ALABAMA STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES SHOWERED, BERATED: ‘I WAS OUTRAGED’

By Trisha Powell Crain

The flurry of text messages came late one afternoon in 2021. An aide at Discovery Middle School told Kristi Krueger that her daughter was in trouble.

“They just put her in the quiet room,” one text read, “then yelled at her that if she can’t stop making noises she’s going back in there.”

“I’m on my way to get her,” Krueger texted back and headed to the school.

Krueger learned from the aide that staff had put her 14-year-old daughter into a shower. Her daughter, who has autism and limited ability to communicate with words, hates showers.

Fifteen minutes later, Krueger took her daughter — whose wet hair was pulled into a ponytail — from the school and began to piece together what had happened. Since her daughter’s clothes were not wet, Krueger wondered if the staff had made her daughter strip before showering.

“I was outraged,” Krueger told AL.com. “I couldn’t believe the school could do this to my child.”

Now, more than two years later, after investigations from police and school officials, Krueger believes children with disabilities at Alabama schools do not have enough protection.

Her family’s case illustrates how hard it is to get police, education and state officials on the same page about allegations of mistreatment of students with disabilities — and how the system to track educators with flags on their records still has cracks in it.

“It seems to me that conduct like this is somehow more tolerated if the kid has a disability,” Dan Stewart, the lead attorney at the National Disability Rights Network, told AL.com.

‘Misconduct’

At Discovery Middle School in Madison, a student and an adult in the room told police that Maya Ries, a special education teacher, and Alisi Outly, an aide, mistreated students in a special education classroom during the 2021-22 school year. A school district investigation later confirmed those accounts.

The school district found that Ries and Outly put Krueger’s daughter in the shower “as a consequence for noncompliance with commands” and also sprayed her with a water bottle. A report by the school district also said that Outly spoke to Krueger’s daughter “in a demeaning and inappropriate manner.”

Ed Nichols, the superintendent in Madison, told the state in March 2022 that “most of the misconduct was attributed to Ms. Outly. However, Ms. Ries was the teacher responsible for the classroom and the investigation supported a finding that she was aware of the mistreatment of students by Ms. Outly, did not intervene to stop it and failed to report any of the misconduct.”

“For example, Ms. Ries witnessed Ms. Outly antagonize students, speak to students in a demeaning manner, spray students with a spray water bottle, take scrunchies or hairbows from students as a behavioral consequence, eat students’ snacks and throw markers at students.”

Parent complaints

The Kruegers filed a police report on Sept. 22, 2021, believing the educators’ actions were criminal. The next day, the Madison City Police Department opened an investigation. And a week after that, Madison City School officials started their own investigation.

Other parents heard about Krueger’s daughter and the police investigation. They, too, had concerns about what was happening in that special education classroom.

Krueger removed her daughter from Discovery Middle School. On Sept. 29, 2021, Madison City Schools placed Ries and Outly on paid administrative leave. After a three-month investigation, Superintendent Nichols gave the two an ultimatum: Resign or be fired.

In interviews with a police investigator, Ries and Outly denied mistreating Krueger’s daughter. They said she was put in the shower because she was menstruating and messed up her clothes. (Krueger said her daughter was not having a period at that time.) Outly said she only sprayed students with water on hot days when asked.

Both resigned in December 2021. In her four-page resignation letter, Ries did not directly address the allegations, instead pointing to her hard work during the COVID pandemic.

“I simply can’t do this anymore,” Ries wrote. “I will not allow the struggles from this school year at Madison City Schools to deter me from what I know I am meant to do. I am meant to be a teacher and I will provide love and care to another group of students elsewhere.”

“The detective came up with no abuse. The school system came up with no abuse,” Ries wrote.

Ries and Outly then found work in a neighboring school system.

Ries did not respond to requests for comment from AL.com. Outly declined to talk to an AL.com reporter.

Serious allegations

In Madison City, people said they witnessed Outly restrain a student multiple times and put a student in a “quiet room” in the dark. People also claimed Outly and Ries “allowed students to strip down and play in the shower but kept the door open to monitor in view of the whole room”, according to the police file reviewed by AL.com.

The school district also found that Ries “engaged in the inappropriate use of physical restraint and inappropriately used the quiet room as a behavioral consequence.”

And while some schools offer showers to students who need to clean up, Madison City board attorney William Sanderson told AL.com that staff should contact parents if a student needs a shower, and that showering should only happen in rare circumstances. A parent should be given the option to pick up their student instead of having staff give their child a shower, Sanderson said.

A new job in the district next door

Once the pair of educators were no longer working in Madison City schools, they were free to seek jobs in other school districts. And they did.

Ries was hired as a collaborative special education teacher at Meridianville Middle School in Madison County on Jan. 4, 2022, before Madison City had notified the state about her resignation.

A review of Ries’ personnel records in October of 2023 showed no disciplinary issues at Meridianville.

In Outly’s case, Madison City was not required to notify the state about her resignation because she was an aide.

Alabama has no system for tracking allegations against school aides. They are not certified or licensed by the state.

Outly was hired as a special education aide at Sparkman High School in Madison County in August 2022. She worked as a long-term substitute in a special education classroom from January 2023 through the end of the school year.

Outly’s personnel file in Madison County now has a handwritten “do not hire” notation.

What the district said happened at Discovery Middle School

Superintendent Nichols told the state about Ries’ resignation in January 2022, four months after Krueger’s daughter was showered at school.

When asked why Nichols did not report the shower, a district spokesperson told AL.com that initial information provided to the department “generally serves as a basis for further investigation by the Department, as deemed necessary.”

In March, Nichols, in response to the state’s request for more information, wrote the district’s investigation found that “most of the misconduct was attributed to Ms. Outly.” But the district did find that Ries participated in some of the alleged mistreatment, including threatening “students that they would be sprayed with a spray water bottle if they did not comply with directions.”

The district’s response to the Kruegers stated, “Following the investigation, the District concluded that the behavior of [Ries and Outly] was inappropriate and inconsistent with the expectations of Madison City Schools.

“Madison City Schools asked that we share a formal apology for the misconduct of its two former employees,” the school district’s letter said.

Nancy Anderson is an attorney with the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, an agency that advocates for people with disabilities and investigates complaints of abuse and mistreatment of children in special education.

“It would never be appropriate to use aversive punishment,” Anderson said. “You spray water in the face of a cat climbing up and pulling on your sofa. You don’t spray water on a child’s face.”

Police and state investigations

Meanwhile, the Madison City police department reopened the case in January 2022 after receiving results of the school district’s investigation.

The Madison County District Attorney took the case to a grand jury in September of 2022, seeking a felony charge of child abuse against Outly. The grand jury chose not to indict the aide. A city magistrate in Madison also declined to issue a misdemeanor warrant for harassment.

The Kruegers contacted the state department of education in September 2022 to ask whether Ries’ teaching certificate was still valid. They did not know that state superintendent Eric Mackey told Ries in late June that he had decided to take no action against her teaching certificate.

“We are concerned that Maya Ries still has a teaching license and that she is currently teaching in a nearby district,” the Kruegers wrote.

In November 2022, the state department notified Ries that it would open a new investigation into her certification based on allegations of misconduct. Krueger said she was relieved to get that news. More than a year later, that investigation is still underway.

Limits in law, policy

State laws and school policies, advocates say, are not always equipped to deal with children with disabilities, especially if they cannot communicate verbally or in writing.

Tim Douthit, a prosecutor in Madison County who worked on the case, told AL.com that he didn’t think the educators’ actions met the bar for abuse under Alabama criminal laws.

“There was kind of this gap between harassment,” said Douthit. “And then it was a really big jump up to the felony. It almost had to be torture, cruelly beat, starving them, things like that.”

State law also gives a lot of leeway to teachers, Douthit said, who, like parents, may do things that are seen as harmful to a child – but are not necessarily illegal.

In 2023, state lawmakers expanded the definition of child abuse beyond actions that leave a mark on a child’s body — such as bruises or burns — to include “mistreatment.” That could mean “any intentional behavior that inflicts unnecessary or unjustifiable pain or suffering on a child without causing physical injury to the child,” according to the new law.

When contacted by AL.com, Madison police Capt. Lamar Anderson said the department would not comment on the case.

Since concluding their investigation, Madison City Schools installed more than 150 cameras in self-contained special education classrooms across the district — including at Discovery Middle School.

Krueger moved her daughter to a different school in the district. The teacher doesn’t put students in the shower there, using it instead as a storage area, Krueger said. And there is a camera in her classroom.

“The cameras will help,” she said, while noting cameras probably wouldn’t have caught educators putting her daughter and other children into the shower, she added.

For now, Krueger is awaiting Ries’ administrative hearing, where she plans to testify. The hearing has been postponed since October. No new date has been set.

She wants to testify so that she can be sure everyone understands the severity of what happened to her daughter.

“I want them to know that was not okay.”

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