a Better Bubble™
Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.
Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.
Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.
“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.
These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News.
Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.
Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.
Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.
Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.
He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.
For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.
“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”
“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list.” — Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla and his mother, Carmen Bonilla, at their house in Valencia, VenezuelaTo deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.
Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.
To examine those claims, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) launched an exhaustive investigation of the backgrounds of the 238 men on the list of detainees first published by CBS. Last week, we published a first-of-its-kind database that highlights our findings, including the fact the Trump administration knew at least 197 of the men had no criminal convictions in the U.S. Nearly half the men had open immigration cases when they were deported, and at least 166 have tattoos, which experts have told us are not an indicator of gang membership.
When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.
He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.
“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”
The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.
Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.
“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.
Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.
They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”
Blanco was detained during an immigration appointment and sent to CECOT, where he says guards beat and humiliated him.The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.
Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”
Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”
Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.
The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.
Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. ... Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”
Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”
Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.
About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.
Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.
This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.
Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.
Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”
“I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience.” — Juan José Ramos Ramos Ramos and his mother, Lina Ramos, at their homeIn a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.
The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.
Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”
During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”
That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.
As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.
Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”
But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.
He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.
Do You Have Information About the CECOT Deportations? Help ProPublica Report.
Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu. Photo editing by Cengiz Yar. Gabriel Sandoval contributed reporting.
Kali Larsen sat at her desk at Fruitland Elementary School in Idaho earlier this year, trying to read the test questions as her classmates silently worked around her. Her anxiety climbed as she stared at the paper. She asked to use the bathroom and left the room.
Her mother, Jessica Larsen, had been substitute teaching that day when she received a call from the front office, notifying her that her 9-year-old daughter was having a panic attack. Kali, now 10, has dyslexia and struggles with reading and writing, Larsen said.
“Wouldn’t you be anxious?” Larsen told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica.
For years, Larsen had been pleading with the Fruitland School District to get Kali qualified for special education for reading. Larsen, who herself was diagnosed later in life with dyslexia, had her daughter tested in first grade in 2021 by a private specialist who said Kali had the same disability. But a diagnosis doesn’t automatically qualify a student for special education. The school still wouldn’t evaluate Kali for help, saying she likely wouldn’t qualify, in part because her scores weren’t low enough, Larsen said.
Larsen grew more frustrated with each passing school year as her child — a shy girl who feels most confident when competing in rodeos on her horse, Pie — would cry after school and tell her she felt “dumb.” A year before her daughter’s panic attack in fourth grade, Larsen had filed a state complaint against the district, saying it refused to evaluate Kali for special education. A few months later, in March 2024, a state investigator agreed: The district had broken the law.
Parents of students with disabilities have increasingly resorted to filing complaints with the state over their schools’ failure to educate their children, alleging districts are violating federal law. Most of the time, state investigators have agreed and found that districts refuse to identify and evaluate children with disabilities, such as dyslexia or autism, and fail to follow plans to educate them fairly.
In Idaho, students with disabilities have performed worse in reading and math than many of their peers in other states, federal data shows. Idaho was among the states with the most founded complaints per capita in recent years, according to a national center that analyzes data on complaints and provides support to states. Over the past five years, investigators found in over 70% of the complaints filed in Idaho that districts had broken the law.
But the state often closes cases without making sure the districts have fully solved the problems, parents across Idaho told the Statesman and ProPublica.
Districts can resolve the violations without “really changing their ways,” said Amy Martz, a Utah-based attorney who has worked with families in Idaho. “There’s no teeth.”
State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield said the state Department of Education expects districts to make any corrections needed to be in full compliance with state and federal law, and that it has conducted listening sessions and piloted other programs to help meet the needs of students and parents.
Critchfield said the challenge with educating students with disabilities comes down, in part, to the way the state distributes funding, which is based on a flat percentage and not the actual number of students with disabilities in each district. She said staff members have large caseloads and districts lack trained staff and specialists.
Parents say it can take months for the districts to evaluate a child for services, and in some cases, districts have refused to provide the instruction or behavioral interventions students need.
Lawmakers have been reluctant to approve changes to the funding formula despite warnings from state officials about a shortfall between what districts spend on special education and what the state allocates. An independent oversight office this year estimated the gap to be over $80 million. Idaho routinely ranks last in the nation for funding per student overall.
Larsen said she didn’t want to get the district or teachers in trouble when she filed her complaint. But she said she risked retaliation, in a small community where speaking out can be damaging, because she intended to make public schools better for her daughter and other kids.
“We’re failing our kids. This is our future,” Larsen said. “Why are we failing them? And that’s my question to them, but they can’t answer.”
Jessica Larsen and Kali at their home in Fruitland, Idaho. Kali is passionate about horses and competes in rodeos with her horse, Pie. (Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman) What Investigators FoundSchool districts nationwide are required to identify children who have disabilities or health impairments that could make it harder to learn, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or dyslexia, and evaluate them for special education services. A parent can also formally request an evaluation of their child. Under federal law, if the school has any reason to suspect a disability, it must provide that evaluation.
But when Larsen asked the district to evaluate her daughter, the school pushed back.
Records show that district officials over a period of 1 1/2 years provided numerous reasons Kali didn’t need or wouldn’t qualify for special education: Her low reading scores were mainly due to anxiety, rather than a disability; she needed to advocate for herself; she was “making progress”; a special education evaluation would take a long time; if she received special education services, she’d miss out on valuable instruction time in a general education classroom.
Fruitland Elementary School (Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman)A few months after Larsen filed her complaint in 2024, an investigator contracted by the state Department of Education concluded that the district didn’t have procedures in place to make sure all students with disabilities were identified and helped, and that it hadn’t conducted a full evaluation of Kali, even after Larsen requested it. The investigators issued a corrective action plan and ordered the district to begin the evaluation process with Kali within about two weeks and to help her within two months if they found she qualified for special education.
Fruitland Superintendent Stoney Winston, who started in July 2024, after the state issued the corrective action plan, said the district has “made corrections” and is meeting current requirements. He said he can’t speak to what happened before he assumed his role.
Get in TouchDo you have personal experience with problems related to special education in Idaho or accessibility through the Americans with Disabilities Act in schools? We want to hear from you, whether you’re a student, a parent, an educator or an administrator. We will only use your name with permission. Reach out to Becca Savransky at bsavransky@idahostatesman.com or 208-495-5661.
Disability advocates have said the lack of funding makes it hard for school districts in the state to attract qualified specialists or special education teachers who fully understand the law, which can lead to improper education plans or other violations. High caseloads for staff members also mean less time for making or implementing specialized education plans, they said.
The state relies on a decades-old funding formula that assumes a set percentage of students in every district would qualify for special education: 6% in elementary school and 5.5% in middle and high school. State education officials acknowledged those percentages were never adequate. Officials said they don’t know how lawmakers first arrived at that formula.
“That 5.5 and that 6%, which was already insufficient back in 2016, is even more insufficient,” said Casey Petti, from Idaho’s Office of Performance Evaluations, an independent oversight agency.
According to the most recent data, about 12% of students in Idaho qualify for special education services — the lowest in the country.
In 2009, that agency told Idaho officials to consider tying special education funding to the actual cost of educating those students. In 2016, the office came out with a report with the same findings.
That same year, the Legislature created a committee to research the issue and rewrite the state’s funding formula. The committee met for three years, and in 2019, lawmakers proposed legislation. While those proposals would have provided money for special education based on the number of students actually receiving services, state education officials and school administrators said they were left out of the process and the legislation would be difficult to implement. The state superintendent at the time questioned whether it would even adequately fund special education.
Most Idaho School Districts Had to Spend More on Special Education Than the State AllocatedNearly 75% of school districts that received state funding for special education programs spent anywhere from $640 to $19 million more than what the state provided during the 2023-24 school year.
Source: Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations (Chris Alcantara/ProPublica) Source: Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations. Note: West Bonner and Wendell school districts are not shown because they did not have financial data available for 2023. Prairie Elementary School District is not included because it had no estimated special education state allocations. Pleasant Valley Elementary District, Avery School District and Three Creek Joint Elementary School District are also not shown because they reported no special education spending and had no estimated special education allocations. All allocations are estimates based on Idaho’s funding formula. View the full table on ProPublica's site.In the years since, lawmakers have introduced other bills to revise the funding formula, but the Legislature did not approve any of them. The cost to investigate complaints overall has nearly tripled since the 2020 school year, according to the state Department of Education, with each investigation ranging from a few hundred dollars to $30,000.
This year, the Idaho Legislature approved adding another specialist to help handle complaints. During the 2023-24 school year, the state received 53 complaints and found districts were out of compliance in most of them.
But while the state has spent more money to investigate the problems, administrators said they have been given little to fix them. In Idaho, districts rely on local taxpayers to fund special education more than in many other states, according to a 2024 study by Bellwether, a nonprofit that analyzed data from the National Center for Education Statistics for the 24 states where it was available.
Boundary County Superintendent Jan Bayer described special education as an “unfunded mandate.” The district spends about $1.7 million from its general fund to educate students with disabilities and goes to its taxpayers every two years to ask for additional funding to provide other programs.
Other superintendents said it was difficult to meet the needs of every student in special education.
“While we provide the vast majority of our students with the services they need, we do have a couple of higher need students who need more services than we can provide,” Butte County Superintendent Joe Steele, who retired this summer, said in an email to the Statesman. But finding educators or specialists with the proper training, and paying for them, would be challenging in the remote area, he said.
Kendra Scheid watched her son struggle in a larger district with high caseloads and inexperienced staff. Scheid’s son, who is autistic and nonverbal, qualified for developmental preschool before moving into the Pocatello-Chubbuck School District in eastern Idaho. But the district told her that her son could attend preschool only two days a week for 2 1/2 hours each day.
Before her son started attending full-day kindergarten, Scheid asked the school for a meeting to put together a revised education plan for her son. But the district refused, according to the complaint investigation.
Scheid went to school with her son on the first days, where he was placed with other students with disabilities, and witnessed what she described as chaos: kids climbing on tables, students injuring themselves with no staff intervention and teachers restraining children in their chairs. “They had no idea what any of these kids needed, what any of these kids were like coming into the classroom,” she said.
Pocatello school district spokesperson Courtney Fisher said the district is committed to “proactively addressing parent concerns” and improving its special education services. That includes putting into place a plan that meets all state requirements and hiring more staff, she said, and trying to address any gaps in its system to prevent issues in the future.
I feel like a bad mom because I didn’t know this stuff at the time. And I feel like I let my son down.
—Kendra ScheidAfter school on the second day, Scheid’s son came home crying and covering his ears, something she said he hadn’t done before. After day three, Scheid disenrolled her son from the district. For the rest of that year, he saw outside therapists and Scheid worked with him at home.
After she filed a complaint with the state, an investigator found the district had broken the law when it failed to create a plan that would work for her son and to ensure the teacher had his previous education plan before school started. The state said the district must create a new education plan for her son should he reenroll, but Scheid had lost faith. Instead, she entered and won one of the few available lottery spots in a charter school, which her son now attends.
“I feel like a bad mom because I didn’t know this stuff at the time,” reflected Scheid, who said her son is now doing well in a charter school that’s more accommodating. “And I feel like I let my son down.”
“I Would Never Move Back There”About 20% of Idaho districts have broken federal disability law multiple times in the past five years, and nearly 40% have violated the law at least once, according to data from the state Department of Education. When they do, the state, which enforces the federal law and corresponding state rules, asks them to fix the problems through corrective action plans.
The plans reviewed by the news outlets ask district staff to undergo training, and sometimes a child gets additional hours of education to make up for the time missed. But a Statesman and ProPublica review of corrective action plans and interviews with parents showed districts repeatedly receive training for the same problems and commit similar violations.
Critchfield, the state superintendent, said there are several factors that could play a role in whether training is successful for districts permanently, including staff turnover and access to resources.
“Compliance with state and federal law is the ultimate goal,” she said in an email. “As a department, we are always prepared to provide remedial training and intervention to address additional concerns as they arise.”
The Pocatello school district received 11 complaints over the past five years, according to data from the state Department of Education. The Garden Valley School District received 10. In both of these districts, federal investigators found systemic violations in special education law that impacted more than one student. The state Department of Education refused to provide the number of founded complaints per district, citing federal law on student privacy, though some other states publicly post much of their complaint investigations online.
Andrew Branham was among several parents who filed complaints against the Garden Valley School District over the past three years.
The Branhams wrote in the complaint that their daughter received “virtually no education” and was denied services, such as speech and counseling. At one point, they said a school resource officer called her parents threatening to arrest her. Her parents said they rushed to school to find her barefoot in the middle of the parking lot as several adults looked on. A state investigator concluded that the district in some instances had “relied” on the resource officer to address the student’s behavior.
Branham said the district was “unwilling” to meet the needs of their daughter. The Branhams elevated their case, hiring an attorney who presented it before a state-contracted hearing officer. The Branhams received a financial settlement with the district and moved to Washington to get their daughter a better education.
“It is a shame what Idaho is doing to kids in that state,” Branham said in December. “I would never move back there, and I would never recommend anyone live in that state, especially if you have special needs kids.”
After the Branhams filed their complaint and went public, more than 20 families shared similar experiences, they said. So they filed a complaint on behalf of other families that alleged that the district ignored state and federal laws meant to protect students with disabilities and denied them an education.
The resulting state investigations concluded that at least 13 of the allegations were founded. The district failed to properly construct education plans for students. It also didn’t have the proper plans for supporting a child with behavioral issues. The district did not gather or share the data it needed to assess student progress and could not adequately determine whether students were meeting their learning goals, the investigations found.
The state decided the district needed extra help, ranking Garden Valley in 2024 as one of three districts in need of substantial intervention. The state now requires the district to follow an improvement plan and monitors its progress — but the district’s funding remains the same.
The Garden Valley School District did not respond to requests for comment.
Families in other districts have also pulled their children from local schools. Some parents and advocates who talked to the Statesman said they are especially worried about President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and leave it to the states when Idaho has long struggled to provide an education to students with disabilities.
In Kali’s case, the state’s corrective action plan issued in 2024, in addition to requiring that the district start to evaluate Larsen’s daughter, also mandated that the district help teachers learn how to spot students who should be evaluated for special education and identify those with disabilities.
The state closed the case earlier this year, about a year after it was filed. Kali had been struggling without adequate help for three years before the district conceded she was eligible for special education services.
Kali now has an education plan, but Larsen said the district still isn’t giving her the help she needs. She just finished fourth grade and still hasn’t mastered reading and writing. As her daughter prepares for middle school, Larsen is considering pulling her from the district next year. But Larsen doesn’t plan on filing another complaint. It was too much stress with little to show for it, she said.
When Kali was moved to a different classroom each day to receive more specialized instruction, her teachers sometimes told her to sit and read quietly, Larsen said.
“She can’t read,” Larsen said, exasperated. “It’s so frustrating.”
Kali uses a voice search tool on Google to help her with spelling. (Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman)
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