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by Mike Reicher and Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times

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

For years, the complaints languished with Washington state education officials.

A therapist emailed about a teenage boy with severe autism, who had wailed for hours inside a locked room in her school, pleading to be let out. A local education official saw a teacher shove her foot in a student’s face as he lay on the ground and threaten to step on him. A special education director observed uncertified teachers struggling with no curriculum and urged the state to step in to protect “these extremely high-risk students.”

The alarming reports cataloged a failure to serve kids with disabilities at the Northwest School of Innovative Learning, a private school designed to cater to Washington’s most vulnerable students.

Despite the complaints, the state took no action to force changes at Northwest SOIL. Instead, it allowed the school to stay open and tap a pipeline of taxpayer money. In the five school years ending in 2021, Northwest SOIL collected at least $38 million and took in hundreds of public school students.

Northwest SOIL operated for years with few trained teachers, and its staff relied heavily on restraint and isolation. Some of the students made no academic progress and even regressed, as their parents were shut out of information that would be available at any public school.

The lack of state oversight has allowed Northwest SOIL to essentially warehouse kids with complex developmental and behavioral disabilities, according to a Seattle Times and ProPublica review of more than 17,000 pages of documents from 45 school districts, three police departments and the state education department.

“Northwest SOIL is an example of turning back the clock 50 years on kids” to an era when people with disabilities were denied access to education, said Vanessa Tucker, a Pacific Lutheran University professor who serves on the state’s Special Education Advisory Council. “It should not continue.”

A Northwest SOIL teacher threatened to step on a boy with autism, according to a complaint by an Orting School District staffer. The student cried and said, “Please don’t step on me.” (Gabriel Campanario/The Seattle Times)

While most of the roughly 140,000 students in special education in Washington attend classes within their public schools, Northwest SOIL is the biggest player in an obscure but vital corner of the state’s special education system. It’s one of a set of private schools, known as nonpublic agencies, that serve about 500 public school students with the most serious disabilities.

Since the 1980s, states across the country have reduced their reliance on separate schools for special education students and moved to integrate such students with their peers. Washington, which has the nation’s second-highest dropout rate for special education students, has recently made strides by increasing the amount of time students spend in regular classrooms.

But for those with the highest needs, the state has been heading in the opposite direction, sending more students out of traditional public schools.

That led to the state and school districts pouring at least $173 million into outsourcing special education to Northwest SOIL and other schools over the five school years ending in 2021. While a full accounting is not available, state spending on these programs more than doubled during that time.

The state knows little about the more than 60 campuses that serve the students. Some of these private schools have decent reputations, but the state doesn’t track how many kids in private schools successfully return to their community schools — a key goal for many of the programs. It doesn’t know how many are restrained or locked in isolation rooms. Until two years ago, it couldn’t even count how many public school students attended these schools.

Northwest SOIL’s Tacoma campus building, left, on the grounds of a white-domed megachurch (Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times)

Those gaps are the result of a fundamental flaw in Washington’s oversight system, which places responsibility for monitoring the private schools not on the state but on individual school districts. State education officials said districts are expected to spot and correct problems, as they’re the ones contracting with the schools to educate students.

But because more than 40 districts at a time send students to Northwest SOIL’s three campuses, and each district only receives information about its own students, no single school district or agency has a complete picture of what’s going on there.

So serious incidents — one district learned that a Northwest SOIL staffer kicked a fourth-grader, another heard that a teacher dragged a 9-year-old boy with autism by his thigh — might appear to be isolated rather than signs of systemic problems. Pieced together, reports from parents, teachers, visitors and police paint a troubling picture the state has failed to address.

In 2019, a 9-year-old boy with autism told police that his teacher at Northwest SOIL grabbed him by the thigh and dragged him across a classroom because he wouldn’t run laps. (Tacoma Police Department report obtained, annotated by The Seattle Times and ProPublica)

“There is probably a sentiment that those kids are bad kids,” said Carrie Basas, the former director of the Washington State Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds. “It’s just students that we have already written off, that teachers or school leaders may perceive as threatening, and we just send them somewhere.” She added, “There has to be somebody in charge.”

Even Northwest SOIL’s top administrator in 2021, Donna Green, complained to the school’s owner, Fairfax Hospital, that the company had crossed ethical boundaries. In a resignation letter, Green said she struggled to make changes as the hospital’s parent company, Universal Health Services, a Fortune 500 health care corporation, cut staff hours and skimped on basic resources to increase profits.

The state “needs to be more hands-on to ensure that these kids are getting a proper education and not just feeding a money horse for UHS,” Green said in an interview.

Leaders of Northwest SOIL and Fairfax, the largest private psychiatric facility in Washington, declined to be interviewed for this story. They defended the program in a statement to the Times and ProPublica, saying administrators take seriously the responsibility of addressing students’ complex needs. The school said it has recently purchased a new English and math curriculum, along with computers for teachers and students.

“We are proud of our overall academic and clinical performance and earned reputation for accepting the most difficult referrals in the area,” the school said. UHS said it had no comment beyond the school’s statement.

Chris Reykdal, who heads the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, said in an interview that his office doesn’t have clear investigative authority or enough people to monitor private schools. But he said his staff looked into complaints about Northwest SOIL four years ago, and he stands by the agency’s decision to not crack down on the school.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal at the OSPI building in Olympia, Washington, in 2020 (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)

“I do think that the response was there,” Reykdal said. “It’s just that people might disagree that we should have done more — which is a fair criticism.”

With no one responsible for scrutinizing the schools, even the most serious warning signs fell through the cracks, with devastating consequences.

“I Am Not OK to Be Here”

Northwest SOIL’s website paints a serene picture, splashed with stock photos of smiling kids. The Tacoma campus advertises hiking trails, pet therapy and 11 separate staff specialties — from speech language pathologists to licensed mental health counselors.

In reality, the building sits in the vast asphalt parking lot of a megachurch. The closest thing to a hiking path is a 200-foot-long walkway that cuts through a patch of greenery between sections of pavement.

Former employees and records from the state and districts describe more of an institution than a school: A staffer wands students with a metal detector as they arrive. Kids bang on the locked doors from inside “quiet rooms,” whose walls are sometimes smeared with feces or blood. At times, children wander the school or aides sleep in chairs.

The Times interviewed 23 former staffers, many of whom described chronic shortages of classroom assistants, inadequate training, a lack of licensed therapists and high-school-educated aides running classes. Amid high turnover, some positions sat vacant for months.

(Lauren Frohne/The Seattle Times and Ramon Dompor/The Seattle Times) (Lauren Frohne/The Seattle Times and Ramon Dompor/The Seattle Times)

"My role was to be the school therapist, but it rarely worked out that way because they were so understaffed,” said Kingsley Simpson, who worked at the Tumwater campus from 2016 until this March. “I covered as an educational assistant or a teacher or at the front desk. I rarely got the opportunity to do therapy."

Northwest SOIL said its hiring practices ensure that “only appropriate and qualified candidates are hired.” It added, “As in many areas of healthcare in Washington (and other states), staffing shortages are a challenge. Nonetheless, we meet appropriate staffing levels that satisfy our student needs.”

Former employees say — and documents back up — that Northwest SOIL staffers were stretched thin managing students and often resorted to restraint or isolation. But the state doesn’t track how often restraints are used.

“They don’t treat you like people; they just grab you,” said Christopher, 16, who attended Northwest SOIL in Tacoma. (Gabriel Campanario/The Seattle Times)

Among the few reports state regulators do require are annual staffing lists. But even then, OSPI doesn’t consistently check them to see if staff are qualified to teach.

Jimmy Fioretti worked at Northwest SOIL for five years. The school repeatedly listed Fioretti as a special education teacher even though he lacked that certification and at times was only approved to be a substitute.

In 2017 and 2019, police investigated after two separate allegations that Fioretti had choked students at Northwest SOIL. Each time, he told the police he never violated school restraint policy. Prosecutors declined to pursue charges, citing insufficient evidence or a law that broadly permits student discipline.

Fioretti — who has been convicted of assault and felony drug possession — was also accused in July 2020 of choking a housemate while living at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation home, according to a police report. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and served five days in jail.

Fioretti did not respond to phone calls or emailed questions.

State law requires nonpublic agencies to “promptly notify” the state and school districts of “any complaints it receives regarding services to students.” But the law doesn’t define what constitutes a complaint. There is no indication that Northwest SOIL notified state education officials of any police investigations.

Scott Raub, OSPI’s administrator for these private schools, said in an interview that abuse allegations would likely count as a complaint, but “just because you notified us, it doesn’t result in anything specific.”

Scott Raub, an OSPI administrator for private special education schools (Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times)

While the law is unclear about who’s responsible for investigating problems, the state has powerful enforcement tools. Officials can force these private schools to comply with specific conditions or prohibit them from accepting public school students if they don't. That could have shut down Northwest SOIL. But the state never took those steps.

One day in late 2020, Fioretti wrapped his arm around a 13-year-old boy’s neck and hauled him across the classroom, as the teenager grasped at Fioretti’s forearm.

A school counselor reported the “chokehold” to Child Protective Services and the police, describing how Fioretti had instigated the confrontation and how the boy couldn’t breathe, his eyes bulging for half a minute until Fioretti released him. Almost immediately, the boy vomited in a trash can. The chokehold was caught on surveillance video reviewed by Tacoma police.

But, once again, neither the state nor the school district would know the severity.

In the more sanitized narrative that Northwest SOIL reported to the boy’s parents and his home district, Tacoma Public Schools, Fioretti wrote that staff “restrained” the student without injury and “attempted to deescalate” the situation, then “escorted him to the hallway.”

Shortly after the incident, the school director sat down at Fioretti’s desk. Fioretti said the boy was “running his lips,” according to an internal company email. Fioretti “then got teary eyed,” the director wrote, “and said, ‘I can’t do this. I love my job and you guys but I am not OK to be here.’”

Nine days later, Northwest SOIL fired him for misconduct.

Northwest SOIL administrators declined to comment on specific allegations of abuse but said “use of restraints and seclusion are always used as a last response when a student is at imminent risk of hurting themselves or others.” The school said any allegation is promptly investigated. “Since even one unintended outcome is one too many, we take the time to determine what lessons can be learned from the regrettable incident,” the statement said.

A review of more than 1,000 pages of restraint reports show that Northwest SOIL regularly sends districts vague summaries of events.

One teenage boy with autism couldn’t tell his parents what happened at Northwest SOIL. He only knows a few words and mostly doesn’t speak. So every day when he returned home, his parents would strip off his clothes and check his body for bruises. They found them often, said his father, who asked that neither he nor his son be named to protect the privacy of his family.

A father described his son’s injuries to Northwest SOIL administrators. (Federal Way School District emails obtained, annotated by The Seattle Times and ProPublica)

One summer afternoon in 2020, Northwest SOIL reported to the boy’s school district and his parents that he was shoving staff. They tried to “redirect” him to his desk, and he “tripped over a chair, falling backwards,” the report says, his arm smashing through a glass window. The boy, then 16, went to the hospital and received three stitches.

His father questioned how his son could fall backward, arm first, into a glass window. The report didn’t say where the window was or how the incident started.

Before the fall, the boy was marked as “safe, responsible & respectable - Holding a Book” at 9:38 a.m. Then he tried to “elope” — or wander away, a common occurrence among children with autism — 11 times, the report says. That was just 10 minutes later.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” his father said.

State Didn’t Intervene

As far back as 2014, Northwest SOIL was already drawing scrutiny from the state’s biggest school district.

Two special education officials from Seattle Public Schools visited the Redmond campus and reported that what they saw left them “literally speechless.” They said kids roamed freely around campus without supervision, and education was virtually nonexistent. They implored the district to withdraw all its students immediately.

Seattle Public Schools staffers visited Northwest SOIL’s Redmond campus and recommended that the district remove all its students immediately. (Seattle Public Schools letter obtained, annotated by The Seattle Times and ProPublica)

Records show the district continued to send students each year but monitored Northwest SOIL more closely. After conditions seemed to improve, the school board voted in 2016 to keep using the school.

Seattle was focused on its own students. But administrators from other districts were also fielding alarming reports about Northwest SOIL.

In October 2017, the head of special education at the Orting School District, Chris Willis, emailed the state about the Tacoma teacher who had threatened to step on a boy. The incident happened in front of an Orting official and parent who were touring the campus, and Willis said he worried problems at the school were “more systemic.” But OSPI had no record of investigating.

Resources for parents navigating nonpublic agencies in Washington

Then, in May 2018, Rochester School District’s special education director visited Northwest SOIL’s Tumwater campus to check on a student and wrote to Glenna Gallo, then OSPI’s assistant superintendent of special education, that “the elementary student did nothing during the time I was in the class and no one interacted with him.”

During one visit, the Rochester director observed the boy opening YouTube on a computer and watching a game of “a man going to different places with a large machine gun shooting at everything in front of him.” When Rochester pulled him out of Northwest SOIL and brought him back into a district school, it found “little to no growth academically in the two years’ time that he was at NW Soil,” the director wrote.

A Rochester School District official reported to the state seeing a student watching a YouTube video of a game involving “a man going to different places with a large machine gun shooting at everything in front of him.” (Gabriel Campanario/The Seattle Times)

A month after Rochester schools’ visits, Cecilia McCormick, a McCleary School District director, reported to OSPI that her district’s student had no special education teacher supervising his instruction. “This is a violation of both federal and state law,” McCormick wrote. The fourth grade boy, who had a history of harming himself, was told by a staffer he’s a “bad boy,” she wrote.

In the summer of 2018, the Tumwater campus was up for its annual review by the state. By that point in the year, OSPI had received at least five serious complaints about Northwest SOIL from district administrators and a parent. Gallo and Raub scheduled a meeting with Northwest SOIL’s leaders.

“We said that this is not acceptable. You have to follow the expectations,” Raub said. “And we got all the assurances that we wanted to hear.”

After the meeting, more complaints poured into Raub’s inbox. The Tumwater School District reported its student did puzzles while his aide — whom the district paid for — slept in the classroom. The school also didn’t provide speech language services for months despite telling the district it had hired a specialist, Tumwater added.

A Tumwater School District official, who visited Northwest SOIL, complained to the state that he saw an aide sleeping while a student “was just doing puzzles.” (Gabriel Campanario/The Seattle Times)

Northwest SOIL didn’t respond to questions about the specific district complaints but said it “strongly refutes claims regarding the intentional billing of services not provided.”

Gallo approved the school’s 2018 annual renewal. She has since left the agency and has been nominated to be the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for special education.

Gallo did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in a 2021 interview with The Times she said the state expects school districts to address problems at private schools.

A complaint to state education officials in 2018 describes an elementary school student’s encounter with staff at Northwest SOIL. (Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction document obtained, annotated by The Seattle Times and ProPublica)

Raub, who was new to the private schools role in 2018, said he would approach the complaints differently now that he has more experience. He pointed to a 2020 case in which OSPI received abuse allegations at another private school and conducted a detailed review of student restraint and isolation files, school policies and staff qualifications.

But the department continued to be hands-off when presented with concerns about Northwest SOIL, including an April 2021 allegation of emotional and physical abuse against an Everett student by a Northwest SOIL staffer.

Raub instructed the district to investigate and said he would be there for “continued support” if it “uncovers a broader, more systemic issue.” OSPI said the district and family never followed up. Everett said it investigated but “did not conclusively find evidence to report back” to OSPI.

This month, the agency said it was investigating a complaint about Northwest SOIL’s Redmond campus after a parent reported inadequate staffing and their student coming home with injuries — the same sort of allegation that has flowed to the state for years.

Because of the diffuse oversight system, many complaints never made it to OSPI. Less than four months after the Everett allegation, Green, Northwest SOIL’s top administrator across all campuses, detailed a series of complaints in her resignation letter, ranging from a lack of training to cutting assistants’ hours that school districts had already paid for. She also sent it to Tacoma Public Schools.

But with no requirement to forward Green’s letter to OSPI, Tacoma never did so, and neither did Northwest SOIL, leaving the state missing a critical piece of the puzzle.

Other States Have Stricter Standards

In many ways, Washington’s special education funding system has exacerbated oversight problems at private schools like Northwest SOIL.

The state reformed its funding model in 1995, realizing that school districts needed more money to educate students with disabilities. It developed a safety net fund to help districts pay for special education services.

But the program prohibits those funds from being used to train teachers in public schools. And while a 2012 state Supreme Court ruling on school financing, known as the McCleary decision, resulted in the Legislature sending billions of state dollars to public schools, lawmakers sidestepped special education.

With limited options, the districts came to rely on the private schools.

The safety net model “made it easier for districts to say, ‘Let’s place the student at Northwest SOIL,’” said Tucker, the Pacific Lutheran professor.

But, unlike in other states, Washington lawmakers have not adopted key oversight and transparency regulations to protect students and taxpayers.

Northwest SOIL’s Tumwater campus building (Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times)

In Massachusetts, similar private schools are required to report all instances of restraint and isolation directly to the state, allowing central oversight.

This isn’t true in Washington. While the state tracks isolation and restraint incidents in public schools with a goal of reducing their use, it doesn’t at private schools that receive public money.

The only institution with the complete picture is the private school itself, but Northwest SOIL claims it doesn’t have to disclose the restraint and isolation reports because it’s a private company. The Times filed a public records lawsuit against Northwest SOIL’s parent company after the school denied a request for those reports and other records typically available from public schools. The lawsuit is pending.

Without information from either the state or the school, the Times and ProPublica requested copies of restraint and isolation records inside Northwest SOIL from 34 school districts. Only 27 districts provided reports, and many documents were missing.

The Bethel School District, for instance, destroyed a year's worth of reports “in error,” an official said, and had to retrieve paper copies of others from a warehouse. A district that sent dozens of students to Northwest SOIL turned over fewer restraint reports than a district that sent only one.

Raub said the department is working to improve data collection and acknowledged it “would be very useful” to track restraint and isolation.

Washington also doesn’t demand state inspections and has vague staffing obligations. It requires an unspecified number of certified teachers and only one special education teacher per school. A representative from a district has to visit every three years.

In contrast, California requires periodic state inspections, a teacher with special education credentials in every classroom and a specific ratio of students per teacher, typically 14-to-1.

Stricter standards allowed former students and staff in California to build a whistleblower case when similar problems cropped up at Universal Health Services schools there. The company shut down the last of those campuses in 2013 shortly after settling the case, without any admission of wrongdoing.

Reykdal, the Washington state superintendent, said stricter staff qualifications could improve the quality of education and reduce staff turnover at private schools.

“I think it's likely that our Legislature has to say, ‘When it comes to basic ed, we're not going to have different expectations for the private sector than we do for the public sector,’” he said. “And they should up their game on that.”

“It Was Hell”

Christopher, who has autism, talks about attending a Northwest SOIL school while his mother Sarah Snyder listens, in Puyallup, Washington. (Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times)

For parents like Sarah Snyder, the lax oversight of these specialty schools can turn finding the right education environment for their children into a terrifying ordeal.

Snyder knew her son Christopher needed a special school. He has autism and learning disabilities and finds it difficult at times to express his frustrations in words. Occasionally, he breaks furniture, hits his parents or punches walls.

Students like Christopher, now 16, can benefit from specialized care that private schools promise. But his mother said his stay at Northwest SOIL left him traumatized.

From his bedroom in Puyallup, his shelves brimming with Lego models, Christopher recounted his time at Northwest SOIL with extraordinary detail.

“They don’t treat you like people; they just grab you,” said Christopher, curled up on his Star Wars sheets, holding his knees to his chest. He spoke about being shoved into a seclusion room.

A picture drawn by Christopher of the room where he was isolated at Northwest SOIL (Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times)

“It was hell —” Christopher said, glancing at his mom in the bedroom doorway. “Can I say that?” She nodded. “It was hell,” Christopher repeated.

In June 2017, a few days after starting at Northwest SOIL, Christopher came home with a disturbing story. He had watched as a boy was strapped to a chair by a belt around his stomach. Another boy erupted in an outburst, competing for attention.

Scared, Christopher, then 11 years old, wanted to call the police. “I don’t feel safe here,” he thought. “I don’t feel safe here.”

He darted across the classroom toward a phone on a filing cabinet and started to dial. A staff member grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back, yanking him away from the phone. (The staffer later threatened to break his arm, Christopher said.)

For seven months, Snyder struggled to get information about what her son had reported. She sought help from Christopher’s home district, Bethel School District, and its school board, as well as the local PTA and nonprofit advocates. She even emailed talk show host Dr. Phil.

“I was desperate,” she said. “I was begging, ‘Please, someone, help my family.’”

Christopher plays basketball outside his home. (Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times)

Snyder got Christopher out of the school within a month. But she kept complaining to officials for months after. In one letter to OSPI she wrote that it appeared “no one is responsible” for the actions of private schools like Northwest SOIL. Bethel said it cooperated with the state’s investigation.

The state found that Northwest SOIL had violated state laws, including improperly restraining Christopher and withholding the staffer’s name.

It concluded with a reminder that the state has the power to revoke Northwest SOIL’s status.

Five months later, OSPI approved the school’s renewal without any conditions.

Taylor Blatchford and Manuel Villa of The Seattle Times contributed reporting, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica contributed research.

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by Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser

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

For the better part of two years, Liliu Ross had lived in a one-room tin-roofed shack in the rural outer reaches of Hawaii’s Big Island. It had no running water and no electricity. But it provided shelter for Ross as she raised sheep and grew crops on land that her Native Hawaiian ancestors once called home. From the open fields and gentle slopes of her five-acre farm lot, she marveled at the stunning views of nearby Mauna Kea, one of the world’s tallest island mountains. Still, there were challenges to living under such conditions. At night she read by candlelight, and during the day she bathed outside with water she warmed in a pot over a fire.

So, in 2014, Ross secured a loan under a special program funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help Native Hawaiians build or purchase homes on Native lands. An architect created drawings for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house, complete with energy-efficient appliances and a covered lanai. And she even picked the location for the new home.

Within months, though, her plan collapsed. Ross learned in a phone call from her builder that HUD had imposed a freeze on federal housing funds throughout the region. As it turned out, her property had been part of the Waikoloa Maneuver Area, a 185,000-acre site that was used by the U.S. military for live-fire training in the 1940s. Troops had fired an unknown number of grenades, mortars and other munitions that failed to explode, and many of the potentially deadly weapons remained, hidden beneath years of soil and vegetation buildup. Federal authorities wanted to ensure the land was safe to use.

But the funding freeze had sweeping consequences. Other prospective borrowers on Native lands soon found they could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages, the only type available on such properties. The freeze also meant that local and state governments could not tap the main sources of federal funding to develop affordable housing in the region — a critical need in a state with one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation. The action effectively thwarted a century-old promise by the federal government to return Native Hawaiians to their ancestral lands.

Money would flow again, HUD decided, after the military removed any unexploded ordnance, or UXO, and state regulators vouched for the land’s safety.

Eight years later, though, Ross is still waiting. The now-64-year-old farmer continues to live in the same shack. She is one of hundreds of Native Hawaiians who are unable to secure housing on lands that the government set aside for them in a trust. Many have already waited years — and sometimes decades — for the opportunity to build homes, farms and ranches.

Liliu Ross stands among wood pallets she erected to protect saplings from strong winds that often sweep over her Big Island farm lot. Her home is in the background. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

“People are getting old, people are dying,” said Mary Maxine Kahaulelio, a prominent Native Hawaiian activist who lives near the UXO zone. “This is another form of delay for Hawaiians.”

No one can say for sure when relief will arrive. In one area, the state initially projected that the construction of 400-plus homes would be completed by next year. It paved streets, poured sidewalks, erected street lights and installed fire hydrants and road signs. But in 2015 it halted construction amid the federal funding freeze; not a single home has been built. Today, weeds and other vegetation are slowly overtaking the empty lots.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is leading the remediation effort, has been plagued by shoddy work and multiple regulatory disputes, according to an investigation by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica. In one case, after state regulators raised concerns, the Corps rebid a contract to assess the UXO risk on the largest Native parcel in the region, prolonging a process that is years behind schedule.

The previously unreported details, laid bare in interviews and hundreds of pages of documents obtained through public records requests, provide further evidence of how government agencies have bungled the timely return of Native Hawaiians to their ancestral lands. The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported in 2020 and 2021 how the state was largely bypassing low-income and homeless Hawaiians because of the pricey homes it developed and how the federal government effectively circumvented a reparations law, depriving the program of prime properties suitable for housing. Today, more than 28,000 beneficiaries — the term for people who are at least 50% Hawaiian — are currently waiting for lots statewide, including nearly 6,000 seeking housing on the Big Island.

For its part, Army Corps officials said they are committed to clearing the Native lands as soon as possible. “Keep in mind we’re trying to help,” said Loren Zulick, who until recently served as the Corps’ program manager for Waikoloa, in an interview. But, he added, “our driving factor is to clean up contamination and protect human health and the environment.” In a written response to the news organizations’ findings, the Corps said it is “committed to getting the remediation done right to ensure these areas are safe” and that every acre that goes through the process “is a success toward restoration of lands.”

Hawaii Island firefighters attend a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers briefing about the ongoing remediation work at the former Waikoloa Maneuver Area. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

HUD also defended its Waikoloa policy, saying in a statement that it was developed “to ensure the safety of all occupants of HUD housing, including Native Hawaiians.”

Local leaders, however, say the government needs to move faster to fulfill its obligations to Hawaii’s indigenous people.

“It’s just common sense, common courtesy, basic values everyone is taught as children: If you break it, fix it,” said Robin Danner, chair of the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations, the largest beneficiary group in the state. “We have the most powerful military on the planet. It’s just unacceptable that the UXO debacle is still ongoing, truly hurting families, keeping them from using our land.”

A Deadly History

Technicians use state-of-the-art equipment to look for buried munitions in a field next to a Waimea school. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

After World War II broke out, the U.S. used large swaths of undeveloped land in the Waikoloa region for so-called live-fire exercises, in which Marines trained in battle-like conditions with artillery shells, rockets, grenades, tank rounds and other arms. It was one of several places in Hawaii that the military used for such training. Officials estimated that about 10% of the munitions failed to detonate during the Waikoloa maneuvers, so before leaving in 1946, the military conducted a cleanup operation. Technicians methodically walked the grounds looking for unexploded arms and debris, which were then destroyed or hauled away.

But over the years, there have been a handful of accidents. In 1954, two ranch workers were killed and three colleagues injured when an old mortar shell exploded near them. The accident prompted another round of cleanup, but that effort failed to catch many remaining munitions too: In 1983, two more people, soldiers involved in a military exercise, were injured when an old shell exploded.

Despite the risks, development marched forward throughout the region. The UXO status of the lands was hazy in those early decades, before the Corps took on a formal role. Many property owners assumed that the prior cleanups made their land safe to develop, and those who were unsure hired UXO experts to guide construction. Coastal resorts, shopping centers, residential subdivisions, parks and other developments gradually popped up.

Among the developers was the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which manages nearly 12,000 acres within the UXO zone as part of the land trust. It was set up in 1921 by Congress to help a people then headed toward extinction. The state took over management in 1959 as a condition of statehood. Under the program, anyone who is at least 50% Native Hawaiian is entitled to lease land for $1 a year and either build or buy a home on it. Over the years, scores of beneficiaries did so within Waikoloa. Both the state and federal governments, as overseers of the trust, are legally bound to ensure the program’s success.

Government remediation efforts picked up again in the 1990s, after federal legislation resulted in the Army Corps being given responsibility for clearing former defense sites such as Waikoloa. And building continued without controversy until 2014, when a Native Hawaiian beneficiary in Puukapu, the same community where Ross lives, applied for a home loan to renovate his residence, as others had before him. This time, though, the lender rejected his application, largely because an appraiser noted that the property was in a UXO zone.

The loan denial alarmed local HUD officials, whose agency had provided millions of dollars each year to DHHL for lot development and housing assistance, including loans to eligible Hawaiians to purchase or build homes on trust land. Federal officials told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that they were previously unaware of the unexploded ordnance issue, which local and state environmental reviews had not adequately addressed. DHHL said it conducted such a review before starting construction on a nearby subdivision in 2012, but that it didn’t uncover any UXO. Nevertheless, once HUD learned of the potential contamination problem in the region, it imposed a freeze on funding and HUD-backed mortgages until safety concerns were addressed.

To comply with the policy, DHHL began putting UXO disclosure provisions in the new land leases it awarded to Native Hawaiian beneficiaries. The designation prevented those leaseholders from obtaining government-insured mortgages until the UXO problem in their specific community was resolved. In fact, some lenders had already stopped lending on Native lands in the Waikoloa area.

Regulators Raise Red Flags

Hundreds of Native Hawaiians looked to the Army Corps to step up its work so the freeze could be lifted. Months, however, turned into years. “My balloon is deflated,” said Leolani Kini, 65, whose plans to build a home on the Big Island are on hold. “It’s heartbreaking for me every day.”

Kini and other Hawaiians were counting on the Army Corps to review two key areas.

One was Puukapu, the mostly rural area where Ross lives and Kini wants to move. It’s the largest trust parcel in the UXO zone and includes nearly 450 lots leased by beneficiaries. The other area was Lalamilo, the location of the unfinished 400-home subdivision.

Given the limitations of technology and other factors, all parties acknowledge, it’s impossible to remove all munitions from the UXO zone. Hawaii’s rugged terrain and high iron levels, for instance, interfere with the digital equipment used to search for buried bombs. Instead, the cleanup goal is to reduce the UXO risk to “negligible.” But over the past several years, state health department documents reveal its regulators have raised significant questions about how the Corps performed its assessments in both areas.

In Puukapu, the department issued a scathing response to an initial Corps report, saying “there appears to be intentional efforts to omit and obscure relevant data.” Regulators also objected to the Corps’ finding in the 2018 report that the UXO risk was acceptable and no further action was needed.

“They basically were saying, ‘Hey, we’re done,’” said Sven Lindstrom, the health department regulator who oversees the Corps’ remediation work. “And we were like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, we need to talk about this more. You need to allay our concerns that there might still be hundreds of munitions items at this site.’”

The Corps took two years to respond, and after that it had to hire another contractor to help complete the report, which still isn’t finished.

In Lalamilo, regulators questioned the effectiveness of new technology the Corps is using to detect munitions, as well as the reliability of its past sweeps of the area. The skepticism was driven by a series of discoveries by workers in other parts of the UXO zone that the federal agency had previously designated as clear. In 2018, for example, they discovered large fragments on the ground and a foot-long projectile just steps away from a low-income apartment complex. The old shell, which still had the potential to explode, was buried just three inches below the surface.

Weeds overtake the sidewalks at the Lalamilo Housing development in Waimea on July 15, after construction stalled due to concerns about unexploded ordnance. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

To allay concerns, the Corps analyzed nine past sweeps of the area that includes Lalamilo. The results, however, were far from reassuring. As it did in Puukapu, the agency backed away from its initial assessment, telling the state it had low confidence in the effectiveness of its prior work. The Corps is now doing a new, more comprehensive sweep of Lalamilo, using state-of-the-art equipment, and is discussing the data with regulators as the work progresses. The technology dispute, however, remains unresolved.

Meanwhile, Native Hawaiian beneficiaries regularly drive by the subdivision site, just off the main road into Waimea. About a dozen told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that they often wonder when the project will get back on track. The site’s 2012 groundbreaking sign, which is still standing, touts the name of Gov. Neil Abercrombie. He left office eight years ago.

In response to questions from the news organizations, the Corps acknowledged that the remediation process is time-consuming. But the agency won’t sacrifice quality for speed, according to Lt. Col. Ryan Pevey, who heads the Corps’ Hawaii operations. “At the end of the day, it’s about the safety of the people of Hawaii and the environment,” he said in an interview. The Corps said it is highly confident that the Puukapu assessment, once completed, will allay the state’s concerns and show that hundreds of UXO will not be left in the ground.

The trust lands have been getting special attention in recent years, officials added. “It is a priority for us to try to help the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands with their needs for people who are trying to get loans on their properties,” said Zulick, the former Waikoloa program manager.

The Corps said Lalamilo is currently ranked No. 1 among its Waikoloa priorities and Puukapu is third, designations that direct resources to expedite the UXO work. Just a few years ago Puukapu was No. 22 — a reflection of the fact that the area had not been used as intensively for live-fire training as other sectors, according to the Corps. Some beneficiaries believe no remedy is needed in Puukapu. They say people have worked the land there for decades without incident, and many express frustration that the Corps is taking so long to assess a site they believe is safe.

William J. Aila Jr., who oversees DHHL and the 203,000-acre land trust, reflected on the balance that must be struck to successfully resolve the UXO problem. “Obviously, we would like to see this effort proceed faster, but we understand the Army Corps has a process, and we want them to do a thorough job,” Aila said in a statement.

Native Hawaiians Pay the Price

Native Hawaiians are paying the price for the delays — sometimes, quite literally.

Shirley Gambill-De Rego, a Big Island mortgage manager, recalled the case of a man who, after learning of the UXO delay, paid a private company $25,000 to sweep his mother’s land in Puukapu so he could get a loan to replace her aging home. Given that his mother was elderly, the man concluded that he couldn’t afford to wait for years for the Army Corps to do its job, said Gambill-De Rego, who ultimately helped the family get financing for construction. The new home was completed about seven years ago. The mother has since died.

Others have also had to dip into their own pockets.

Rocky and Kamala Cashman moved to Puukapu with designs for a new home in 2014. The retirees, who were in their 70s at the time, set up shop in a temporary trailer, expecting to live there for a year at most while workers constructed their new prefabricated home. But just before building began, their bank canceled the loan because it was no longer insurable due to the UXO problem. Other lenders subsequently turned them down as well. As a result, the trailer became their home for the next five years.

Kamala Cashman, 81, is thrilled to be in her new Puukapu home after spending five years living in a cramped trailer on the property because she and her husband were unable to obtain financing due to the UXO problem. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

The rented camper, which measured 240 square feet, had just enough room for a king-sized bed, a bathroom and a small refrigerator. The couple made meals with a toaster oven, microwave, electric frying pan and rice cooker. While the living situation was cramped, Kamala Cashman said, it was offset, in part, by the natural beauty of their five-acre lot, which featured expansive mountain views. “We made it work,” she said.

The financial cost, though, was significant. On top of renting the trailer, the Cashmans paid to lease two shipping containers to hold their household belongings and a third to store the wood and other materials for their new home. Their total five-year rental tab came to about $60,000.

Then, in 2019, the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, an advocacy organization for Hawaii’s indigenous people, stepped in. The group agreed to lend the Cashmans $300,000 through a program designed to assist Hawaiians unable to get more conventional financing. The council approved the loan even though the UXO assessment in Puukapu was still ongoing.

“I knew if we didn’t step in and help, this family would still be in the trailer,” said Kuhio Lewis, the council’s chief executive officer.

The Cashmans moved into their new home in 2020. The three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath cedar-and-redwood residence spans about 2,500 square feet of living space — more than 10 times the size of their rented trailer — and features a dome-shaped great room and a wraparound balcony facing Mauna Kea.

“It’s sad that it took five years for us to move into something that should’ve happened in a few months,” said Kamala Cashman, who is now 81.

“That shouldn’t be happening at their age,” added Noe Aiu, Cashman’s daughter.

Rocky Cashman, 81, with his daughter, Noe Aiu, 60, at their Pu'ukapu homestead. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

The HUD freeze is impacting Native Hawaiians in other ways too.

Those who have wanted to sell their homes in the region have had to look for all-cash buyers because of the unavailability of financing. And some have been unable to refinance existing mortgages, which prevented the homeowners from taking advantage of record-low interest rates in 2021. Rates have since rebounded to two-decade highs.

The result, advocates say, has been that Native Hawaiians have been deprived of building financial equity during a period in which Hawaii real estate values have soared. If any other group were denied such an opportunity, government officials would “move mountains to turn that faucet back on,” said Rolina Faagai, vice chair of Hawaiian Lending & Investments, a beneficiary-run organization that helps Hawaiians obtain mortgages on trust lands. “Not for our community. Why is that?”

A Plea for Help

Given how long beneficiaries have suffered under the freeze, Native Hawaiians and their advocates are now calling for the Corps and the state’s congressional delegation to expedite remediation.

“They’ve got to prioritize this,” said Lewis, head of the Native Hawaiian advocacy council, citing the state and federal governments’ long-standing legal duty to beneficiaries as overseers of the land trust. “This is a trust obligation to Native Hawaiians, an obligation that is being unfulfilled, unmet.”

The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reached out to Hawaii’s four members in Congress about the Waikoloa cleanup process. Just two responded: U.S. Sens. Mazie Hirono and Brian Schatz.

Hirono did not answer the news organizations’ questions but issued a general statement saying more needs to be done to ensure the governments’ trust obligations are fulfilled.

Schatz was more specific. In written responses, he said he would push for more funding to speed up the cleanup effort to help ensure no one waits longer than needed. “It’s a dangerous job that understandably takes time,” he said of the remediation work. “But for beneficiaries, every delay in the process has a real impact.”

In recent years, Congress has approved additional monies for Waikoloa, according to Schatz, who sits on the Senate’s appropriations committee. A decade ago, the project was getting about $10 million annually. This year, the total hit more than $18 million, a record, Schatz said. Much more, however, is needed. The Corps estimates $375 million will be required to finish the job.

Danner, the beneficiary leader, urged DHHL to help supplement the remediation effort. “If the lots were good enough to issue to our families, then they are good enough for DHHL to spend resources to clear the lands for safety,” she said. But the department, which received a record $600 million from the state this year to boost the Native Hawaiian homesteading program, said the federal government is obligated to pick up the tab and should.

For now, Ross continues to wait. Several years ago, she added a second room to her shack and now has running water and a power generator. But she is losing hope that she’ll ever see an actual house.

“There’s a lack of concern for the Hawaiian people,” she said. “So we’ll just continue to be successful on our trust land.”

Liliu Ross tends to the flock of sheep she raises on her Puukapu farm. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)