Something very interesting about the fact that a vote created the Special School District of St. Louis County stands out. People in St. Louis County who had disabled children in 1957 didn’t wait for the government to give them something. They pushed. They planned. People in the county voted for the district to exist at a time when it wasn’t even assumed that children with disabilities would be able to go to public school. That moment of founding was “bold,” as Holly K. Hacker of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it, and it’s hard to disagree.
That beginning story is important because what’s happening in the Special School District of St. Louis County right now seems to go against it.
A family is suing the school district, saying that their 9-year-old son, who went to Southview School in Sunset Hills and has autism and ADHD, was put in an observation room 66 times over the course of two school years, for a total of about six hours. “It was easier for them to throw them in a room and lock them in there than it was to just teach the kid,” said Grant Boyd, their lawyer. It’s clear what it means. For the same reason, it’s hard to dismiss what federal investigators have found.
The lawsuit came soon after a harsh report from the U.S. Department of Justice criticized the district’s practices of seclusion and restraint. The report says that over the course of two years, about 300 students were put in separate rooms about 4,000 times. Seven hundred and seventy times, 150 more students were physically restrained. One student was put in a separate area 186 times in one school year, which is the same as 17 full school days. The Department of Justice (DOJ) said these actions were unfair and kept students from getting a good education. Boyd thought of it as “a pattern, a practice, a systemic issue.” It’s tough not to agree.
Missouri law only allows people to be alone when they are in immediate danger. The lawsuit and the DOJ report both say that seclusion wasn’t used as a last resort in real emergencies, but as a way to deal with people talking too much. So that managers can use it. There is a clear difference between those two things. One is a safety measure. The other one is a fine. It’s also a serious failure of institutional purpose to use it on kids who already have a lot of trouble learning in a district that was made to help them.
In March 2025, the problem went from being a failure of policy to being a crime. Charles Thomas, a staff member, was charged with grabbing a 7-year-old student, pushing them into a closet, and blocking the door. She admitted to a misdemeanor charge of assault. Her lawyer pointed out that she had only been working there for a few weeks and hadn’t had much training. The training piece is the detail that keeps coming up.
Sarah Hertel, a paraprofessional, told the school board in October 2025 that the district was “so critically understaffed that the safety and well-being of our SSD students, general education students, and staff have become serious concerns.” Not having enough staff or training doesn’t make what happened to these kids okay. But they do help show how a district gets on the radar of the DOJ. If you push systems too far, people will take short-cuts. People fear what they don’t know when they aren’t trained to judge.
The district does work with dozens of partner school districts and runs special campuses like Ackerman School in Florissant, Litzsinger School in Ladue, and both Northview and Neuwoehner High Schools. They have refused to say anything in public because they are still dealing with legal issues. Reports say that the DOJ has made an offer of a settlement. It’s still not clear what that settlement contains.
The Special School District of St. Louis County was founded on the truly progressive idea that all children, including those with disabilities, should be able to go to school. That thought is still valid. But right now, it’s hard to look past the gap between the district’s founding principles and how it works now.
