporting, the Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation, which is ongoing, into whether the district violated federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender.

A volunteer review committee of parents and district employees eventually recommended returning nearly all of the books to the shelves.

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Hard-liners wanted additional titles removed, claiming that the district was allowing “pornography,” without offering evidence to support the assertion. But Gore backed the committee’s findings, saying she was satisfied with the handful of books the district had removed for explicit content. Glenn, too, drew the ire of his onetime allies after he also supported the committee’s recommendation. Lang and Criswell have since called for his ouster. Glenn declined an interview request through a district spokesperson.

The book debate, along with a series of other fissures, contributed to Gore’s growing belief that her former colleagues were more interested in misleading residents than in improving educational outcomes.

In early 2022, leaders of the rapidly growing district announced plans to ask voters for $394 million in bonds to build a new high school and renovate existing campuses. School board members established a community advisory committee that would counsel the district.

Gore chose Criswell as her representative on the committee. She thought that once Criswell saw the district’s needs firsthand, he would support the bonds. But the opposite happened. Criswell urged voters to reject the measure, claiming some parts, such as providing full-day pre-K programs for all students, were “communist in nature.”

Gore said Criswell directed her and Graft, who did not respond to requests for comment, to post messages on social media against the bonds. When Gore pushed back, she said Criswell accused her of betraying the party. (The bonds ultimately lost by a wide margin.)

According to Gore, Criswell also pressured her to stop speaking with all of her fellow school board members, except for Graft. “They’re just lying to you. They’re not your friends,” she recalled him saying.

“I was like, how am I supposed to do my job as a board member if I’m not talking to anybody?” Gore said. “None of it was adding up.”

Criswell, who has previously said that he supports public schools, declined to answer detailed questions. Lang did not respond to requests to comment. In April 2022, Gore rescinded her nomination of Criswell to the bond advisory board. She felt that he and Lang were misleading voters about the bond and its cost to taxpayers.

“Mike Lang would call them snowballs,” she said. “You just get as many little snowballs as you can so you’re attacking from multiple fronts. And then you see which ones start to stick and gather speed and get bigger and bigger.”

In June 2022, Lang and Criswell directed one of their snowballs in Gore’s direction, taking a veiled shot at the former co-host of their show. In a video, Criswell praised Graft for continuing the fight to remove books from the school district’s libraries, saying she was “the only one that acts as the buffer right now on that board. Which is sad, because, you know, we’ve had other people elected in recent elections that just haven’t lived up to the expectations.”

Three days later, Gore fired back.

“I refuse to be someone’s puppet,” she wrote in a June 8 Facebook post. “I refuse to be told what to do, what to say or how to vote. I refuse to participate in any agenda that will dismantle or abolish public education.”

Once Gore was elected to the school board, she began to believe that her former allies were more interested in misleading residents than in improving educational outcomes. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) “Extremism IS the Problem”

A week after that post, Gore watched the livestream of a Granbury school board meeting on her laptop from a hotel room along Mexico’s Caribbean coast while on an anniversary trip with her husband.

Emotions ran high as about a dozen residents complained that board members had not removed enough books from the library. Some argued that the school board was stifling dissent from Graft by requiring the consent of two board members to place an item on the agenda.

During the meeting, Cliff Criswell, the grandfather of Nate Criswell, took the microphone, carrying what police would later describe as a black handgun in a leather holster. He accused board members of allowing pornography in school libraries and of trying to “rip apart” Graft, whom he had previously described as “the only conservative on the board.”

“We have profile sheets” on all the trustees except for Graft, Cliff Criswell shouted. “We know what you do. We know where you live.”

Gore was shocked. Panicked, she started calling family members. “My grandmother was home with our children,” she recalled in an interview. “My brother came over and slept on my front porch to make sure nobody showed up at our house in the middle of the night. I mean, my kids were terrified after that.”

Later that night, Gore addressed the incident on Facebook.

“Tonight, threats were made against me, every board member (except one) and our superintendent. We were individually called out by name, told we had profile sheets made on each of us and that we would be dealt with accordingly. THIS IS NOT OK. I take threats against myself and my family seriously, especially with all of the violence in today’s world. Will we be dealing with school board shootings next?!? WE MUST DO BETTER!”

In response to a commenter’s message of support, Gore wrote, “extremism IS the problem.”

According to a Granbury police report, an off-duty officer spotted a black pistol in a holster in Cliff Criswell’s waistband and alerted school and city police. Possession of an unauthorized firearm at a school board meeting is a third-degree felony under state law, but because officers didn’t conclusively identify the weapon that night, and because Cliff Criswell declined to cooperate, prosecutors were unable to file charges, said Granbury police Deputy Chief Cliff Andrews. Cliff Criswell could not be reached for comment.

“Had we identified the gun at the very moment, yes, absolutely, we could have filed charges on it,” Andrews said. “We made a simple mistake.”

The incident forced the district to adopt tighter security measures, including clearly posting signs prohibiting firearms and bringing in additional officers during board meetings anytime administrators expect that certain topics could lead to heated exchanges.

“That was the moment I saw how crazy it was, how unhinged it had become and how far some people were willing to go to prove their points,” Gore said.

Gore installed “private property” signs on the gates surrounding her home after a school board meeting where Cliff Criswell, an angry resident, made threatening remarks against her and her fellow school board members. “We know what you do. We know where you live,” he had said. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Yet rhetoric over the school district only ratcheted up in the ensuing months.

That fall, Hood County’s far-right leaders backed the school board candidacy of Karen Lowery, who in May 2022 was one of two women who filed a criminal complaint against district librarians claiming they were providing pornography to children. A Hood County constable has declined to answer questions about the status of the complaint.

Lowery, who had served on the committee that reviewed library books but opposed returning them to the shelves, also received a key endorsement from Rafael Cruz. She went on to win her election in November 2022.

Her victory helped resurface the district’s book battles as she pressed to remove more titles. Then, in August 2023, Lowery snuck into a high school library during a charity event and began inspecting books using the light of her cellphone, according to a district report.

School board members met to discuss censuring Lowery at an Aug. 23 public meeting for violating a policy that requires them to get permission from principals when entering a campus and for not being truthful when confronted by an administrator. Lowery claimed she had disclosed her visit to the library beforehand as required. She did not respond to calls or emails seeking comment. A district spokesperson said he was unable to pass along an interview request because Lowery has requested to only be contacted through her board email.

The board voted to censure Lowery, who opposed the symbolic measure along with Graft.

“It is clear that the actions Mrs. Lowery took, as evidenced by the community and the outcry that we have heard tonight, has broken some of that trust with our staff, parents and community members,” said Gore, who motioned to censure Lowery. “The only people that pay the price for this, no matter what happens tonight, are the kids of this district.”

Old Foe, New Friend

By November 2023, the battle lines over school vouchers were hardening in Granbury, and at the state Capitol in Austin.

Abbott had begun waging war against Republicans who had not supported voucher efforts and contributed to their failure during the last legislative session. One lawmaker who escaped Abbott’s wrath was Shelby Slawson, a Republican who represents Hood County. Unlike some of those now being targeted, Slawson had bucked a request spearheaded by Gore and supported by the school board majority that urged lawmakers to vote against a measure that would send public dollars to private schools. Slawson did not respond to questions regarding her decision to vote in favor of vouchers despite the local school district’s opposition to the legislation.

Meanwhile, Granbury was facing a tough election. The school district was asking voters to approve a $151 million bond measure to build a new elementary school in the rapidly growing and overcrowded district, as well as provide security updates and renovations to aging campuses. The balance of the school board was also at stake in the same election.

Bond opponents formed the Granbury Families political action committee. In advertising materials, the group cited library books as one of the principal reasons residents had lost trust in the board. “Our community has lost faith in the board’s ability to conduct business,” the group claimed. “Not another penny until GISD gets new leadership.”

Nate Criswell, Gore’s former co-host and campaign manager, loaned the PAC $1,750, according to campaign finance reports filed with the district. The loan constituted about 40% of the PAC’s funding ahead of the November election.

Although a majority of the state’s school districts with bond measures scored victories, Granbury’s tax measure failed once again. (Voters rejected another bond measure this month.) Hard-line conservatives celebrated the loss, pointing to anger over the library books issue.

But even as they celebrated, the November election delivered a setback to those who wanted to take over the school board. The two candidates supported by hard-line conservatives lost by wide margins, denying the county’s far-right faction the majority on the board. Among the winners in that election was Nancy Alana, the school board member whom Gore ousted two years earlier. This time around Gore endorsed Alana, and the two former opponents have since become friends and allies.

“She let everybody know that she had been misled and that she has seen for herself the good things that are happening in our school district,” Alana said. “That the school board can be trusted. That the administrators can be trusted. And she has spoken out on that. And that has made a big difference. And she is very well thought of in our community because of her willingness to step up and say, ‘I was wrong.’”

Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on School Board and Bond Elections in Your Community

by Jessica Lussenhop

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Update, May 20, 2024: On Sunday, the Minnesota Legislature passed a bill to reform controversial contracts-for-deed real estate deals as a part of the Judiciary, Public Safety, and Corrections Supplemental Budget Bill. The measure includes greater protections for buyers and outlaws the sort of property churning that some brokers have been accused of engaging in. Gov. Tim Walz is expected to sign the bill this week.

The Minnesota attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit Tuesday against a home seller who allegedly targeted the East African Muslim community for real estate deals that authorities called “predatory and deceptive.”

The lawsuit alleges that Chadwick Banken and six of his limited liability corporations broke state and federal laws, including Minnesota’s laws against religious discrimination, by using transactions known as contracts-for-deed to sell homes at higher prices than warranted and on worse terms to Muslim buyers.

Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said in an interview that while the complaint focuses on Banken, the case is intended to send a message to others engaged in similar practices.

“He’s not the only one, but he’s one of the worst that I’ve seen,” Ellison said. “When people can’t pay back, they’re out of their house, and they’re out of their money. I can’t think of anything more financially devastating to a family than that.”

Banken did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit, filed in Hennepin County district court, follows a ProPublica and Sahan Journal investigation in 2022 that identified a rising market in Minnesota for contract-for-deed home sales, particularly in the Somali community. Many buyers in the East African Muslim community avoid paying or profiting from interest because of their religious principles, and investors have been offering them deals as an “interest free” way to purchase a house.

But buyers told the Sahan Journal and ProPublica that they signed contracts they didn’t understand and would not be able to pay off. The lawsuit said Banken used inflated home prices, abnormally high down payments and six-figure balloon payments due at the end of short contracts to push buyers into default and to ultimately retain ownership of the property.

The ProPublica-Sahan Journal story featured Abdinoor Igal, a long-haul trucker who bought a home from Banken in suburban Lakeville in 2022 and is described in the lawsuit as “purchaser 2.” Officials confirmed that Igal was purchaser 2, and Igal said he has spoken with the attorney general’s office several times.

Igal said he walked away from his house this past winter after making about $170,000 in payments. He slept in his truck for months after sending his wife and children to live in Kenya. He said the lawsuit was news he’d been waiting to hear.

“I’m really excited,” he said. “I can’t even believe how I’m feeling.”

Abdinoor Igal bought a home from Banken in 2022. (Dymanh Chhoun/Sahan Journal)

The attorney general’s actions follow a push at the state Legislature to rewrite Minnesota’s contract-for-deed law. The bill would outlaw the kind of property “churning” that Banken is accused of in the lawsuit, and it provides a number of new protections and ways to recoup losses from a contract-for-deed deal gone wrong. It is currently included in an omnibus bill awaiting final approval at the Legislature.

The lawsuit alleges that Banken has sold hundreds of homes in contracts-for-deed deals in the last six years. It also reveals new details about his practices. The name of one of Banken’s six limited liability corporations, Slow Flip LLC, is actually a useful term for the predatory practice, the lawsuit alleges: Buyers submit exorbitant down payments and agree to large monthly installments that they will eventually default on, and then Banken takes the home back and “flips” it to a new purchaser.

According to one email from Banken’s business to a real estate agent, the ideal buyers are described as people with “low credit scores” or a “recent bankruptcy/foreclosure.” Banken also allegedly insisted that buyers enter contracts using their business names to create the false impression in court that he was evicting commercial tenants rather than families from their primary residence. None of Banken’s contracts disclosed the true total cost of the homes or the balloon payments, both in violation of federal Truth In Lending Act requirements, according to the lawsuit.

The contracts, according to the lawsuit, contained monthly interest payments in excess of the market rate, and the down payment, monthly payments and total price of the home went up if the purchaser was Muslim. Ellison said this was particularly galling, given that Banken markets his business as helpful to a community that has been shut out of the traditional home purchasing market.

“He’s not helping,” Ellison said. “What he’s really helping himself to is their money that they probably have mopped floors and pushed brooms for. … He’s setting people up to fail. His conduct is predatory, deceptive. And we hope to bring a stop to it.”

Ellison said buyers should reach out to his office if they feel they’re in a predatory contract-for-deed and that there may be options for restitution in the future.

Igal said that while he is excited to hear that there may be consequences for Banken, defaults and evictions are ongoing, affecting some of his former neighbors. And he is still struggling to put his family’s lives back together.

“My kids, the smallest one, 4 years, she called me and asked me, ‘Daddy, when am I coming?’ And I told her I’m making some money, but I don’t know when,” he said. “It’s not something I can describe.”

by Vernal Coleman, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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Nearly three years have passed since the 2021 murder of Chicago police officer Ella French, and police and prosecutors have revealed much about her killing: the grim details of her final moments, the type of gun used to shoot her during a traffic stop and how that .22-caliber Glock made its way into the hands of the man who pulled the trigger.

But absent from the public discussion was the name of the retail shop where the gun used to kill French was purchased. Its disclosure has been hindered by a long-standing push by the gun industry to protect the identities of retailers that have sold guns used in crimes.

The law enforcement agencies that investigated her murder and prosecuted her killer could not or would not say. Those that tracked and prosecuted the man who bought the gun used to kill her have been just as silent.

ProPublica, however, has learned the name of the retailer. It’s Deb’s Gun Shop, an Indiana retailer just over the Illinois state border that has drawn attention from federal regulators because of the large number of its guns that have turned up in crime investigations. James Vanzant, an attorney for the man convicted on federal charges for buying that gun, revealed that detail in an interview.

Speaking through his attorney, Deb’s Gun Shop owner Ed Estack called French’s death a horrible tragedy but declined further comment.

A police officer holds a photograph of fellow officer Ella French in his hat at French’s funeral service in 2021. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Two decades ago, federal and local law enforcement routinely identified the source of guns used in crimes to members of the media or anyone else who inquired.

That changed in 2003 when Congress, bowing to pressure from the gun industry, approved legislation known as the Tiahrt amendment, named after a former Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., a gun rights champion. The amendment bars police and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from disclosing any information they uncover during gun-tracing investigations, including the names of retailers.

The move hobbled efforts by cities to study gun-trafficking patterns and ended what the gun industry has called a pattern of “name and shame,” in which retailers were thrust into the spotlight for selling guns later linked to crimes.

Gun safety advocates and researchers argue that Tiarht created a knowledge gap on a pressing public safety issue and allowed retailers to escape scrutiny. Such information, they say, can help the public determine whether the transactions that put guns in the hands of criminals are a rarity or part of a larger pattern.

The story of the gun used to kill French began in earnest in March 2021 at Deb’s, a small storefront off one of the main drags in Hammond, Indiana. Inside, Jamel Danzy picked out the Glock to purchase, then waited to pass his background check. On March 25, he returned and picked up the gun, prepared to deliver it to a friend.

He later admitted to ATF investigators that he’d bought the gun for Eric Morgan in violation of federal law. Danzy acknowledged that he knew Morgan was barred by federal law from buying a gun for himself due to a prior felony conviction. Morgan drove from Chicago to Danzy’s home in Hammond to pick it up.

Four months later, French, 29, was on night patrol in the West Englewood neighborhood when she joined other officers in conducting a traffic stop on a Honda SUV traveling with an expired registration. The officers inspected the car and found Morgan and his brother, Emonte Morgan, inside with a bottle of liquor.

The encounter escalated as officers ordered the brothers to exit the car, according to Chicago police. Eric Morgan jumped out and fled on foot. His brother stayed, refusing to put down his cup. A scuffle ensued. As French ran to help the other officers at the scene, Emonte Morgan pulled out the Glock and began to fire, police said.

French was struck and killed. Another officer, Carlos Yanez Jr., was severely wounded.

A “back the blue” sign hangs near the location where French was killed in 2021.

Cook County prosecutors charged both Morgan brothers in French’s killing. Eric Morgan pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and unlawful use of a deadly weapon. In March, a Cook County court convicted Emonte Morgan of French’s murder. He has since petitioned for a new trial.

Danzy already was serving time by then. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired with Morgan to buy the gun and lied by claiming on a required form that he was purchasing it for himself. A judge sentenced him to 30 months in federal prison.

The ATF, which investigated the purchase of the gun used to kill French, would not reveal the name of the Hammond retailer when contacted by ProPublica. Neither would federal prosecutors. In filings for the case against Danzy, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois did not reveal the name of the store where he purchased the Glock.

The gun used to kill Chicago police officer Ella French, found by police in a yard near the scene of the shooting (Federal court record obtained by ProPublica)

Tiahrt’s restrictions prevent investigators from disclosing the names of gun retailers, but federal prosecutors who try gun traffickers have more leeway. In fact, such disclosures in federal filings occur often.

ProPublica has viewed federal filings in both the Northern District of Illinois and the Northern District of Indiana where retailers were named in conjunction with cases against individuals who lied to make gun purchases or later resold the guns illegally in so-called straw sales.

One such gun was bought from an Indiana retailer and days later used in a shooting that left two Wisconsin police officers severely injured, ProPublica reported in March. The retailer involved was never charged yet still was named in court records.

Nonetheless, Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office in Chicago, said it’s “our policy to not identify uncharged individuals or entities.”

As part of an ongoing lawsuit against the firearms industry, the city of Gary, Indiana, is seeking sales records from Deb’s and other retailers in the area. The suit aims to hold responsible local gun retailers and iconic gun manufacturers, such as Smith & Wesson and Glock, associated with illegal purchases like the one that led to French’s murder. The suit has survived court challenges for nearly a quarter of a century, but the Indiana General Assembly recently passed a law designed to get it dismissed. Deb’s is not a defendant in the suit.

ATF records show that Deb’s has operated under enhanced monitoring from the agency since at least 2021. The gun shop is included in a program known as Demand 2 for retailers who sell a high volume of guns later recovered in police investigations, according to records obtained by the Brady Center, a gun violence prevention group, and provided to ProPublica.

A man glances inside Deb’s Gun Range while passing by on a bicycle.

Gun dealers can be placed in Demand 2 when ATF finds they are the source of at least 25 gun-trace requests from police in a given year; the retail sale of those guns must have been three or fewer years prior to that.

Besides the gun bought by Danzy, records show that at least one other firearm purchased illegally at Deb’s in recent years was central to a killing.

In 2021, Mark J. Halliburton shot and killed Monica J. Mills outside a school in East Chicago, Indiana, over a gun illegally purchased at Deb’s Gun Range. A prior criminal conviction prevented Halliburton from purchasing a gun legally, so he’d paid Mills $100 to buy the gun for him, according to court records. The two then argued over the deal one night inside a car in the parking lot of a school, leading to the shooting. The gun that fired the fatal shot was the same one purchased at Deb’s, according to police records. Halliburton later pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

David Sigale, an attorney for Deb’s Gun Range owner Estack, declined to comment on Deb’s compliance record or associations with guns traced to crimes. “Deb’s continues to cooperate with all requests from law enforcement,” he said.

The ATF points out that involvement in the Demand 2 program does not mean a retailer has done anything wrong. Retailers’ location and the sheer volume of sales they process can make businesses susceptible to trafficking schemes, the agency told ProPublica in written answers. The program helps “raise awareness” among those retailers, ATF said.

Advocates for the gun industry say retailers in Demand 2 are operating within the law. “The illegal straw purchase of a firearm is a crime committed by the individual lying on the form. That is not a crime for which the firearm retailer is liable,” said Mark Oliva, spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a lobbying group for gun retailers and manufacturers.

Oliva also reiterated the group’s continued support of the basic tenets behind the Tiahrt amendment. “Access to gun-trace data should only be available to law enforcement taking part in a bona fide investigation, and law enforcement already has the access it needs for this purpose,” he said.

Kristina Mastropasqua, an ATF spokesperson, said Tiahrt helps protect the integrity of ongoing agency investigations and “does not negatively affect ATF’s ability to investigate and hold accountable illegal gun purchases or traffickers.”

But the debate over Tiahrt continues even as efforts to revisit it in Congress stall.

Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis, said that Tiahrt’s restrictions have inhibited the study of illicit gun markets. He and others who study gun violence say they need the data to understand gun trafficking and, in turn, assess the regulatory efforts to prevent it.

“Firearms are associated with a number of adverse health effects,” he said. “Wouldn’t we like to know where that hazard is coming from?”

Signage is posted for customers entering Deb’s Gun Range.

When researchers do obtain tracing data compiled by federal authorities, it’s usually under an agreement to keep the sources of the guns confidential. But there have been workarounds and exceptions. The city of Chicago and its police department facilitated University of Chicago studies that identified several Midwest retailers as the sources of thousands of guns trafficked into the city and then later submitted to the ATF for tracing.

The studies — published in 2014 and 2017 — link Westforth Sports, a now-closed Gary, Indiana, retailer, to 850 such guns recovered by police. There was no mention of Deb’s Gun Range in either of those reports. Shop owner Earl Westforth did not respond to a request for comment.

Other cities are continuing to look for ways to navigate around the Tiahrt amendment. The city of Baltimore, for instance, is suing the ATF over its denial of trace data.

That drew the ire of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which moved to intervene in the case. “This is a transparent attempt by gun control advocates at the City of Baltimore … to gain access to the data to use it to smear licensed firearm retailers and manufacturers by suggesting they are responsible for crimes committed by others misusing lawfully sold firearms,” foundation Senior Vice President Lawrence G. Keane said in a statement.

In arguing for the gun-trace information to stay under wraps, foundation attorneys cited federal law — specifically the Tiahrt amendment.

by Kate Royals, Mississippi Today

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Today. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Mississippi lawmakers have overhauled the state’s civil commitment laws after Mississippi Today and ProPublica reported that hundreds of people in the state are jailed without criminal charges every year as they wait for court-ordered mental health treatment.

Right now, anyone going through the civil commitment process can be jailed if county officials decide they have no other place to hold them. House Bill 1640, which Gov. Tate Reeves signed Wednesday, would limit the practice. It says people can be jailed as they go through the civil commitment process only if they are “actively violent” and for a maximum of 48 hours. It requires the mental health professional who recommends commitment to document why less-restrictive treatment is not an option. And before paperwork can be filed to initiate the commitment process, a staffer with a local community mental health center must assess the person’s condition.

Supporters described the law, which goes into effect July 1, as a step forward in limiting jail detentions. Those praising it included county officials who handle commitments, associations representing sheriffs and county supervisors, and the state Department of Mental Health.

“This new process puts the person first,” said Adam Moore, a spokesperson for the Department of Mental Health, which provides training, along with some funding and services related to the commitment process. “It connects someone in need of mental health services with a mental health professional as the first step in the process, before the chancery court or law enforcement becomes involved.”

But some officials involved in the commitment process said that unless the state expands the number of treatment beds, the effect of the legislation will be limited. “Just because you’ve got a diversion program doesn’t mean you have anywhere to divert them to,” said Jamie Aultman, who handles commitments as chancery clerk in Lamar County, just west of Hattiesburg.

Although every state allows people to be involuntarily committed, most don’t jail people during the process unless they face criminal charges, and some prohibit the practice. Even among the few states that do jail people without charges, Mississippi is unique in how regularly it does so and for how long. Under Mississippi law, people going through the commitment process can be jailed if there is “no reasonable alternative.” State psychiatric hospitals usually have a waiting list, and short-term crisis units are often full or turn people away. Officials in many counties see jail as the only place to hold people as they await publicly funded treatment.

Idaho lawmakers recently dealt with a similar issue. There, some people deemed “dangerously mentally ill” have been imprisoned for months at a time; this spring, lawmakers funded the construction of a facility to house them.

Nearly every county in Mississippi reported jailing someone going through the commitment process at least once in the year ending in June 2023, according to the state Department of Mental Health. In just 19 of the state’s 82 counties, people awaiting treatment were jailed without criminal charges at least 2,000 times from 2019 to 2022, according to a review of jail dockets by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. (Those figures, which included counties that provided jail dockets identifying civil commitment bookings, include detentions for both mental illness and substance abuse; the legislation addresses only the commitment process for mental illness.)

Sheriffs have decried the practice, saying jails aren’t equipped to handle people with severe mental illness. Since 2006, at least 17 people have died after being held in jail during the civil commitment process; nine were suicides.

The bill’s sponsors said Mississippi Today and ProPublica’s reporting prompted them to act. “The deficiencies have been outlined and they're being corrected,” said state Rep. Kevin Felsher, R-Biloxi, a co-author of the bill.

An affidavit of someone who was committed and held in a Mississippi jail for mental health issues (Obtained by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

As a chancery clerk in northeastern Mississippi’s Lee County, Bill Benson has long dealt with people seeking to file commitment affidavits asserting that someone, often a family member, should be forced into treatment. He said first requiring a screening by a mental health professional is a good move. “I’m an accountant. I’m not going to try and make a determination” about whether someone needs to be committed, he said. He generally allows people to file commitment papers so he can “let the judge make that call.”

The bill says that if the community mental health center recommends commitment after the initial screening, someone can’t be jailed while awaiting treatment unless all other options have been exhausted and a judge specifically orders the person to be jailed. The legislation also says people can be held in jail for only 24 hours unless the community mental health center requests an additional 24-hour hold and a judge agrees. Roughly two-thirds of the people jailed over four years were held longer than 48 hours, according to Mississippi Today and ProPublica’s analysis.

However, the bill does not address the underlying reason that many people are jailed as they await a treatment bed. “I’m not certain there are enough beds and personnel available to take everybody,” Benson said. “I think everyone will attempt to comply, but there are going to be some instances where somebody’s going to have to be housed in the jail.”

Nor does the legislation say anything about how the provisions will be enforced. House Public Health Chair Sam Creekmore, R-New Albany, the primary sponsor of the bill, said the Department of Mental Health will “police this.” He also said he hopes the law’s new reporting requirements for community mental health centers will encourage county supervisors to monitor compliance.

Moore, at the Department of Mental Health, said the agency won’t enforce the law, although it will educate county officials, who are responsible for housing people going through civil commitment until they are transferred to a state hospital. “We sincerely hope all stakeholders will abide by the new processes and restrictions,” Moore said. “But DMH does not have oversight over county courts or law enforcement.”

Several mental health experts and advocates for people with mental illness say the law doesn’t go far enough to ban a practice that many contend is unconstitutional. For that reason, representatives of Disability Rights Mississippi have said they’re planning to sue the state and several counties.

“The basic flaw remains,” said Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and former president of the American Psychiatric Association. “There is no justification for putting someone who needs hospital-level care in jail, not even for 24 hours.”

Agnel Philip of ProPublica and Isabelle Taft, formerly of Mississippi Today, contributed reporting.

by Paul Kiel, ProPublica, and Russ Buettner, The New York Times

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Former President Donald Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an IRS inquiry uncovered by ProPublica and The New York Times. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.

The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.

But when Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the IRS has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.

The first write-off came on Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, ProPublica and the Times found.

There is no indication the IRS challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the IRS. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.

The issues around Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the IRS undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. ProPublica and the Times, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the IRS would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.

Trump’s tax records have been a matter of intense speculation since the 2016 presidential campaign, when he defied decades of precedent and refused to release his returns, citing a long-running audit. A first, partial revelation of the substance of the audit came in 2020, when the Times reported that the IRS was disputing a $72.9 million tax refund that Trump had claimed starting in 2010. That refund, which appeared to be based on Trump’s reporting of vast losses from his long-failing casinos, equaled every dollar of federal income tax he had paid during his first flush of television riches, from 2005 through 2008, plus interest.

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The reporting by ProPublica and the Times about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Trump’s quarrel with the IRS. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney general’s suit against Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 IRS memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting maneuver. The memorandum did not identify Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by the Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.

It is unclear how the audit battle has progressed since December 2022, when it was mentioned in the congressional report. Audits often drag on for years, and taxpayers have a right to appeal the IRS’ conclusions. The case would typically become public only if Trump chose to challenge a ruling in court.

In response to questions for this article, Trump’s son Eric, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said: “This matter was settled years ago, only to be brought back to life once my father ran for office. We are confident in our position, which is supported by opinion letters from various tax experts, including the former general counsel of the IRS.”

An IRS spokesperson said federal law prohibited the agency from discussing private taxpayer information.

The outcome of Trump’s dispute could set a precedent for wealthy people seeking tax benefits from the laws governing partnerships. Those laws are notoriously complex, riddled with uncertainty and under constant assault by lawyers pushing boundaries for their clients. The IRS has inadvertently further invited aggressive positions by rarely auditing partnership tax returns.

The audit represents yet another potential financial threat — albeit a more distant one — for Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 presidential nominee. In recent months, he has been ordered to pay $83.3 million in a defamation case and an additional $454 million in a civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Trump has appealed both judgments. (He is also in the midst of a criminal trial in Manhattan, where he is accused of covering up a hush-money payment to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election.)

Beyond the two episodes under audit, reporting by the Times in recent years has found that, across his business career, Trump has often used what experts described as highly aggressive — and at times, legally suspect — accounting maneuvers to avoid paying taxes. To the six tax experts consulted for this article, Trump’s Chicago accounting maneuvers appeared to be questionable and unlikely to withstand scrutiny.

“I think he ripped off the tax system,” said Walter Schwidetzky, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and an expert on partnership taxation.

Trump’s Chicago tower (Nurphoto/Getty Images)

Trump struck a deal in 2001 to acquire land and a building that was then home to the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. Two years later, after publicly toying with the idea of constructing the world’s tallest building there, he unveiled plans for a more modest tower, with 486 residences and 339 “hotel condominiums” that buyers could use for short stays and allow Trump’s company to rent out. He initially estimated that construction would last until 2007 and cost $650 million.

Trump placed the project at the center of the first season of “The Apprentice” in 2004, offering the winner a top job there under his tutelage. “It’ll be a mind-boggling job to manage,” Trump said during the season finale. “When it’s finished in 2007, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Chicago, could have a value of $1.2 billion and will raise the standards of architectural excellence throughout the world.”

As his cost estimates increased, Trump arranged to borrow as much as $770 million for the project — $640 million from Deutsche Bank and $130 million from Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund and private equity company. He personally guaranteed $40 million of the Deutsche loan. Both Deutsche and Fortress then sold off pieces of the loans to other institutions, spreading the risk and potential gain.

Trump planned to sell enough of the 825 units to pay off his loans when they came due in May 2008. But when that date came, he had sold only 133. At that point, he projected that construction would not be completed until mid-2009, at a revised cost of $859 million.

He asked his lenders for a six-month extension. A briefing document prepared for the lenders, obtained by the Times and ProPublica, said Trump would contribute $89 million of his own money, $25 million more than his initial plan. The lenders agreed.

But sales did not pick up that summer, with the nation plunged into the financial crisis that would become the Great Recession. When Trump asked for another extension in September, his lenders refused.

Two months later, Trump defaulted on his loans and sued his lenders, characterizing the financial crisis as the kind of catastrophe, like a flood or hurricane, covered by the “force majeure” clause of his loan agreement with Deutsche Bank. That, he said, entitled him to an indefinite delay in repaying his loans. Trump went so far as to blame the bank and its peers for “creating the current financial crisis.” He demanded $3 billion in damages.

At the time, Trump had paid down his loans with $99 million in sales but still needed more money to complete construction. At some point that year, he concluded that his investment in the tower was worthless, at least as the term is defined in partnership tax law.

Trump’s worthlessness claim meant only that his stake in 401 Mezz Venture, the LLC that held the tower, was without value because he expected that sales would never produce enough cash to pay off the mortgages, let alone turn a profit.

When he filed his 2008 tax return, he declared business losses of $697 million. Tax records do not fully show which businesses generated that figure. But working with tax experts, ProPublica and the Times calculated that the Chicago worthlessness deduction could have been as high as $651 million, the value of Trump’s stake in the partnership — about $94 million he had invested and the $557 million loan balance reported on his tax returns that year.

When business owners report losses greater than their income in any given year, they can retain the leftover negative amount as a credit to reduce their taxable income in future years. As it turned out, that tax-reducing power would be of increasing value to Trump. While many of his businesses continued to lose money, income from “The Apprentice” and licensing and endorsement agreements poured in: $33.3 million in 2009, $44.6 million in 2010 and $51.3 million in 2011.

Trump’s advisers girded for a potential audit of the worthlessness deduction from the moment they claimed it, according to the filings from the New York attorney general’s lawsuit. Starting in 2009 Trump’s team excluded the Chicago tower from the frothy annual “statements of financial condition” that Trump used to boast of his wealth, out of concern that assigning value to the building would conflict with its declared worthlessness, according to the attorney general’s filing. (Those omissions came even as Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth to qualify for low-interest loans, according to the ruling in the attorney general’s lawsuit.)

Trump had good reason to fear an audit of the deduction, according to the tax experts consulted for this article. They believe that Trump’s tax advisers pushed beyond what was defensible.

The worthlessness deduction serves as a way for a taxpayer to benefit from an expected total loss on an investment long before the final results are known. It occupies a fuzzy and counterintuitive slice of tax law. Three decades ago, a federal appeals court ruled that the judgment of a company’s worthlessness could be based in part on the opinion of its owner. After taking the deduction, the owner can keep the “worthless” company and its assets. Subsequent court decisions have only partly clarified the rules. Absent prescribed parameters, tax lawyers have been left to handicap the chances that a worthlessness deduction will withstand an IRS challenge.

There are several categories, with a declining likelihood of success, of money taxpayers can claim to have lost.

The tax experts consulted for this article universally assigned the highest level of certainty to cash spent to acquire an asset. The roughly $94 million that Trump’s tax returns show he invested in Chicago fell into this category.

Some gave a lower, though still probable, chance of a taxpayer prevailing in declaring a loss based on loans that a lender agreed to forgive. That’s because forgiven debt generally must be declared as income, which can offset that portion of the worthlessness deduction in the same year. A large portion of Trump’s worthlessness deduction fell in this category, though he did not begin reporting forgiven debt income until two years later, a delay that would have further reduced his chances of prevailing in an audit.

The tax experts gave the weakest chance of surviving a challenge for a worthlessness deduction based on borrowed money for which the outcome was not clear. It reflects a doubly irrational claim — that the taxpayer deserves a tax benefit for losing someone else’s money even before the money has been lost, and that those anticipated future losses can be used to offset real income from other sources. Most of the debt included in Trump’s worthlessness deduction was based on that risky position.

Including that debt in the deduction was “just not right,” said Monte Jackel, a veteran of the IRS and major accounting firms who often publishes analyses of partnership tax issues.

Trump continued to sell units at the Chicago tower, but still below his costs. Had he done nothing, his 2008 worthlessness deduction would have prevented him from claiming that shortfall as losses again. But in 2010, his lawyers attempted an end-run by merging the entity through which he owned the Chicago tower into another partnership, DJT Holdings LLC. In the following years, they piled other businesses, including several of his golf courses, into DJT Holdings.

Those changes had no apparent business purpose. But Trump’s tax advisers took the position that pooling the Chicago tower’s finances with other businesses entitled him to declare even more tax-reducing losses from his Chicago investment.

His financial problems there continued. More than 100 of the hotel condominiums never sold. Sales of all units totaled only $727 million, far below Trump’s budgeted costs of $859 million. And some 70,000 square feet of retail space remained vacant because it had been designed without access to foot or vehicle traffic. From 2011 through 2020, Trump reported $168 million in additional losses from the project.

Those additional write-offs helped Trump avoid tax liability for his continuing entertainment riches, as well as his unpaid debt from the tower. Starting in 2010, his lenders agreed to forgive about $270 million of those debts. But he was able to delay declaring that income until 2014 and spread it out over five years of tax returns, thanks to a provision in the Obama administration’s stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession. In 2018, Trump reported positive income for the first time in 11 years. But his income tax bill still amounted to only $1.9 million, even as he reported a $25 million gain from the sale of his late father’s assets.

It’s unclear when the IRS began to question the 2010 merger transaction, but the conflict escalated during Trump’s presidency.

The IRS explained its position in a Technical Advice Memorandum, released in 2019, that identified Trump only as “A.” Such memos, reserved for cases where the law is unclear, are rare and involve extensive review by senior IRS lawyers. The agency produced only two other such memos that year.

The memos are required to be publicly released with the taxpayer’s information removed, and this one was more heavily redacted than usual. Some partnership specialists wrote papers exploring its meaning and importance to other taxpayers, but none identified taxpayer “A” as the then-sitting president of the United States. ProPublica and the Times matched the facts of the memo to information from Trump’s tax returns and elsewhere.

The 20-page document is dense with footnotes, calculations and references to various statutes, but the core of the IRS’ position is that Trump’s 2010 merger violated a law meant to prevent double dipping on tax-reducing losses. If done properly, the merger would have accounted for the fact that Trump had already written off the full cost of the tower’s construction with his worthlessness deduction.

In the IRS memo, Trump’s lawyers vigorously disagreed with the agency’s conclusions, saying he had followed the law.

If the IRS prevails, Trump’s tax returns would look very different, especially those from 2011 to 2017. During those years, he reported $184 million in income from “The Apprentice” and agreements to license his name, along with $219 million from canceled debts. But he paid only $643,431 in income taxes thanks to huge losses on his businesses, including the Chicago tower. The revisions sought by the IRS would require amending his tax returns to remove $146 million in losses and add as much as $218 million in income from condominium sales. That shift of up to $364 million could swing those years out of the red and well into positive territory, creating a tax bill that could easily exceed $100 million.

The only public sign of the Chicago audit came in December 2022, when a congressional Joint Committee on Taxation report on IRS efforts to audit Trump made an unexplained reference to the section of tax law at issue in the Chicago case. It confirmed that the audit was still underway and could affect Trump’s tax returns from several years.

That the IRS did not initiate an audit of the 2008 worthlessness deduction puzzled the experts in partnership taxation. Many assumed the understaffed IRS simply had not realized what Trump had done until the deadline to investigate it had passed.

“I think the government recognized that they screwed up,” and then audited the merger transaction to make up for it, Jackel said.

The agency’s difficulty in keeping up with Trump’s maneuvers, experts said, showed that this gray area of tax law was too easy to exploit.

“Congress needs to radically change the rules for the worthlessness deduction,” Schwidetzky said.

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Susanne Craig of The New York Times contributed reporting.

by Doug Bock Clark

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Ten months after Georgia officials said they would take steps to ensure that counties were correctly handling massive numbers of challenges to voter registrations, neither the secretary of state’s office nor the State Election Board has done so.

In July 2023, ProPublica reported that election officials in multiple Georgia counties were handling citizens’ challenges to voter registrations in different ways, with some potentially violating the National Voter Registration Act.

Instead of fixing the problem, the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature passed SB 189 at the end of March. The bill’s authors claim that it will help prevent voting fraud, while voting rights advocates warn that it could make the issue worse. Gov. Brian Kemp signed it into law on Monday.

“I see this as being pro-America, pro-accuracy, pro-transparency and pro-election integrity,” state Rep. John LaHood said of the bill, which he worked to help pass. “I don’t see it being” about voter suppression “whatsoever.”

When it takes effect in July, SB 189 will make it easier for Georgia residents to use questionable evidence when challenging fellow residents’ voter registrations. Voting rights activists also claim that the law could lead county officials to believe they can approve bulk challenges closer to election dates.

“It’s bad policy and bad law, and will open the floodgates to bad challenges,” said Caitlin May, a voting rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, which has threatened to sue over what it says is the law’s potential to violate the NVRA.

ProPublica previously reported on how just six right-wing advocates challenged the voter registrations of 89,000 Georgians following the 2021 passage of a controversial law that enabled residents to file unlimited voter challenges. We also revealed that county election officials may have been systematically approving challenges too close to election dates, which would violate the NVRA.

The Georgia secretary of state’s office said at the time that it was “thankful” for information provided by ProPublica, that it had been working on “uniform standards for voter challenges” and that it had “asked the state election board to provide rules” to help election officials handle the challenges. And the chair of the State Election Board told ProPublica last year that though the board hadn’t yet offered rules due to the demands of the 2022 election, “now that the election is over, we intend to do that.”

With the new law soon to be in effect, the State Election Board is determining its next steps. “We’re going to probably have to try and provide some instruction telling” election officials how to respond to SB 189, said John Fervier, who was appointed chair in January after the former chair stepped down. “I don’t know if that will come from the State Election Board or from the secretary of state’s office. But we’re one day past the signing of the legislation, so it’s still too early for me to comment on what kind of instruction will go out at this point.”

Mike Hassinger, a public information officer for the secretary of state’s office, said in a statement that it falls to the State Election Board to review laws and come up with rules. “Once the board moves forward with that process we are more than happy to extend help to rule making,” Hassinger said.

Conservative organizations have been vocal about their plans to file numerous challenges to voter registrations this year, providing training and other resources to help Georgians do so. Activists and Georgia Republican Party leadership publicly celebrated the passage of SB 189, with the GOP chair telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that this year’s legislative session was “a home run for those of us concerned about election integrity.”

But what has not gotten as much attention is how individuals who were involved in producing massive numbers of voter challenges managed to shape SB 189.

Jason Frazier, who in 2023 was a Republican nominee to the Fulton County election board, challenged the registrations of nearly 10,000 people in Fulton County, part of the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta. (Cheney Orr for ProPublica)

Courtney Kramer, the former executive director of True the Vote, a conservative organization that announced it was filing over 360,000 challenges in Georgia after the 2020 presidential election, played an instrumental role in getting the bill passed. She was the co-chair of the Election Confidence Task Force, a committee of the Georgia Republican Party that provided sample language to legislators crafting SB 189. An internal party email reviewed by ProPublica thanked Kramer for her dedication in helping bring “us to the final stages of pushing essential election integrity reform through the legislature.” Kramer said in a statement that “my goal was to restore confidence in Georgia’s elections process” and to “make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

Jason Frazier, who ProPublica previously found was one of the state’s six most prolific challengers, served on the Election Confidence Task Force. Frazier did not respond to requests for comment.

In late July, William Duffey, who was then the chair of Georgia’s State Election Board, was working on a paper to update county election officials on how to handle voter challenges. But when the board met in August 2023, a large crowd of right-wing activists packed the room, and dozens of people castigated the board for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election. One mocked a multicultural invocation with which Duffey had started the meeting, declaring, “The only thing you left out was satanism!” A right-wing news outlet accused “the not so honorable Judge Duffey” of hiding “dirt” on the corruption of the 2020 election.

Less than a month later, Duffey stepped down. He denied that activists had driven him out, telling ProPublica that pressure from such activists “comes with the job.” But, he explained, the volunteer position had been taking “70% of my waking hours,” and “I wanted to get back to things for which I had scoped out my retirement.”

According to two sources knowledgeable about the board’s workings, who asked for anonymity to discuss confidential board matters, Duffey had been the primary force behind updating the rules about voter challenges, and without him, the effort stalled. One source also said that the board had realized that Republican legislators planned to rewrite voter-challenge laws, and members wanted to see what they would do.

In January 2024, Republican legislators began working on those bills. The one that succeeded, SB 189, introduces two especially important changes that would help challengers, according to voting rights activists.

First, it says a dataset kept by the U.S. Postal Service to track address changes provides sufficient grounds for election officials to approve challenges, if that data is backed up by secondary evidence from governmental sources. Researchers have found the National Change of Address dataset to be unreliable in establishing a person’s residence, as there are many reasons a person could be listed as living outside of Georgia but could still legally vote there. ProPublica found in 2023 that counties frequently dismissed challenges because of that unreliability. And voting rights activists claim that the secondary sources SB 189 specifies include swaths of unreliable data.

“My worry is” that the bill “will cause a higher success rate for the challenges,” said Anne Gray Herring, a policy analyst for nonprofit watchdog group Common Cause Georgia.

The new bill also states that starting 45 days before an election, county election boards cannot make a determination on a challenge. Advocates have expressed concerns that counties will interpret the law to mean that they can approve mass, or systematic, challenges up until 45 days before an election. The NVRA prohibits systematic removal of voters within 90 days of an election, and election boards commonly dismissed challenges that likely constituted systematic removal within the 90-day window, ProPublica previously found.

When True the Vote was challenging voters in the aftermath of the 2020 election, a judge issued a restraining order against the challenges for violating the 90-day window.

Whether SB 189 violates the NVRA could be settled in court, according to voting rights advocates and officials. On Tuesday, after SB 189 was signed, Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state, disputed on social media that the new law would make voter challenges easier. But months earlier, he said that imprecision in the voter challenges process could lead to legal problems.

“When you do loose data matching, you get a lot of false positives,” Sterling said, testifying about voter list maintenance before the Senate committee that would pass a precursor to SB 189. “And when you get a lot of false positives and then move on them inside the NVRA environment, that’s when you get sued.”

by Lisa Song

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

When I registered to attend last month’s United Nations conference in Canada, organizers insisted it would be a “plastic free meeting.” I wouldn’t even get a see-through sleeve for my name tag, they warned; I’d have to reuse an old lanyard.

After all, representatives from roughly 170 countries were gathering to tackle a crisis: The world churns out 400 million metric tons of plastic a year. It clogs landfills and oceans; its chemical trail seeps into our bodies. Delegates have been meeting since 2022 as part of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution in hopes of ending this year with a treaty that addresses “the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design and disposal.”

The challenge before delegates seemed daunting: How do you get hundreds of negotiators to agree on anything via live, group editing? Especially when representatives from fossil fuel and chemical companies would be vigorously working to shift the conversation away from what scientists say is the only solution to the crisis: curbing plastic production.

But when I got to the meeting, I discovered those industry reps were not the sideshow; they were welcomed into the main event.

They could watch closed-door sessions off limits to reporters. Some got high-level badges indistinguishable from those worn by country representatives negotiating the treaty. These badges allowed them access to exclusive discussions not open to some of the world’s leading health scientists.

In a setting that was supposed to level the inequalities among those present, I watched how country delegates and conference organizers did little to minimize them, making what was already going to be a challenging process needlessly opaque and avoidably contentious.

With such high stakes, I asked the INC Secretariat — the staff at the UN Environment Programme who facilitated the negotiations process — why they hadn’t set rules on conflict of interest or transparency. They told me that wasn’t their job, that it was up to countries to take the lead. But in some cases, countries pointed me right back to the UN.

Over five days, I would come to understand just how hard it will be to get meaningful action on plastics.

A pro-plastic ad (James Park for ProPublica) Day 1: Represent the Public? Stay Out.

From the moment I landed in Ottawa, the counter-argument of the plastics industry was inescapable, from wall-sized ads at the airport to billboards on trucks that cruised around the downtown convention center.

Their message: Curtailing plastic production would spell literal doom. (I could almost see the marketing pitch: Think of the children!)

These plastics deliver water, read one, depicting a girl drinking from a bottle in what was implied to be a disaster zone.

I headed to the media registration desk and got my green-striped badge, which placed me at the lowest rung of the pecking order.

At the top were people on official delegations. Their red-striped badges opened the door to every meeting, from the large “plenaries” where rows of country representatives spoke into microphones, to smaller working groups where negotiators hashed out specifics like whether to ban certain chemicals used in plastic.

The majority of the attendees wore orange badges. This hodgepodge of so-called observers included scientists, environmentalists, Indigenous peoples and some industry reps, though the color code made no distinction among them.

Observers were allowed into certain working groups at the discretion of government delegates.

Reporters could attend only plenaries.

These huge, open sessions were like the UN equivalent of Senate floor speeches: declarations and repetition to get ideas into the public record.

Veteran observers tracked the real action in the margins, standing in the back of the ballroom to watch who was talking to whom. It was an art, they said: You want to stroll close enough to read the small print on name tags, but you have to be chill about it.

I was not chill about the lack of access, which prevented sources from talking about what happened behind closed-door proceedings. They were governed by rules that prohibited those present from recording the meetings or revealing who had said what.

Reporters trying to inform the public and hold governments accountable were completely shut out. Yet somehow the rules allowed the industry whose survival depends on more plastic production to dispatch reps to watch negotiators at work.

The rules follow the “norms when it comes to fundamentals of negotiating, multilateralism, and diplomacy amongst UN Member States,” said a statement from the INC Secretariat. These meetings are managed by the countries negotiating the treaty, the statement said; the countries set the rules.

But when I asked the U.S. State Department, which led the U.S. delegation in Ottawa, whether journalists should have more access, a spokesperson directed me back to the UN.

An environmental health advocacy group near the Ottawa convention center (James Park for ProPublica) Day 2: “The Human Right to Science”

I heard about an exhibit at the nearby Westin hosted by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. It sounded like an environmental group, but an online search showed it was founded by corporations including Dow and ExxonMobil. Dow didn’t respond to a request for comment. ExxonMobil said it attended the conference “to be a resource, bring solutions to the table and listen to a broad range of views by all stakeholders.”

As I wandered through the ballroom stocked with refreshments, shiny videos and diagrams promoted the potential of “circularity,” a marketing term that’s often focused on recycling. Independent research shows pollution will skyrocket if companies don’t curb production, but the industry has, for decades, shifted attention from that with false promises about waste management.

“The work we do is not the whole solution,” the alliance later told me in an email.

But I could easily see someone leaving the exhibit with that impression.

The finer points of plastic science, from its toxic manufacturing process to the limits of recycling, are highly technical and complex.

While countries like the United States could afford to fly in multiple experts to inform government delegates, other countries could not.

Later that day, I met Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist from Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, who was among 60 independent, volunteer researchers who had traveled to Canada in hopes of bridging that gap in access to expertise.

As part of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, they shared fact sheets and peer-reviewed studies and made themselves available for questions. Carney Almroth said ensuring the integrity of the group was vital. Members must have a proven track record of researching plastic pollution and follow a conflict-of-interest policy to prevent bias.

“The human right to science,” she said, “includes the right to transparency.”

Bethanie Carney Almroth, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, is on the steering committee of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty. (James Park for ProPublica) Day 3: “No Such Thing as Conflict of Interest”

For the first two of these conferences, the INC Secretariat didn’t include the participants’ affiliations when they released the list of people who had registered for the event, making it hard to tell who worked for the industry. That has since changed, making it easier for advocacy groups to scour lists for fossil fuel and chemical company affiliations.

After the UN released the roster of the 4,000 people who had registered for Ottawa this year, the Center for International Environmental Law released its analysis of industry attendees. It found about 200 people with observer-level badges.

What’s more, the group said, 16 industry representatives had received the red badges usually reserved for government delegates. They were invited onto official delegations by China, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey and Uganda. I later learned an Indonesian delegate was listed as part of its Ministry of Industry; LinkedIn revealed him to be a director at a petrochemical firm.

I reached out to officials from all 10 countries. Most did not respond.

(The United States wasn’t on the list. “As a matter of policy, the United States does not include any industry or civil society representatives in our official delegation,” said a spokesperson from the State Department.)

There is “no such thing as conflict of interest in International negotiations,” the executive director of the Uganda National Environment Management Authority, Barirega Akankwasah, told me in a WhatsApp message. It’s “a matter of country positions and not individual positions,” he said, adding that the conference was “open and transparent” and stakeholders were “all welcome to participate.”

An official from the Dominican Republic, Claudia Taboada, told me that environmental groups and academic scientists had been consulted before the Ottawa conference and that the two industry reps on the country’s eight-member delegation had restricted privileges. They were barred from internal meetings where observers weren’t allowed, she said, and they couldn’t negotiate on behalf of the government.

Claudia Taboada was part of the official delegation from the Dominican Republic. She is director for science technology and environment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (James Park for ProPublica)

Those industry reps weren’t trying to influence the government’s position, added Taboada, who is director for science, technology and environment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I found that hard to believe. Who would sit through days of bureaucratic meetings just to observe?

A red-striped badge provides tangible benefits, multiple attendees told me, like access to email lists and WhatsApp chats that are closed to observers. A university scientist who’s part of Fiji’s official delegation, Rufino Varea, said it’s easier to talk to official delegates from other countries when you have that badge. It shows only a person’s name and country, making it impossible to tell at a glance whether someone works for the government or for private interests.

A press release issued that day showed a counter-analysis of the entire list of attendees from the International Council of Chemical Associations, which said that industry observers were vastly outnumbered by more than 2,000 members from nongovernmental organizations like environmental advocacy groups.

Many of these groups are “incredibly well funded” and supported by billionaires, said a subsequent email from the American Chemistry Council, the country’s largest plastics lobby. It noted that at least eight countries had NGO representatives on their official delegations.

Rufino Varea is in his final semester as a doctoral student in ecotoxicology at the University of the South Pacific. Varea said Fiji’s delegation supports a strong treaty that limits plastic production. (James Park for ProPublica) Day 4: Fighting for Attention

For every NGO with millions in the bank, there were others whose members couldn’t afford the trip to Ottawa. Many had to compete for limited travel funds from sources like the UN or larger advocacy groups.

I sat down with John Chweya, a friendly man in a leather jacket who makes a living as a waste picker in Kenya. A single salad at the conference cost more than a day’s pay.

As president of the Waste Pickers Association of Kenya, he wanted delegates to understand how plastic impacts the millions around the world who collect garbage and sort the recyclables they can sell in places without formal waste disposal. Toxic fumes from plastic burning in landfills make his fellow workers sick, he told me. They wake up with swollen necks, joints that don’t work and mysterious tumors. Chweya wants the world to make less plastic; he came to Ottawa to fight for protective gear and health care.

The specificity of his story brought home how the experiences of front-line communities could inform the understanding of the plastics crisis.

John Chweya traveled to Ottawa to advocate for waste pickers in Kenya. (James Park for ProPublica)

Others like Chweya tried to give voice to huge portions of the world’s populations that are suffering from every step in the plastic life cycle: residents of Indigenous communities and Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” breathing dangerous plant emissions; Pacific Islanders seeing their coral reefs entangled in abandoned fishing nets; activists from lower-income countries that are swimming in Americans’ discarded plastic.

I watched them trying to grab the attention of government officials with handwritten posters, events in cramped rooms and limited speaking slots during the plenary.

None of it matched the flash of the billboards I could not seem to avoid, which heralded their own impending health emergency.

These plastics save lives, one decreed, featuring a girl in a hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask.

Negotiators couldn’t even agree on setting voluntary reductions for plastic production, I thought. Nobody was proposing to eliminate enough plastic to cause hospital shortages.

Chweya called the prevalent ads “traitorous.”

Day 5: The UN Isn’t Powerless

UN officials had warned against the inequities playing out in Ottawa.

In November 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement during the first conference to negotiate the treaty, held in Uruguay.

Even though they weren’t hosting it, human rights officials had advice on how to proceed. “The plastic industry has disproportionate power and influence over policy relative to the general public,” they wrote. “Clear boundaries on conflict of interest should be established … drawing from existing good practices under international law.”

They recommended policies similar to those adopted by the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a separate UN treaty. Government representatives meet every two years to evaluate results. Recognizing that the tobacco industry’s presence was fundamentally incompatible with protecting public health, the countries agreed to virtually ban Big Tobacco from those meetings.

“It is irresponsible and inaccurate to liken plastics to tobacco,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement in response to my questions about this comparison. “Unlike the tobacco industry, the plastics industry is playing a vital role in helping meet the UN’s sustainability goals by contributing to food safety, healthcare, renewable energy, telecommunications, clean drinking water, and much more. …

“Keeping plastic producers out means a less informed treaty,” the council said. “We are essential and constructive stakeholders in the global effort to prevent plastic pollution.”

Short of barring the plastics industry, many have wondered why the UN can’t start with smaller steps, like giving industry observers a different kind of badge.

The fossil fuel companies “that are manufacturing plastics” are “not coming to these negotiations with solutions,” Baskut Tuncak, a former UN special rapporteur for human rights and toxics, told me. They’re here “to throw a wrench in the process, or two, or three.”

When I asked if it intended to introduce conflict-of-interest controls, the INC Secretariat said it couldn’t impose rules unilaterally. Governments would have to decide for themselves.

Some U.S. and European politicians have requested such reforms. Negotiators should consider measures “to protect against undue influence of corporate actors with proven vested interests that contradict the goals of the global plastics treaty,” said a letter last month sent to President Joe Biden and the secretary-general of the United Nations.

It was signed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who’s often criticized the fossil fuel industry’s influence on public policy, along with 11 other members of Congress and a member of the European Parliament. Industry reps should be required to disclose lobbying records and campaign contributions, the letter suggested.

The UN isn’t powerless, said Tuncak and Ana Paula Souza, a UN human rights officer I met on my last day in Ottawa. There’s more the institution could do to raise the profile of the issue, they said. Souza said the UN could also increase funding to allow more of those most affected by plastic pollution to attend these meetings.

An art installation outside the Ottawa convention center (James Park for ProPublica) Looking Ahead

The Ottawa conference ended with limited progress. Negotiators have a long way to go to reach a final draft at the last scheduled conference this November in Busan, South Korea. Smaller groups of delegates will meet before then; it’s unclear how many observers will be able to attend.

It’s tempting to feel pessimistic. This could easily end up like the UN climate treaty — anemic, voluntary and dragging on forever.

And it’s not like a conflict-of-interest policy would magically solve everything. Countries with powerful plastics lobbies, including the United States, can still advocate for corporate interests.

But it’s worth stepping back to recognize the magnitude of what’s happening.

Nearly every government on Earth signed up for days of painstaking sessions on plastic as a global threat — even places confronting existential crises, like Haiti, Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine. The world recognizes the importance of figuring this out. And despite all the industry influence, capping plastic production remains a possibility.

Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.

by Sergio Hernandez

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In the summer of 2021, New York Police Department officer Willie Thompson had sex at least twice with a witness to a Harlem carjacking that he was investigating. When a prosecutor questioned Thompson about his relationship with the witness, Thompson first lied, denying the relationship, before recanting and confessing the next day, according to an internal discipline report. About a week later, the woman, sounding upset, called the prosecutor and said Thompson had cornered her at a bodega, blaming her for getting him in trouble and threatening that officers from the precinct would be coming to her home, the document shows.

Thompson, who declined to comment, was found guilty by the NYPD on two misconduct charges and was placed on probation.

But if you looked up his disciplinary history on the department’s public database of uniformed officers, you would be unlikely to learn that.

ProPublica has found the NYPD site for allowing the public to track officers’ misconduct is shockingly unreliable. Cases against officers frequently vanish from the site for days — sometimes weeks — at a time. The issue affects nearly all of the officers in the database, with discipline disappearing from the profiles of patrol officers all the way up to its most senior uniformed officer.

ProPublica examined more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database’s contents and found that, since the fall of 2022, the number of discipline cases that appear in the database has fluctuated often and wildly. Try to pull up the record for a disciplined officer and the site sometimes spits back, “This officer does not have any applicable entries.”

Since May 2021, at least 88% of the disciplinary cases that once appeared in the data have gone missing at some point, though some were later restored. As of this week, 54% of cases that had at one point been in the system were missing.

“It is really disconcerting to see that there are records that are there one day that are not the next,” said Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project.

In the NYPD’s Officer Database, Discipline Records Frequently Vanish

A ProPublica analysis of more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the NYPD’s Office Profile database found that, since fall 2022, cases have repeatedly disappeared and the number of publicly accessible cases fluctuates often and wildly.

Source: ProPublica analysis of archived NYPD data. (Chart by Sergio Hernandez)

The NYPD did not respond to repeated requests for interviews or comment.

Because the department’s database is designed to show discipline only for active officers, some cases relating to former officers might have been removed from the data over time. Yet that would only explain a fraction of the missing cases. For most of the past year, at least a third of cases that had previously appeared in the database were missing.

These missing cases have included Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, the force’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, and six deputy chiefs whose assignments include the department’s transit bureau and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The allegations against these high-ranking officers include being “discourteous” to a suspect, drinking while on duty, improper use of department property, and wrongful searches, frisks and uses of force.

In the chief of department’s case, Maddrey was docked 45 vacation days over a 2015 incident in which he impeded internal affairs officials who were investigating an altercation with an ex-lover and fellow officer. The incident ended with the officer brandishing a gun at Maddrey. When a reporter looked up Maddrey’s discipline record on Wednesday, the department’s system reported no disciplinary cases against him.

In interviews, several advocates for police reform and accountability said the issues raised by ProPublica’s analysis renewed their concerns about the NYPD’s competence, legal compliance and accountability.

“It just continues to undermine the public confidence in that they care at all about discipline and police accountability,” said Lupe Aguirre, a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Their track record shows that they are both unwilling and unable to hold their officers accountable.”

While people across the country rallied against police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis officers in 2020, reform advocates in New York scored a major victory. Capitalizing on the groundswell of public demand for accountability, they pushed lawmakers to repeal a state statute that, for more than four decades, prohibited the release of personnel information about police officers.

Early the next year, the NYPD published a searchable database of its uniformed officers, allowing the public to look up cops and see their training histories, departmental awards and, for the first time, internal discipline records. In a department-wide memo, agency brass reportedly touted the move as a “step that increases transparency and improves accountability.”

Despite a 2012 local law that requires agencies to publish their data on the city’s open-data platform, the police department chose a vendor best known for selling “athlete management” software for sports teams to run the officer lookup system.

The source code of the officer profile website reveals it runs on software from RockDaisy, a New York-based software company. A blog post on its site, first published in 2017 and updated last year, says it has been licensed to several teams in the NFL, NHL and NBA and “the world’s largest police department,” an apparent reference to the NYPD.

RockDaisy’s founders did not respond to ProPublica’s inquiries about the company’s relationship with the police department. While RockDaisy does appear in a database of qualified vendors, a spokesperson for the city comptroller, which audits agency spending and reviews city contracts, said her office could not find any contracts with or payments to the company.

Aguirre and Wong, the Legal Aid Society attorney, cited the department’s habit of resisting oversight to argue that disclosure of officer misconduct data should not be entrusted to the department itself.

“It all should be up on [NYC] Open Data,” Wong said, referring to the citywide portal that publishes data from various agencies, including the NYPD, on everything from 311 calls and filming permits to a census of the city’s trees.

A schedule of upcoming releases shows that the NYPD’s officer profile data was supposed to be added to Open Data by the end of last year, but that still has not happened.

A spokesperson for the city’s chief technology officer, whose agency operates the Open Data platform, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

Adrienne Schmoeker, who led the city’s Open Data program from 2016 to 2019 and served as New York City’s deputy chief analytics officer under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, said it was not unusual for data releases to fall behind schedule. But failing to publish quality data reliably, she said, risks losing the public’s trust, especially when New Yorkers assume the worst: that agencies are hiding unflattering information.

“That’s extremely problematic, even if it’s wrong,” Schmoeker said, “because it erodes the trust that is essential between New Yorkers and their government.”

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by Brett Murphy

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Years before Oct. 7, soldiers and officers in four Israeli security force units committed what the U.S. State Department would later determine to be serious human rights violations against Palestinians.

In one incident in 2019, an Israel Defense Forces soldier shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian man on the side of a road in the West Bank. That soldier was given no jail time — only three months of community service.

Under the U.S. Leahy Laws, the government must disqualify any military or law enforcement unit from receiving assistance if there’s credible information that the group had committed violations like rape or extrajudicial killings, unless the offending entity has taken adequate steps to punish the perpetrator.

On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress he had determined the punishments for the soldiers and officers in all four cases — including the community service sentence — to be adequate, according to a State Department memo to Congress. The units won’t be disqualified from receiving American military assistance. The names of the units were previously reported by Al-Monitor. ProPublica obtained the memo with Blinken’s justifications.

Some experts disagreed with that decision, saying that the punishment Israel meted out in the 2019 case was not adequate. They said the decision to continue the support was another example of special treatment for Israel.

Community service is “not what would be considered appropriate punishment,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chief author of 1997 laws that the State Department is meant to enforce.

Rieser said Blinken’s justification was “not consistent with how the law was written and how it was intended to be applied.” A former State Department official said it was a “mockery.” Both officials, along with another congressional aide, were especially troubled that during the years it had taken to assess whether Israel had sufficiently punished the perpetrators, the State Department had apparently not disqualified the units from U.S. support.

A State Department spokesperson did not answer questions about Blinken’s memo but told ProPublica the agency has taken “extensive steps to implement the Leahy law for all countries that receive applicable U.S. assistance, including Israel.” The spokesperson said the agency is continuing to review reports of violations. “Israel has a moral obligation and a strategic imperative to protect civilians,” the spokesperson added.

ProPublica previously reported that a panel of internal State Department experts, known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, had sent Blinken multiple cases of violations, along with recommendations to cut units off from assistance, months ago. The recommendations were an unusual escalation after years of deferential treatment of Israel, according to people close to the forum’s activities.

Following the report three weeks ago, Blinken promised to announce his determinations “in the coming days.” At the time, several media outlets reported that the State Department was poised to sanction one of the units, Netzah Yehuda, the ultra-Orthodox military battalion that has operated in the West Bank and been accused of multiple human rights violations.

The vetting forum reviewed the unit for an incident in which commanders gagged, handcuffed and left an elderly Palestinian American man for dead. (The commanders were reprimanded and demoted but did not face prison time, according to the vetting forum’s meeting minutes.) Israel’s leaders responded by fiercely pushing back against U.S. plans to withhold American assistance from the battalion. Blinken has since delayed his decision on it, Axios reported.

Netzah Yehuda is not mentioned in Blinken’s Friday memo. In the meantime, the unit has apparently remained eligible for U.S. military assistance despite the finding that there was a violation.

“That’s an outrage and another example of special treatment for Israel,” said Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights and a former participant in the forum. The larger issue, he added, is that “there are literally dozens of Israeli security force units that have committed gross violations of human rights and remain eligible for assistance because of the State Department’s failure to apply the law.”

Blinken’s letter to Congress comes at a time of increasing tension between the U.S. and Israel. Last week, President Joe Biden withheld a shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel after the country pledged to ignore international outcry and go forward with its incursion into the southern Gazan city of Rafah. It was the first known time since Hamas’ terrorist attack that the administration has halted an arms shipment. Then, on Wednesday, Biden told CNN he would not supply bombs and shells to Israel that it can use to attack Rafah, where there are 1 million civilians sheltering.

Blinken is required to inform Congress about any State Department findings of gross human rights violations that he considered to be remediated. His memo on Friday detailed four cases he apparently decided met that standard.

In one case, a senior officer in the Israeli National Police’s Ma’avarim unit deceived and coerced six women, including some in the Israeli military, to have sex with him. Another officer serving in the West Bank’s COGAT unit forced at least two Palestinian women who were seeking permits to work in Israel to have sex with him between 2013 and 2016. Both of those officers are currently serving significant prison sentences, punishments that experts said are an adequate response from the Israeli government.

In March 2016, Elor Azaria, a medic in the Israel Defense Forces’ 92nd Shimshon Battalion, killed a 20-year-old Palestinian, Abed al-Fatah al Sharif. Al Sharif was disarmed and handcuffed on the ground after stabbing an Israeli soldier when Azaria shot and killed him. Azaria was charged and convicted with manslaughter and appealed before serving nine months in prison.

The case received enormous attention in the Israeli media, spurring debate in Israel about whether the punishment was adequate.

However, experts, including some State Department officials, say the handling of the fourth case is egregious.

In that case in 2019, an unnamed officer from the Shahar Search and Rescue Battalion, which looks for Hamas weaponry and intelligence, shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian man named Ahmed Manasra. Manasra had pulled over on his way home from a wedding to help a woman on the side of the road. The soldier also shot and wounded another driver, who the soldier assumed had been throwing stones at Israeli motorists.

The soldier reached a plea deal with military judges, who acknowledged he had “made a mistake of fact when he shot the victim,” before sentencing him to three months of community service and a three-month suspended sentence. He was also removed from the military.

The Israeli military said during court proceedings that the soldier had “wrongly assumed” that Manasra was the stone thrower and that there was a report of a possible terror attack in the area before the incident, according to The Associated Press.

The Israeli Embassy declined to comment.

“To the best of the Department of State’s knowledge, the investigation and judicial processes were credible,” Blinken noted in his memo to Congress. He determined that the Israelis “are taking effective steps to bring to justice the responsible member of the Shahar Battalion.”

Blaha, one of the former forum members, said if any other country offered such a paltry punishment, his office never would have accepted it as adequate remediation. “The whole process has been such a disappointment to me,” he said.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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From the first months that Brett Ashinoff was at Shrub Oak International School in New York, his parents felt uneasy about the residential school for students with autism.

They worried that Brett, who already was thin, was losing weight. They said his nails weren’t getting cut. He would refuse to get into the car to return to Shrub Oak after visits home, sitting for hours on the porch until his father coaxed him into the vehicle.

His parents’ concerns, documented in email exchanges with school administrators, began soon after he started in April 2022 and grew over time. Brett’s speech therapy was reduced because of limited staff. He wasn’t given his medication for at least five days in a row. “Kindly accept our sincerest apologies,” Lauren Koffler, a member of the family that operates the school, wrote in an email to Brett’s mother about the medication. She said an error with the pharmacy was responsible for the lapse.

Then came a series of confrontations with overnight staff in February 2023. Brett, his parents said, had never been physically restrained at a school before going to Shrub Oak. But employees restrained the 18-year-old, who weighed 95 pounds, at least three times one week after he became aggressive with them. One of those nights, several employees took him to a padded room and held him down on the floor. He sustained injuries, including a cut on his leg, according to emails between the school and his parents.

When Brett called his mother crying and begging to leave, Russ Ashinoff, his father, got in his car and drove two hours from his home in New Jersey to Shrub Oak, located in Westchester County.

He said he arrived to find Brett shaking, his foot purple and swollen. His nose was bruised and cut. “He was inconsolable, not himself,” Ashinoff said. He took Brett to an emergency room, where he was sedated, records show. Brett had never before needed to be sedated, his father said.

Ashinoff said he tried to report suspected abuse to several agencies in New York. The attorney general’s office took his complaint but told him it didn’t have jurisdiction and referred him to the New York State Education Department, according to the attorney general’s office. The Education Department told Ashinoff that it, too, couldn’t do anything, he said.

Ashinoff scribbled notes on the back of an envelope as he was repeatedly turned away.

“I never imagined you could have a school with a bunch of kids who are vulnerable that would be a free-for-all,” said Ashinoff, a physician. “The health department comes in and looks at every McDonald’s, but nobody is going to check out a school?”

He’s right. No state agency oversees Shrub Oak, which enrolls a range of students with autism including those whom other schools declined to serve and who have severe behavioral challenges and complex medical needs. The private, for-profit school chose not to seek approval from New York’s Education Department.

That means it has gotten no meaningful oversight and state officials have had no authority over the school — over who works there, whether money is spent properly and if the curriculum and services are appropriate for students with disabilities.

Even without New York’s approval, Shrub Oak receives public money from school districts across the country that pay tuition for the students they send there.

Brett Ashinoff, 18, lived at Shrub Oak for nine months before his parents brought him home to New Jersey. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

Shrub Oak opened in 2018 with grand promises: beautiful dorms, an indoor therapy pool, an equestrian stable, a restaurant-quality kitchen, sophisticated security, round-the-clock care and cutting-edge education for students with autism from around the world.

Some of those promises never materialized. A ProPublica investigation — based on records from school districts, court documents and interviews with nearly 30 families and just as many workers — also found accusations of possible abuse and neglect: unexplained black eyes and bruises on students’ bodies, medication mix-ups, urine-soaked mattresses and deficient staffing. Many parents and workers, armed with confidential documents and photos of student injuries, described their futile efforts to get authorities to intervene.

Shrub Oak’s leaders declined to be interviewed. In written responses to questions from ProPublica, the school said it “handles some of the most complex cases” of students who have autism and who struggle with “significant self-injurious behaviors,” aggression and property destruction.

“Our success stories are now known among parents and many of the currently enrolled students were recommended to us via word of mouth,” the school wrote in its response, provided by crisis communications specialist Richard Bamberger. He arranged interviews with four families who said the school has been a godsend for their children.

Shrub Oak is among the most expensive therapeutic boarding schools in America. Tuition for residential students is $316,400 this school year. Many students require a dedicated aide for 16 hours a day, bringing the total to $573,200. Shrub Oak currently enrolls about 85 students, ages 7 to 23, from 13 states and Puerto Rico.

Though the school touts its expertise with students who need constant care, police records detail young people swallowing aluminum foil, plexiglass, diapers and their own feces; putting their heads or fists through windows; and running away as recently as late March.

Shrub Oak serves students on the autism spectrum who might also have challenging behavioral and medical needs. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

Last year, two Shrub Oak workers were criminally charged with abusing students, though one case has been dropped. The other worker is due in court on Thursday.

Shrub Oak struggles to maintain enough workers, particularly during evenings and weekends. It doesn’t always provide the dedicated aides it guarantees, records and interviews show. And the school’s leaders also have hired employees with criminal convictions for offenses including robbery and burglary — something that would be prohibited in many students’ home districts.

The New York Education Department said it does not track how many unapproved schools operate in the state. It oversees hundreds of approved private schools, which gives them the ability to issue diplomas and take tuition money directly from New York school districts.

New York’s position is that the states sending students to Shrub Oak are responsible for them. But some states and districts have struggled to monitor students’ progress or well-being or didn’t check on them in person, the ProPublica investigation found. The failures of oversight come at a time when more young people are being diagnosed with autism and school districts and families are desperate for help educating them.

Shrub Oak said the school has been working with New York to get approved. But the state Education Department and other agencies that would need to sign off said Shrub Oak has not filed applications with them.

The school said its tuition rates are reasonable, especially given all the services it provides. It defended its hiring practices, saying it gives individuals with criminal histories a second chance as long as their misconduct didn’t involve children. Shrub Oak investigates allegations of misconduct by staff members, involves police and “fires employees involved in an issue,” the school said.

Shrub Oak said it could not comment on incidents involving individual students, citing the need for confidentiality, and asked reporters to have families sign a broad waiver provided by the school’s lawyer. ProPublica’s lawyers modified the waiver to enable the school to release information relevant to ProPublica’s questions. One former adult student and a parent of another student signed that but two did not, including the Ashinoffs. Shrub Oak still declined to address individual cases without its version of the waiver.

Koffler, a top administrator at Shrub Oak, said the school uniquely serves all types of students with autism, from those learning basic life skills to others who will go to college. “It’s a beautiful thing to be able to service the entire spectrum,” she told reporters during a tour of the school.

The Ashinoffs never took their son back to Shrub Oak. They had a friend collect his things.

Brett, at home with his parents in New Jersey, would rather jump around in his bounce house or play with his dog, Otis, than talk about the nine months he spent at Shrub Oak.

“I hate Shrub Oak,” he said, barely above a whisper. He dropped his head. “It’s kind of sad,” he said, and then decided he didn’t want to talk anymore.

Brett Ashinoff plays in his inflatable bounce house in his family’s basement in New Jersey. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

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As Michael Koffler and his family were creating Shrub Oak in 2016, they were still dealing with the fallout from a state investigation into their alleged misuse of taxpayer money for personal gain.

That October, New York authorities publicly accused Koffler and his two sons, Brian and Daniel, of using state money intended for students with disabilities at Sunshine Developmental School, a special-education preschool in New York City, to pay family members’ inflated salaries, credit card bills and boat expenses. Some state money also paid Brian Koffler’s law school tuition, and Michael Koffler claimed maintenance on his Westhampton beach home and purchases in St. Barts as business expenses, according to the investigation by the New York state comptroller, attorney general and tax commissioner.

“We won’t allow special education programs to be exploited for personal financial gain,” then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a press release.

The family and its business, K3 Learning Inc., “launched a scheme” to avoid paying millions of dollars in personal and corporate income tax and had also created a real estate company that it used to mark up rent to Sunshine, the tax commissioner said at the time.

The family did not admit any wrongdoing but agreed to pay New York $4.3 million to settle the case. Michael Koffler’s sons have paid what they owed, records show. But Koffler and his wife are delinquent. The state issued a tax warrant, and with penalties and interest the couple now owe $2.9 million. Michael, Brian and Daniel Koffler did not respond to a request for comment. The school’s spokesperson said “the tax warrant case is unrelated to Shrub Oak.”

Sunshine Developmental School in Queens is a special-education preschool. New York state officials found in 2016 that it misspent public money. Its operators developed Shrub Oak. (Alex Bandoni/ProPublica)

Six weeks after the settlement was announced, Brian Koffler applied to establish Shrub Oak International School, the family’s first boarding school, as a business in New York. Michael Koffler used K3’s business address and his company email address in financing documents to open Shrub Oak, records show.

Shrub Oak said in its responses to ProPublica that “K3 is unrelated to Shrub Oak.” But some leaders are the same; Michael Koffler is the CEO, Brian Koffler is the general counsel and a consultant. Brian Koffler’s wife, Lauren, is head of admissions, communications and client relations. In his LinkedIn profile, Michael Koffler lists himself as K3’s CEO and under his experience there mentions Shrub Oak, calling it “a crowning achievement to date.”

Shrub Oak took over the property, a former seminary on 127 acres of rolling hills in Mohegan Lake about an hour outside of New York City, in late 2017. The goal was to enroll about 400 students, and Shrub Oak’s leaders worked to create buzz about their new project. Email blasts to school district officials touted the “extraordinary personal attention” that students would get. Advertisements promoted a luxe facility with impressive amenities. A piece in Architectural Digest extolled its renovation.

Michael Koffler in 2010, left, Lauren Koffler and Brian Koffler (Michael Koffler’s image: Jason Binn/WireImage/Getty Images. Lauren Koffler’s image: Shrub Oak leadership page. Brian Koffler’s image: Sunshine Developmental School Director’s Corner page.)

While the initial idea for Shrub Oak was to be a high-end school serving autistic students as they transitioned to adult life, leaders broadened the vision to include difficult-to-place students with immense challenges. The school then made direct pitches to public school districts, navigated states’ varying rules for funding and helped families understand how they could get public money to pay the tuition.

Shrub Oak’s leaders are currently responding to another market demand as they prepare to open their next venture this summer. The Pines at Shrub Oak, a 24-bed wing within the same building as the school, will enroll autistic students who are experiencing a psychiatric crisis.

In response to inquiries from ProPublica about Shrub Oak, the school’s spokesperson arranged interviews with families who described similar traumatic experiences that led them to send their children to Shrub Oak and why they believe the school is essential.

Ed Dasso described the pain of realizing his two autistic sons couldn’t stay at their local school or in his home because of their aggressive behavior. His school district, in a suburb west of Chicago, agreed that Shrub Oak was the best option after other schools closer to home turned them down.

As he prepared for an admissions call with the school, Dasso said he thought: “If this doesn’t work out, I think I have to give up custody of the boys.” His sons, who are 16 and 18, moved to Shrub Oak about eight months ago and Dasso said he feels that they are well cared for and are experiencing new things. “They basically saved our family and saved the boys.”

Kristin Buck expressed the same gratitude. Her 13-year-old son, Teddy, interviewed for a spot at Shrub Oak from a juvenile detention center after a violent outburst landed him in custody. He had been there for six months and was terrified, she said. At Shrub Oak, Teddy gets more attention and the school has figured out what triggers difficult behavior for him, Buck said.

“There were no other schools for Teddy,” said Buck, whose family lives in the suburbs of Chicago. “Everybody turned their back on us. What instance can you think of where the police can’t help you, hospitals can’t help you, schools can’t help you?”

A few other parents, including those not provided by the school’s spokesperson, said they are aware of troubles at the school but believe their children have done well.

“I know that it’s not perfect,” said Brandy Carbery, from Bartlett in suburban Chicago. She said that she doesn’t know where her family would be without Shrub Oak, and that her 14-year-old son Alex has taken trips into the community and enjoys the school’s sensory room. But, she added, “I know that some people have issues.”

As ProPublica was reporting on Shrub Oak, some state education officials and advocates for people with disabilities were looking more closely at the school.

Massachusetts acknowledged to ProPublica that it approved Shrub Oak two years ago in violation of its own requirements. The state allowed public money to pay students’ tuition there after it failed to realize that New York had an approval process — and that Shrub Oak had not sought that approval. The Massachusetts education department discovered the error after receiving complaints about the school from at least two districts and parents. It gave the seven districts with publicly funded students at Shrub Oak until July to find other placements for them.

And last year, Disability Rights New York, the federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities in the state, launched an investigation and visited the school. DRNY said in recent court filings that it has received more than 40 complaints about the school, including students being denied medical attention and staff being discouraged from calling 911 — allegations the school said are false. The organization can release its findings publicly and sue to seek changes, but it does not have enforcement authority.

The group filed a lawsuit last month against the state Education Department after the agency denied responsibility for Shrub Oak and argued it didn’t have to provide records of any complaints. The department has cited the school’s nonapproved status as a reason for denying the records, saying it does not have responsibility for “investigating incidents of abuse or neglect, injury or death” or “any other oversight responsibility” at Shrub Oak.

Shrub Oak criticized the fairness of the investigation, saying DRNY and a similar agency in Connecticut have visited the school multiple times and requested documents and other information but have not shared their concerns, leaving the school unable to respond.

DRNY declined to comment to ProPublica. Disability Rights Connecticut would not comment except to say that the group has “information that is of great concern to us.”

There are currently about 85 students from 13 states and Puerto Rico enrolled at Shrub Oak. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

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Last October, soon after the school day ended, a Shrub Oak employee began menacing a student who was yelling, court records show. The man raised a desk over his head and threatened to throw it at the 22-year-old student from Chicago.

He also knocked on the student’s forehead with his knuckles four or five times “similar to a way a person would knock very hard on a door,” according to the sworn statement of an employee who said she witnessed the incident.

The student said, “Ouch, you are hurting me,” according to that statement, and the student at one point grabbed the right side of her stomach and cried out that she’d been hit.

The employee was fired then charged with three misdemeanors — menacing, harassment and endangering the welfare of a disabled person. He has pleaded not guilty.

A court filing describes what led to criminal charges against a former Shrub Oak worker last fall. (Obtained by ProPublica from the Yorktown Justice Court)

When the Chicago student’s mother picked up her daughter for a visit in December, she decided she wasn’t comfortable leaving her at Shrub Oak any longer. She called Chicago Public Schools and learned that Shrub Oak had not told the district that its student was the victim of the alleged abuse even though it should have, according to its contract with Shrub Oak. Chicago Public Schools confirmed the district learned of the alleged abuse of the student from her mother.

That same day, the student’s mother also called ProPublica. She and other parents spoke to reporters on the condition that their names not be used because they were afraid of retaliation by the school’s operators or feared being in the desperate position of needing to find another school and being penalized for speaking out.

“I just called Chicago Public Schools and said: ‘I’m not taking her back. This is not a safe place,’” the student’s mother told ProPublica.

Shrub Oak said it couldn’t comment about the incident or its communications with Chicago Public Schools because they are related to an individual student.

A 22-year-old student attended Shrub Oak until late last year when her family brought her home to Chicago. (Taylor Glascock, special to ProPublica)

The October incident was one of the more than 150 times that the local police responded to calls about the school since 2019 — from employees reporting student injuries to parents asking for well-being checks on their children.

In at least four other incidents involving suspected abuse, Shrub Oak told police that it had fired employees, records show. The school fired an employee in 2022 who was seen shoving a student “to the floor multiple times.” It fired another employee in November 2023 after a co-worker saw him hit a student in the head and chest and slam him to the floor.

In February of last year, Shrub Oak also fired a worker who reportedly punched two students in the stomach at night in their bedrooms. The school told police about the incident three days later. An employee who witnessed the incident told police he saw the worker punch both students and then justify it, saying, “Sometimes you have to (motioned punching) to get them to do what they have to do,” according to court records.

Listen to a 911 Call Related to the November 2023 Incident A security guard alerts authorities to the incident. (Yorktown Police Department. Edited by ProPublica for clarity and to preserve anonymity.)

The employee in the February incident was arrested, but the Westchester County district attorney’s office said it dismissed the case because of issues with gathering sufficient evidence within the required time frame for criminal cases.

The school told ProPublica that it calls the police to be transparent and impartial, and that some students make false allegations or call 911 as “negative attention-seeking behavior.”

Underlying many of the problems at Shrub Oak are staffing shortages, according to records and interviews. An internal email shows that one night, a “skeleton staff” was stretched too thin to attend to students’ hygiene. Employees provided ProPublica schedules that showed multiple students assigned to one worker even though the students required individual aides and the districts were paying for them.

Shrub Oak acknowledged the challenge of operating round-the-clock, but its spokesperson said that its staff of 400 is adequate and that the school “determines staffing levels based on student needs and contract parameters.” The school said that some students have advanced to where they can work without individual aides and that it passes any savings onto the districts.

James Roddy, a former Shrub Oak student, said the school sometimes was so short on staff “they’d literally ask other kids to watch over them.” He and another student ran away from the school one evening in January 2022 and spent the night hiding inside a Home Depot, police records show.

James Roddy, 18, is a former Shrub Oak student who lives in Utah. (Kim Raff for ProPublica)

Despite being a school that pledges to help students with intense behavioral challenges, Shrub Oak has only one certified behavioral therapist, employees and parents told ProPublica. Shrub Oak would not confirm the number.

“You send your kid to a residential school because you can’t handle all the things they need,” said the mother of one current student. “So they go to a school where they will have a team of experts, and you trust that the school will provide that. They are not providing that.”

A current employee described his concern over a student who was isolated in his bedroom as punishment. Like the Ashinoffs, he found he had nowhere to turn. He tried the state Education Department and the Justice Center, which investigates allegations that students with disabilities have been abused or neglected. He said both agencies told him they had no authority over unapproved schools.

“It broke my heart,” the employee said. “Who is watching out for these students?”

A note from Shrub Oak’s staff messaging system describes a student’s condition. (Obtained by ProPublica. Redactions by ProPublica.)

Other workers and parents expressed their alarm at failures to address students’ basic needs: medicine, hygiene and food.

“I had a student almost die because he had a seizure and almost stopped breathing. They had stopped giving him medicine,” said a former behavior specialist at the school. Police records and emails describe students taking the wrong medication or none at all. Shrub Oak told ProPublica that it has changed its medication practices.

Several parents also said their children uncharacteristically began urinating and defecating in their rooms because they were locked out of bathrooms overnight. Shrub Oak said some students have conditions that lead them to soil themselves — sometimes intentionally — and that staff are always available to let students in the locked bathrooms.

A student eats his takeout meal at Shrub Oak. (Obtained by ProPublica from the family)

And for years, Shrub Oak leaders have been telling parents that a “restaurant-quality kitchen” would be finished “by year end” or in a few months, records show.

Instead, the food mostly comes from a nearby deli, though the school says Shrub Oak’s chef and nutritionist “are beyond compare.” (The therapy pool and equestrian stable also have not been built.) Shrub Oak told ProPublica on April 12 that the kitchen is slated to open “within days,” pending completion of electrical work. As of Tuesday, the kitchen still was not open.

“The promise of this place was magic,” one mother from California said. She pulled her son from Shrub Oak last year and sent him to an approved residential school for autistic students.

“Why they’re even allowed to have a school, I have no idea,” she said.

A wing of the Shrub Oak campus is being renovated to include more dorm rooms. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

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Help ProPublica Report on Education

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

It was 2022 when pediatrician Tom Herr realized just how many babies on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota were already infected with syphilis when they took their first breaths. He was seeing more and more patients who’d spent their first weeks in a tangle of tubes that pumped antibiotics into their tiny bodies. Some had died in the womb.

With growing alarm, Herr and other health officials spread the word, appealing to bosses at the federal Indian Health Service and tribal health authorities, writing op-eds and talking to reporters. But as the months ticked by, the crisis mounted.

By 2023, an astonishing 3% of all Native American babies born in South Dakota were infected.

Now, according to tribal leaders, the syphilis rate among American Indians and Alaska Natives in the Great Plains surpasses any recorded rate in the United States since 1941, when it was discovered that penicillin could treat the infection.

On a map of rising syphilis cases nationwide, some reservations stand out like a red alert.

Desperate for help, in late February of this year tribal leaders from four Great Plains states took the extreme step of asking U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to declare a public health emergency. The Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board asked the secretary to deploy commissioned officers from the U.S. Public Health Service to help diagnose and treat people for syphilis, and to provide emergency funding for the tribes to improve their response capabilities.

More than 10 weeks later, Becerra has not responded.

“We need to free up resources so we can take extraordinary measures to respond to these extraordinary circumstances,” said Meghan Curry O’Connell, chief public health officer for the tribal health board.

Syphilis, which is transmitted primarily through sexual intercourse, is easily treatable. But the disease is life-threatening when left unchecked. Babies infected in the womb can be born in excruciating pain, with deformed bones, brain damage or other serious complications. They can even die.

The emergency declaration may be the only way to get money in time to prevent more babies from getting sick or dying. The typical funding processes — which go through the federal budget or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — can lead to a delay of a year or more before money trickles down to communities.

In response to questions from ProPublica about why Becerra hasn’t replied to the emergency request, an HHS spokesperson wrote that “HHS has received the request and will respond directly” to the Great Plains tribes, but did not provide a time frame for doing so.

ProPublica also sent questions about the outbreak to Dr. Natalie Holt, chief medical officer for the Indian Health Service’s Great Plains office. In response, IHS provided written answers from both Holt and HHS.

The rise of syphilis cases among Native American communities, particularly in some Great Plains states, is “especially concerning,” Holt said. She said that Great Plains IHS is working with the South Dakota Department of Health and tribal partners to “maximize syphilis case identification, contract tracing and treatment efforts.”

HHS wrote that it was “taking action to slow the spread with a focus on those most significantly impacted,” noting that it had held a workshop for tribes and created a national task force to “leverage federal resources.” It also pointed to guidelines IHS had released in October 2023 about how to respond to the outbreak.

Syphilis has been on the rise nationwide for a decade, and the country has repeatedly run low on penicillin, the medicine used to cure it. But amid a shortage of health care providers and money the disease was spreading faster on reservations.

Because syphilis is treatable and can be so devastating to a baby, even one case of an infected infant is a sign that a health system is failing.

Alarms about health care in the area have been ringing for years, in large part due to neglect from various arms of the federal government, including chronic underfunding from Congress for the health care system for Native Americans.

Now, the silence from HHS is threatening to perpetuate what health workers say is a preventable outbreak that endangers the lives of children.

“The more you delay, the harder it is to contain. More people infected, more infant deaths,” O’Connell said.

The U.S. government is obligated to provide health care to many tribes, including several in the Great Plains, under a variety of treaties. It does so largely through the Indian Health Service, a series of clinics and hospitals on reservations and in cities primarily in the western United States.

Unlike other major health programs like Medicare, IHS funding is determined by a congressional vote each year. It has always fallen far short of the $50 billion tribes say is needed. The IHS spends a little over one-third of what the Veterans Health Administration spends per patient and half of what the government spends on health care for federal prisoners, according to the most recent data available.

When infectious diseases inevitably arrive, as they do in every community, the Indian Health Service is often ill equipped to respond, according to current and former employees. Those existing shortfalls have made the syphilis outbreak even more challenging.

Holt, the chief medical officer at IHS Great Plains, wrote, “Public health initiatives are chronically underfunded.” Responding to infectious diseases requires “substantial ‘boots-on-the-ground,’” she said, noting that the U.S. is experiencing a national health care staff shortage, including a dearth of nurses, providers and other support personnel.

At the end of 2020, HHS released a national strategic plan to tackle sexually transmitted infections, including syphilis. The report noted concerning rates of syphilis in Native American babies across the country, which by then were already three times higher than in the population as a whole. Officials set a goal to bring the rate down by more than 15% by 2025.

Instead, over the next two years, the rate of syphilis among Indigenous people in the Great Plains soared by 1,865%. Around 80% of the cases in South Dakota in recent years have been among Native people, who represent less than 10% of the state population.

At Rosebud, Herr started spending his weekends at work, poring over patient charts. He made a list, tracking those who had tested positive but gone untreated. He shared the list with colleagues and tried to figure out how to get people their penicillin.

“We just did this with COVID,” he thought. “We know what to do.”

Herr set up an alert in the electronic medical record system to flag patients who needed treatment. On the walls of reservation hospitals and clinics, staff hung colorful posters featuring pregnant bellies, encouraging people to get tested.

The more you delay, the harder it is to contain. More people infected, more infant deaths.

—Meghan Curry O’Connell, chief public health officer for the tribal health board

Nurses held a few testing events in the community, diagnosing several people. The tribal health board held testing events in Rapid City.

Other Native American reservations were struggling as well. Jessica Leston, then a director for the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, was tracking infectious disease data throughout the West when she noticed a cluster of new syphilis cases at a reservation in Montana. In a community of under 10,000 people, a dozen patients had been diagnosed in one week. She alerted colleagues at Indian Health Service headquarters, and they learned that three of the cases were stillborn babies.

The Montana outbreak was detailed in the Indian Health Service’s budget justification to Congress last year. In 2023, the president’s budget proposal called for $9.3 billion for IHS, a modest increase from the previous year, with additional increases over the next decade. Congress approved $6.9 billion for the system that serves 2.6 million people.

“People always say we care about babies,” Leston said. “Now we aren’t even caring about babies.”

Last year, the tribal health board called in the CDC through a program that deploys the agency’s experts for one to three weeks during outbreaks. CDC staff concluded, as Vox reported last year, that there isn’t enough prenatal care in the area and that patients lack transportation to the few available clinics. CDC disease investigators provided care to 14 people during their visit, noting that all but one would have gone untreated without their help.

The CDC recommended that tribes test and treat people outside of clinics, transport patients to appointments and hire additional workers to find the sexual partners of those who’ve tested positive so that they can be treated as well. The officials also suggested the tribes consider the use of rapid tests, which can return results in time for a patient to be treated before they leave the clinic.

All of those suggestions are nearly impossible to implement, tribal health officials told ProPublica.

Prenatal care used to be more readily available at the Indian Health Service facilities across the Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Cheyenne River reservations, which span nearly 5 million acres, an area approximately the size of New Jersey.

Over the last two years, many staff left and weren’t replaced. Across the three reservations, only Pine Ridge had an obstetrician for much of the last year, according to several people with direct knowledge of the situation. Holt said that the IHS is working to hire more providers and that there is now an additional part-time obstetrician at Pine Ridge and another working two days a week at Cheyenne River.

People with any kind of pregnancy risk factor — including a patient over 34 and another with high blood pressure — have said they were told to drive up to three hours to Rapid City.

Tribal health officials lack the staff or money for mobile clinics and more testing events to find new cases.

They also struggle to track existing cases because three states and the Indian Health Service have refused to share contact information for patients who test positive. South Dakota recently began sharing this crucial information with the tribal health board, but the Indian Health Service and Iowa, North Dakota and Nebraska still do not. Health departments in Iowa, North Dakota and Nebraska did not respond to questions about data sharing.

As for the rapid tests, the Indian Health Service nationally recommends their use. But current and former staff in South Dakota said that area managers have denied their requests for these tests. Instead, providers said, they must use a test that has to be sent out to a lab and wait three to seven days for results. By that time, it can be hard to locate patients for treatment.

Holt said that the IHS “supports data sharing in the interest of improving population health” and that tribes must follow an established policy to request and receive the data. Regarding rapid tests, she wrote that the Great Plains IHS prefers to do the lab-based testing because “we feel this approach improves speedy access to treatment.”

The CDC also urged the tribes to research how punitive policies stop people from seeking medical care. In South Dakota and on several reservations, a pregnant person with illegal substances in their system can be charged with a felony. And providers are required to contact child protective services if they know a person has used drugs during pregnancy. Doctors described patients being screened for drug use at hospitals, with or without their consent, and then taken to jail. People in the area know this risk and sometimes avoid medical visits as a result, women and providers said.

The South Dakota tribes and state officials have shown no indication they are considering changing these policies.

Immediately after the CDC visit last summer, the tribes put in a formal request to the agency for more help. A few CDC staffers returned to the area in April to help find and treat patients who have tested positive. It’s an important step, O’Connell said. But given how far syphilis has reached into the community, a few days of help at few reservations is not enough to stop babies from dying.

The tribes also worry about the damage that’s already been done. In addition to asking for help preventing new infections, leaders asked for a longer-term plan to make sure that children born with syphilis get the care they need in years to come.

Herr remains haunted by one patient file from Rosebud. It belongs to a young woman who came to the hospital in labor and delivered a stillborn baby. A week later, when the patient was long gone, test results came back showing she had syphilis.

Hospital staff tried a few times to follow up to no avail. The woman returned to the hospital months later, this time in the midst of a miscarriage. Based on her medical records, Herr believes she lost both pregnancies due to untreated syphilis.

When Herr retired from IHS in January of this year, the woman still hadn’t been treated.

We plan to continue reporting on Native American health care and are looking for experts and sources. Help us make sure our journalism is responsible and focused on the right issues. We’d especially like to hear from tribal members about their experiences, along with employees of the Indian Health Service, and tribal leaders and elders. If this is you, please fill out the form below or reach out to reporter Anna Barry-Jester at anna.barryjester@propublica.org.

by ProPublica

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ProPublica won the prestigious public service Pulitzer Prize for what the judges described as “groundbreaking and ambitious reporting that pierced the thick wall of secrecy surrounding the Supreme Court to reveal how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel, pushing the Court to adopt its first code of conduct.” The prize is given to the staff of a news organization that performed “meritorious public service.” It is the seventh Pulitzer Prize for ProPublica.

The Pulitzer Board also recognized a collaboration between The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE as a finalist in the explanatory reporting category. The investigation provided a detailed analysis of the deeply flawed law enforcement response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The designation is ProPublica’s 17th Pulitzer finalist in 16 years.

ProPublica’s “Friends of the Court” series uncovered the biggest ethics scandal to hit the Supreme Court in the modern era. Reporters Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski, Brett Murphy and Kirsten Berg pierced decades of judicial secrecy and uncovered major gifts to justices from a small set of politically influential donors.

Senior editor Jesse Eisinger, left, and Murphy, Mierjeski, Elliott, Berg and Kaplan (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

The series began a national conversation about ethics and judicial reform of the Supreme Court. In response to ProPublica’s reporting, the court announced in November that it had unanimously adopted the first ethics code in its 234-year history. Justice Clarence Thomas for the first time acknowledged that he should have reported selling real estate to billionaire Harlan Crow in 2014, writing in his annual financial disclosure form that he “inadvertently failed to realize” that the deal needed to be disclosed. Thomas also disclosed receiving three private jet trips from Crow, two of which ProPublica had already reported. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted to authorize subpoenas of Crow and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo as part of its ongoing effort to investigate ethics lapses by justices.

In the series honored as a Pulitzer finalist in explanatory reporting, the Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE used a trove of unreleased investigative files to produce a startling and exhaustive investigation of the Uvalde shooting, which included a documentary. It revealed what no one else had: States across the country are providing devastatingly insufficient training for law enforcement to confront a mass shooter, leaving critical and long-overlooked gaps in preparedness between children and the officers expected to protect them. The series involved the work of Lomi Kriel, Lexi Churchill, Perla Trevizo and Jessica Priest for ProPublica and the Tribune; Jinitzail Hernández and Zach Despart for the Tribune; and Juanita Ceballos, Michelle Mizner and Lauren Prestileo for FRONTLINE.

After the news investigation, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled the findings of a federal probe into the response. Garland pointed to missteps that led to delays in confronting the shooter. Then he turned to what he said was the biggest failure, one that required the most urgent action to avoid another colossal breakdown such as the one that cost lives that day: the lack of sufficient active shooter training for law enforcement. Garland’s comments validated the investigation’s finding that there is an astounding dearth of such instruction around the country.

ProPublica received Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting in 2020, feature writing in 2019, public service in 2017, explanatory reporting in 2016, national reporting in 2011 and investigative reporting in 2010. Local Reporting Network partner Anchorage Daily News won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2020.

by Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story was produced in partnership with Capital & Main and Gray Television/InvestigateTV.

The first sign of trouble bubbled up from gopher holes a stone’s throw from Stan Ledgerwood’s front door. The salt water left an oily sheen on the soil and a swath of dead grass in the yard.

It was June 2017, and Ledgerwood and his wife, Tina, had recently built a home on the family farm, 230 acres of green amidst the rolling hills and long horizons of south-central Oklahoma. There they planned to spend their retirement, close to Stan’s parents on land that has been in the family since 1920.

The view from the porch took in Stan’s parents’ house, two rows of pecan trees his great-grandfather had planted in the 1930s, and the forest shielding the Washita River, a muddy brown ribbon flowing along the southern edge of the farm. The nearest town, Maysville, has a population of 1,087.

“The only people who come down our road are either lost or the mailman,” said Stan, a husky man with a biting sense of humor.

Stan and Tina Ledgerwood in the family’s pecan grove (Mark Olalde/ProPublica)

Also visible from the porch was metal piping in a red-gated enclosure: an aging oil well.

Like many property owners in this rural farming community, the Ledgerwoods own their land but only a meager percentage of the oil beneath it. Pump jacks nod up and down in nearby fields of soybeans and alfalfa.

Stan’s 84-year-old parents, Don and Shirley Ledgerwood, have watched oil companies drill multiple wells on their farm, where the family had grown crops and run cattle. The family received small royalty payments from the oil production. And decades later, they had to allow a wastewater pipe to cross the farm when another company, Southcreek Petroleum Co. LLC, redrilled the well behind the red gate. The well, which plunged about 9,000 feet into the earth, was repurposed to inject salt water into the geologic formation and push any remaining oil up to other wells.

A new production boom never materialized for Southcreek in this slice of Garvin County, and the family didn’t hear much from the oil company.

“When they were through here,” Don said, “we thought we were finished with the oil business.”

But then a corroded valve malfunctioned underground, injecting brine into the soil, according to a report by a Southcreek contractor.

After salt water leaked from an oil well on the Ledgerwoods’ farm, fouling part of their land and their drinking water, the family struggled for years to hold oil companies accountable. (Jason Crow/InvestigateTV+)

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A few days after the release was discovered in June 2017, Stan met with Southcreek and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulatory agency. At the meeting, the company characterized the incident as a “small spill,” the Ledgerwoods later alleged in court. It was unclear how long the leak lasted, but the saltwater plume had already saturated the soil and killed 2 acres of vegetation by the time it broke the surface, according to state oil regulators.

Samples analyzed a month later by Oklahoma State University found that the soil’s concentration of chloride, which occurs in the type of salt water injected into the well, had risen to more than 12 times the state’s acceptable level and was “sufficiently high to reduce yield of even salt tolerant crops.”

Other tests showed that chloride levels in the family’s water well had spiked to more than five times what the Environmental Protection Agency deems safe. The tests didn’t look for other contaminants like heavy metals that are often left behind by the oil production process.

Watch “Drilled and Drained”

The Ledgerwoods entered a grim limbo, wondering what toxins might be in the cloudy water coming from their faucets and waiting for someone to address the problem.

They experienced firsthand the policy failures that have allowed the oil and gas industry to reap profits without ensuring there will be money to clean up drill sites when the wells run dry and the drillers flee. A recent ProPublica and Capital and Main investigation found a shortfall of about $150 billion between funds set aside to plug wells in major oil-producing states and the true cost of doing so. When the Ledgerwoods later sought to hold the drillers accountable, the family learned how easily oil companies can use bankruptcy to leave their mess to landowners.

Don began traveling 30 miles round-trip to Walmart to buy bottled water. Stan and Tina’s steel pots rusted after being washed, and their 2-year-old great-niece’s skin became irritated and inflamed after repeatedly washing her hands while they potty-trained her. In a text message, the girl’s mother described her hands as looking like they had “a burn.”

After an oil well leaked salt water just outside her front door, Tina Ledgerwood wondered what else was in the water flowing from her taps. (Mark Olalde/ProPublica)

Southcreek did not respond to ProPublica and Capital & Main’s requests for comment. In court, the company denied calling the release “small” and argued that the groundwater contamination was contained to the two impacted acres the state identified.

The Ledgerwoods watched in horror as the farm that represented their past and their hope for the future languished. Somehow it had to be fixed, they believed. The rest of the family had also considered retiring to the farm, said Steve Ledgerwood, Stan’s brother and a lawyer in nearby Norman, but that plan was going up in smoke.

“We’ve gone out and made our living and done what we were supposed to do, and we wanted to have a relaxed, peaceful life,” Steve said. “And it has been anything but that.”

“Our Only Source of Fresh Water”

The Ledgerwoods and other farmers in Garvin and McClain counties started worrying the moment the oil industry returned in 2012.

Southcreek and other oil companies wanted to resume extraction from the oil field underlying Maysville. But the reservoir was old, so they proposed flooding it with water to force the oil to the surface. Don Ledgerwood and other local farmers signed a petition beseeching the Corporation Commission to reject the companies’ plans.

“This aquifer is our only source of fresh water for our homes, families and livestock,” the farmers wrote. “We fear that any error in development and production could lead to devastating contamination to this critical freshwater supply.”

Cows graze in a pasture in Garvin County, Oklahoma, where farmers tried and failed to block renewed activity from oil companies over fears of water pollution. (Jason Crow/InvestigateTV+)

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As is common in American oil fields, property rights in this part of Oklahoma often create split estates, where one person owns the land while another owns the underlying minerals, such as oil and gas. The owner of the minerals has a right to drill, even if the landowner would prefer they didn’t.

The farmers didn’t sway the Corporation Commission, and in 2014, Southcreek redrilled the well on the Ledgerwoods’ land. The company was small but produced about $4 million worth of oil and gas from the area, adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis of Oklahoma Tax Commission data.

State regulators are supposed to minimize the risks that accompany oil and gas production, including by mandating that drillers plug old wells to prevent them from leaking greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or leaching toxic chemicals into the land and water.

In theory, cleanup is guaranteed by financial instruments called bonds that companies fund and that regulators can put toward the cost of retiring wells if drillers go bankrupt or walk away. Sufficient bonding creates an incentive for companies to plug their own wells: Once the work is completed, the company gets its bond back. But when bonding requirements are lax, there’s little to deter drillers from forfeiting their bonds and leaving their wells as “orphans.”

Oklahoma allows companies to cover an unlimited number of wells with a single $25,000 bond. Alternatively, companies can satisfy bonding requirements by proving they are worth at least $50,000, in which case they often do not have to set aside any real money in bonds. Corporation Commission spokesperson Matt Skinner said the agency was unable to find a single case where the state recouped enough money to plug a well from companies that relied solely on the latter option.

To cover all of its roughly 30 wells, Southcreek held a $25,000 bond and filed paperwork to show it was worth at least $50,000. (Different agencies disagree on how many wells Southcreek operated.)

The well that spoiled the Ledgerwoods’ drinking water is one of the 18,500 that the Corporation Commission classifies as orphaned. “We would not be surprised to see that number go higher,” Skinner said. State taxpayers will ultimately be on the hook to plug many of them, or the state can leave the wells unplugged, but many will continue leaking.

A state contractor plugs an orphan Southcreek Petroleum Co. LLC oil well on a farm across the road from the Ledgerwoods’ property. (Mark Olalde/ProPublica)

Some orphan well cleanup in Oklahoma is funded by a voluntary 0.1% fee paid by industry on the sale of oil and natural gas. The Oklahoma Energy Resources Board spent $156 million of the funds collected from this fee over the past three decades. The state has an additional orphan well fund with several million dollars in it.

But Oklahoma has more than 260,000 unplugged wells — behind only Texas — according to data from energy industry software firm Enverus. To plug and clean up the state’s wells could cost approximately $7.3 billion, according to an analysis of state records. Oklahoma has just $45 million in bonds.

The oil industry’s bonds are “shockingly inadequate,” said Peter Morgan, a Sierra Club senior attorney. “It’s clear that abandoning wells and leaving communities and taxpayers to foot the bill to clean them up is baked into the oil and gas industry business model.”

At the Capitol in Oklahoma City, which features repurposed oil derricks outside its main entrance, Republican state Rep. Brad Boles has tried for several years to address the shortfall. This year, he introduced a bill to create a tiered bonding system based on the number of wells a company operates, increasing the highest required bond to $150,000.

A monument to oil stands outside the Oklahoma Capitol. (Mark Olalde/ProPublica)

“We have a huge liability in our state that we’re trying to get better control of,” he said, acknowledging that his bill would only be a partial solution. “It’s a lot better than it was, but it’s nowhere near where we need to be.”

The Oklahoma House of Representatives and a Senate committee both passed it unanimously, but the bill didn’t receive a vote on the Senate floor. Boles pledged to run a similar bill next session.

“They’re Doing You a Favor If They Clean Up”

Shortly after the 2017 brine release, Southcreek began cleaning up with funds from an insurance policy. Fox Hollow Consultants Inc., an environmental consulting firm working with Southcreek, warned in a report that “the remediation of ground water impacted by saltwater is at best a difficult undertaking, costly, and often not effective.”

A stream of trucks rumbled down the Ledgerwoods’ once-quiet gravel road as workers removed enough dirt to fill 750 dump trucks and pumped more than 71,000 gallons from the Ledgerwoods’ water well.

Workers remove contaminated soil from the Ledgerwoods’ farm after the 2017 saltwater release. (Courtesy of Stan Ledgerwood)

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But the dangerous concentrations of chloride didn’t change, according to Fox Hollow’s report.

A family who leased the Ledgerwoods’ farmland decided not to plant a crop and removed their cattle.

Nearly two years after the spill was discovered, the company drilled new water wells next to each house, but questions about the safety of drinking the water persisted. Southcreek eventually halted its cleanup, and the Corporation Commission deemed the incident resolved.

“It’s your own property, but you’re made to feel like they’re doing you a favor if they clean up their pollution,” Stan Ledgerwood said.

The Ledgerwoods considered moving. A nearby farm was for sale. Although it was half the acreage with only one house, the water was clean and they could distance themselves from the debacle on their farm. So they held an auction for their farm in June 2019.

Their property had been appraised to be worth around $1 million before the spill. They feared bids would be low — they had disclosed the water issues to potential buyers — yet the offers from the auction were shocking, with bids for the whole farm coming in at $450,000.

Potential buyers’ “first question was about the water, and I couldn’t say it was safe,” Stan said.

Still, the Ledgerwoods needed to pay their attorneys, so they sold nearly all the land, about 200 acres, including the fields that earned them income. The family kept the two houses, with the injection well sitting in the field between them.

The same week as the auction, the Ledgerwoods sued Southcreek. The family’s lawsuit also named as defendants Wise Oil & Gas No. 10 Ltd. and Newkumet Exploration Inc. — which each owned an interest in the oil Southcreek was pumping — as well as the companies that manufactured and sold the well’s corroded valve. The family sought reimbursement for expenses related to the spill, monetary damages and an order that the oil companies finish removing the contaminated soil and water.

In court, Newkumet denied responsibility because it did not operate the well, while the other companies argued that the failed valve was not defective.

On a recent, unseasonably warm winter day, with a mackerel sky hanging over the property, Stan and Tina Ledgerwood talked about what brought them back to the farm. Stan had worked for three decades at the Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, a nonprofit utility, while Tina held an administrative role at the University of Oklahoma, and they looked forward to a peaceful retirement.

“There’s a draw to the beauty here,” Tina said.

Stan and Tina Ledgerwood at the failed injection well (Mark Olalde/ProPublica)

There were also family memories stretching back a century. Tina recalled taking her niece to camp along the Washita, where sandbars interrupt the river’s meandering flow and willows grow on the red dirt banks.

Her niece still talked about eating the best hamburger of her life on one of those excursions, Tina said with a laugh. “It’s frustrating,” she added, her tone shifting, “because you look out there and it’s not yours anymore.”

An Escape Hatch

Progress in the lawsuit was short-lived. In November 2019, shortly after the Ledgerwoods’ attorney sent discovery requests to Wise Oil & Gas, the company filed in a Texas court for voluntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy — a full liquidation of its assets.

Company executives acknowledged they declared bankruptcy to avoid legal fees associated with the Ledgerwoods’ suit, according to court records.

Bankruptcy court has become an easy escape hatch for the industry to shed its costly obligations. More than 250 oil and gas companies in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, bringing about $175 billion in debt with them, according to research from law firm Haynes and Boone. (Haynes and Boone is representing ProPublica in several Texas lawsuits.)

Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said it is “outrageous” that oil executives can pay themselves handsomely before offloading liabilities via bankruptcy. He is preparing a Senate bill to amend the Bankruptcy Code to address this pattern in the oil industry.

“They privatize the profits, and then they dump the costs on the taxpayer, which is an outrageous arrangement that needs to end," Merkley said, adding that “this is not just one company in one place. This is a practice that has been exquisitely developed by the industry.”

Josh Macey, a University of Chicago law professor who studies bankruptcy, said that “one of the most significant benefits you get when you file for bankruptcy protection is the automatic stay,” which puts other cases on hold while the bankruptcy is ongoing.

The Wise Oil & Gas bankruptcy halted the Ledgerwoods’ suit.

So the Ledgerwoods ventured into labyrinthian bankruptcy court proceedings as creditors. But the bankruptcy filings for Wise Oil & Gas — which owned a 20% stake in the oil underlying the Ledgerwood farm — listed between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities against less than $33,000 in assets.

While Wise Oil & Gas appeared to be underwater, financial and legal documents showed that the company was one node in a sprawling business empire run by the wealthy Cocanougher family of North Texas.

Alongside their extended family, brothers Daniel and Robert Cocanougher own the web of businesses that included real estate holdings, golf courses, trash services, charitable organizations and more. A company representative estimated in court that the family controlled more than 100 companies. The entire operation was managed by Cocanougher Asset Management #1 LLC out of an office in North Richland Hills, Texas, near Fort Worth.

Wise Oil & Gas was kept afloat by more than 30 loans from other Cocanougher companies, chiefly Wise Resources Ltd., which shared an office with the oil company, according to records filed in court. The loans ensured the oil company had enough cash to operate, but it otherwise hovered around insolvency. Wise Oil & Gas periodically held less than $0 in its account, internal records revealed in court show.

The Ledgerwoods would never see any money from the Cocanoughers’ businesses.

“A Pretty Ordinary Situation”

In bankruptcy, secured creditors, whose debt is backed by collateral, are first in line to claim proceeds from the liquidating company’s assets. Unsecured creditors — such as the Ledgerwoods — are paid if there are funds left over. Even further back in line are environmental claims, such as money to plug wells.

One secured claim stood out: $1.9 million for Wise Resources. According to legal filings, a few months before declaring bankruptcy, Wise Oil & Gas had consolidated its “outstanding obligations” and transferred them to Wise Resources, although the deal was backdated to the previous year.

During one deposition, Jamie Downing, a lawyer for the Cocanoughers, went back and forth with Steve Ledgerwood, who occasionally represented his family, over whether Robert Cocanougher was “two different people” when he signed documents for Wise Oil & Gas and for Wise Resources.

“Robert Cocanougher is signing documents in his capacity as general partner of one entity or the manager of another entity,” Downing said. “They would not be the same person.”

Even though the Cocanoughers were wealthy, the layers of corporate entities between the family and the oil limited their liability for the saltwater spill. It is difficult to “pierce the corporate veil” and tie a company’s actions to individuals, so executives finding protection in bankruptcy is “a pretty ordinary situation,” Macey explained. “We’ve gone too far in shielding investors from the cost of corporate misconduct.”

Daniel and Robert Cocanougher and company attorneys did not respond to requests for comment. In court filings, the family and its companies argued that they were not responsible for the brine release and were within their rights to file for bankruptcy protection.

The Ledgerwoods soon realized the bankruptcy case would lead to neither the cleanup of their farm nor Wise Oil & Gas paying for the damage, so they filed a motion to dismiss it, sanction the Cocanoughers and force the company back into their Oklahoma lawsuit.

Southcreek tanks that formerly collected contaminated liquid near the Ledgerwoods’ farm are now leaking. (Jason Crow/InvestigateTV+)

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The judge overseeing the case was Mark X. Mullin, a former corporate bankruptcy attorney himself. At first, he acknowledged the Ledgerwoods’ plight. “To be clear, the court has a lot of empathy for what happened to the Ledgerwoods,” he said during an August 2021 hearing.

But two months later, Mullin ruled against the Ledgerwoods. He disagreed that Wise Oil & Gas had entered bankruptcy to shed bad investments and dodge cleanup obligations. He blasted the Ledgerwoods for requesting sanctions against the Cocanoughers.

“Merely because the Ledgerwood Creditors have been damaged by the saltwater contamination, this does not provide them with an unfettered right to retaliate or lash out against unrelated and far-removed targets, such as the Cocanougher Sanction Targets,” Mullin wrote.

If the Ledgerwoods wanted to continue seeking damages against the Cocanoughers and their businesses, they would have to pay the oil company’s attorneys’ fees, about $107,000, Mullin ruled.

Mullin declined to comment.

In September 2022, the trustee overseeing Wise’s liquidation reported that, after paying administrative fees, the company had no money for creditors. The Ledgerwoods withdrew their claim.

“I Can’t Afford to Come In and Clean It Up”

The Ledgerwoods weren’t the only ones taking a financial hit. Southcreek, the well’s operator, also entered bankruptcy protection and began offloading its wells. Cleaning them all up could cost taxpayers nearly $1 million, based on the Corporation Commission’s average cost to plug a well.

Even before the company liquidated, Southcreek executive Gus Lovelace admitted to the state that the company had stopped maintaining its wells, according to Corporation Commission records.

The company left some wells to the state as orphans, including the injection well that fouled the Ledgerwoods’ land. Some ended up in the hands of other oil companies, although those, too, appear to be on the verge of becoming wards of the state.

Michael Brooks, a neighbor of the Ledgerwoods, lives on a farm that his father-in-law worked before him — they’ve put in more than 50 years between the two generations. On a recent winter morning, Brooks showed ProPublica and Capital & Main a 3-acre drill site that scars his land and provides him no royalties.

The plot would be Bermuda grass pasture for cattle, but the paddock instead hosts two inactive oil wells and huge tanks that the Ledgerwoods believe held the salt water that fouled their land. Brooks has to retrieve cows that slip through the barbed wire fence around the site and chew the wells’ rusting metal and drink wastewater.

“I’m at a complete loss,” he said from beneath the brim of a hat embroidered with the logo of an oil and gas pipeline company. “I can’t afford to come in and clean it up. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

Brooks has for years tried to reach the companies that own the wells, calling phone numbers on the signs posted around them. No one ever answered or called back, he said.

ProPublica and Capital & Main’s attempts to contact the owners were also fruitless. Court records indicate several of the Southcreek wells on Brooks’ farm and other nearby properties were sold out of bankruptcy. But the first company that purchased them is not a registered oil operator in Oklahoma, and the Corporation Commission has no record of the business taking them over.

The idle wells were then transferred to another oil company, but, when asked about that transfer, Corporation Commission staff said they had made a mistake in approving it and would try to revoke it. The best Brooks can now hope for is the state declaring that the wells are orphaned and plugging them.

“It’s just so frustrating because it’s just here. We look at it every day outside our windows,” Brooks said, adding, “It’s been nothing but a pain.”

“We’ll Never Have Back What We Had”

Nearly seven years after brine first poured from gopher holes on the Ledgerwood farm, most of the land has been sold. But the well is still there, rusting behind a curtain of dry weeds.

“We don’t get these years back,” Stan Ledgerwood said. “There’s no way to pay for that. We’ll never have back what we had.”

Stan and Tina drink from their new water well. But Don and Shirley Ledgerwood, Stan’s parents, don’t trust the water that flows from their faucets, as their house sits at a lower elevation than the injection well and water tests have shown occasional increases in the salt concentration.

Don Ledgerwood hauls clean water from a well at his son and daughter-in-law’s home. (Mark Olalde/ProPublica)

Don’s back is slightly hunched, but his sprightliness belies his 84 years. He still cuts the expanse of grass surrounding his old brick house, and Stan long ago gave up asking to do it for him. “He doesn’t do it right,” Don said, as he filled 5-gallon blue plastic jugs with water from Stan’s well. In one form or another, Don has been hauling water for six years.

As he hoisted the jugs into his off-road vehicle, Don lamented that landowners have to allow oil companies to drill on their property, only to see those operators avoid the costly cleanup.

“That’s not right,” he said.

The sun was rising higher, and Don had more chores to do. So he finished loading the water jugs and whisked them down the gravel road, kicking up dust that hung in the air alongside his parting words.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Anna Clark and Sarahbeth Maney, Photography by Sarahbeth Maney

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Flint, Michigan, is less than 70 miles from the Great Lakes, the most abundant fresh water on the face of the planet. It’s laced with creeks and a broad river that bears its name. Yet in 2014, Flint’s drinking water became a threat — not because of scarcity, or a natural disaster, or even a familiar tale of corporate pollution.

Ten years ago this spring, public officials made catastrophic changes in the city’s water source and treatment, then used testing practices that hid dangers. As problems emerged, they failed to appropriately change course. Residents raised repeated concerns about the color, odor and taste of the water but struggled to get a sufficiently serious response, especially from state and federal authorities.

It didn’t help that the distressed city was under the authority of state-appointed emergency managers, an unusually expansive oversight system that residents decried. For a crucial period of about 3 1/2 years, local decision-making was not accountable to voters. The result: excess exposure to toxic lead, bacteria and a disinfection byproduct in Flint’s drinking water. An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease sickened 90 people and killed 12. (The toll is likely higher, as Frontline documented.) The water, now drawn from the Flint River, wasn’t treated with corrosion control — a violation of federal law — so the pipes deteriorated more every day.

At one point, saying the water damaged its machinery, a General Motors plant switched to another community’s system. Flint’s emergency manager and other officials still insisted that nothing was seriously wrong with the water. But if the water was harming machines, many wondered, what was it doing to people?

The Flint River near Vietnam Veterans Park along East Fifth Avenue and James P. Cole Boulevard

It took about 18 months, and an extraordinary effort by residents and a few key researchers, before the state reconnected Flint with Detroit’s water, which is drawn from Lake Huron. In the years since, remediation efforts have included replacing corroded pipes, at-home filtration and infrastructure investments, which seem to have yielded promising results. Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy said in December that Flint’s water had met federal standards for more than seven straight years. Recent testing followed Michigan’s requirements, adopted in 2018, which are even tougher than federal standards. The state and city are working to resolve deficiencies to the supply system that can affect water safety.

Expired water bottles are scattered throughout the abandoned Northwestern High School in Flint. Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley takes a tour of upgraded facilities at the Flint water plant. “It’s about establishing all the things that we need to be able to build back the trust,” Neeley said.

But no one can flip a switch on public trust. And Flint was vulnerable long before the water crisis.

Many point to the crisis as an extreme example of environmental injustice, where people of color and poor people, and especially those who are both, are disproportionately exposed to toxic conditions. A state commission acknowledged that race and class contributed to Flint not having “the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards as that provided to other communities. Moreover, by virtue of their being subject to emergency management, Flint residents were not provided equal access to, and meaningful involvement in, the government decision-making process.”

That emergency manager law is still on the books. The work to replace the pipes is mostly done — but the city has blown repeated deadlines to complete it. Two state investigations under two administrations led to high-profile criminal charges, including allegations of involuntary manslaughter, official misconduct and willful neglect of duty. Primarily, state officials and employees were charged, including the former director of the state health agency and the former governor. Two emergency managers were also charged; both pleaded not guilty. One has said there was “overwhelming consensus” for the switch, and he was “grossly misled” by state water experts.

No case made it to trial. A new attorney general’s team dismissed the initial cases and started a new investigation. But the second wave of charges fell apart when courts rejected the use of a one-man grand jury to gain indictments.

The Environmental Protection Agency didn’t use its authority to effectively protect public health in Flint, according to the agency’s inspector general. The EPA has denied liability, however, and earlier this year asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that it failed to properly intervene.

While it was announced in 2020, not one penny of the class-action settlement of more than $626 million has reached residents. With more than 40,000 claims and 30 compensation categories, a special master indicated recently that the initial review should be complete this summer, but there will still be more vetting to do before claims are paid. (Some lawyers and contractors, though, have already been paid preliminary fees and expenses.)

Water is Flint’s origin story. The city was founded on a riverbank, and water powered its rise. Each spring, the water turns neighborhoods and parks lush. But these days, the betrayal of trust by the very institutions meant to protect residents has made some extra cautious as they look to keep themselves and their community safe. Their relationship with water is forever changed.

A nonprofit promotes protection of fresh water in a parking lot across the street from the Flint River along James P. Cole Boulevard.

Pastor Robert McCathern of Flint’s Joy Tabernacle Church said he has a list of about 30 people who haven’t gotten baptized because they’re afraid of the water. They’re wondering, he said, “‘Am I still saved?’ And the answer is yes."

McCathern, 70, crosses the street in front of Joy Tabernacle Church in Flint. The church is also the site of the Urban Renaissance Center, a faith-based nonprofit designed to provide social and development services in the Civic Park neighborhood and broader Flint community.

McCathern’s church served as a bottled-water distribution site during the crisis, which, he said, strengthened relationships and community trust. But he worries for the next generation, especially their psychological well-being. And he has his own fears too. He said he often smells a “foul odor” from the water. He is apprehensive when showering and usually drinks bottled water, he said, but sometimes lets his guard down to make tea with tap water.

In recent years, McCathern was diagnosed with multiple myeloma cancer. He believes it’s connected to chemicals in the water but will never know for sure. Over his 22 years at Joy Tabernacle, McCathern said, he’s seen an uptick in youth suicide. He wonders about a connection between lead exposure and violence. He recalls sitting at one funeral and thinking, Oh my God, if it produces violent tendencies, that’s not just outward violent tendencies — that’s internal.

McCathern approaches Tayler Armstrong, 9, and his grandmother Patricia Stewart-Burton while preaching during a Sunday service at Joy Tabernacle Church.

An investigation published in Science Advances showed an 8% increase in the number of school-aged children in Flint with a qualified special educational need. But, the researchers indicated, it’s difficult to pinpoint to what extent lead is the direct cause.

A cross-sectional study backed by the federal Office of Victims of Crime found that five years after the onset of the crisis, an estimated 1 in 5 residents — roughly 22,600 people — had met the criteria for clinical depression in the past year. One in 4, or 25,000 people, were estimated to have had post-traumatic stress disorder. According to researchers, only 34.8% of residents were offered mental health services to assist with psychiatric symptoms related to the crisis. Most people used them, if offered.

“We’re very acquainted to human suffering. This community has been acquainted to abandonment — to not trusting health systems, not having relationships with health systems and not having access at a level of comfortability. People have to come out of their safe zones to access health. Marginalized communities, people of color, have to go on and survive. They have to go through it.” — Pastor Robert McCathern

McCathern becomes emotional while talking with a friend about the lasting health impacts of the Flint water crisis. “That’s the only reason I’m here [in Flint], is because so much injustice to humans, to humanity.”

Teagan Medlin was a teenager in Flint during the water crisis. Now, the 25-year-old is the mother of three, including a newborn named Audrina. She lives at a recovery house for people with substance use disorder. As she works through her own recovery, she also struggles with whether it’s OK to expose her children to the water.

Teagan Medlin, 25, holds her newborn baby, Audrina, at a recovery house where she lives temporarily. Medlin bathes Audrina using water from the bath faucet at the recovery house in Flint.

Medlin said she uses her food stamp benefits on bottled water deliveries from Walmart for Audrina’s bottles. For her first months, Medlin relied on the infant’s father to bathe her at his home outside the city.

“I’ve been through the wringer. I’m sure I can handle it, but my babies — I don’t know what that could do to them. I am already done growing. I’m 25 and my brain is done growing. My body is done growing, but they are still developing and I don’t want it to damage them. But I don’t have anywhere else to go, and I can’t afford to live anywhere else, honestly.” — Teagan Medlin

Medlin prepares tea for herself using bottled water.

Ambitious programs aim to support Flint’s most vulnerable residents. Medlin is enrolled in Rx Kids, which “prescribes” a no-strings-attached payment of $1,500 for pregnant Flint residents and $500 for each month of the baby’s first year. A Medicaid initiative that covers youth up to age 21 and pregnant parents who were exposed to Flint’s water was extended in 2021 for another five years. And the Flint Registry connects people with health services while monitoring the effectiveness of efforts to prevent lead poisoning.

“I’ve seen the struggle for Flint in a deep way. I’ve been on the streets. I’ve met a lot of people. There are beautiful people here and it’s a beautiful city. They deserve better. I don’t know if there is a way to make up for the actual damage that’s been done. The accountability needs to be there.” — Teagan Medlin

Medlin and Audrina

Jacquinne Reynolds lives with unanswered questions about possible connections between the water and her health. She said she takes only quick showers these days, and never any baths.

Jacquinne Reynolds, 73, prepares for her care routine, which involves washing, brushing and moisturizing her scalp multiple times per week. Reynolds holds her dreadlocks, which she believes fell out because of contaminated water.

Reynolds is the executive director of a local literacy organization, tutoring children and adults on reading, writing and African American culture. She said her hair began falling out during the water crisis. While she was diagnosed with alopecia, she said, another doctor later told her that the hair loss is likely connected to the water. She too feels like she’ll never know for sure. Because of the lack of information about the water at the time, she didn’t think to track her symptoms.

“Going through this, I didn’t know that I was being affected. Nobody was saying anything to us. We didn’t know what was going on.” — Jacquinne Reynolds

The water’s effect on hair and skin was among the earliest concerns raised by residents, though a direct correlation has been difficult to prove. A 2016 state and federal analysis — conducted after Flint switched back to Detroit’s system — identified nothing in the current water supply that affected hair loss. A survey of more than 300 residents by academic researchers found that more than 40% of respondents said they experienced hair loss beyond what they considered normal before the crisis. Black respondents reported significantly higher percentages of hair loss. The more physical symptoms respondents reported, the more likely they were to report psychological symptoms.

Reynolds inside the classroom where she tutors at Word of Life Christian Church

Having taught and tutored Flint families for decades, Reynolds feels the weight of the community’s unmet needs.

“When are we, the citizens, going to be thought about? When are our children who were affected by the water and who are having learning difficulties in school going to receive what they need?” — Jacquinne Reynolds

A photograph of Reynolds and her husband, Lawrence Reynolds, a retired pediatrician and former president and chief executive officer of Mott Children’s Health Center

Nearly 80,000 people now live in Flint, according to recent census data, a drop of about 20% in the past 10 years. Fifty-seven percent are Black, 34% are white and 4% are Hispanic. Median household income is $33,036. Nearly 38% are in poverty. Population loss and disinvestment make it difficult to maintain a water system, with fewer people paying for infrastructure designed for a much larger city.

Flint had almost 200,000 residents in 1960; it built water infrastructure to support 50,000 more, according to the city’s communications director. It connected to Detroit’s system in the first place because it expected continued growth. Vacancy can worsen water quality because water sits longer in pipes before reaching a tap — a problem made visible when metals from corroding pipes saturated the water more in some Flint neighborhoods than in others.

In addition to service-line replacement efforts, the city offers free filters to residents. Beyond legally mandated testing, a unique community water lab provides residents with a free way to learn about their water. Young people lead much of the work. As lab director and Flint City Council member Candice Mushatt put it, “We’re training the next generation to be prepared in a way that we were not.”

Results range from 0.031 parts per billion up to over 50 ppb of lead from water samples tested in Flint, according to Mushatt. Under federal law, if a community water system reaches 15 ppb of lead, based on the 90th percentile of samples, certain public health measures must be taken. No amount of lead is safe.

High school interns carefully transfer water from pipettes at the water lab. A mural is reflected in a window as analytical chemist Cassidy Goyette reviews charts at the McKenzie Patrice Croom Flint Community Water Lab.

Flint residents have emphasized the importance of determining for themselves when justice has been done. In a 2020 paper, a cohort of community advocates wrote that they expect accountability, policy reform and community-driven investments. “And we will be insisting,” they wrote, “as always, that people ask us and our fellow residents before concluding that Flint has been made whole.”