Jury Orders Higashi School To Pay $2 Million For Teen's Abuse
By Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express
November 20, 2006

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS--A jury has ordered officials at a private residential school for students with autism to pay $2 million to a family that claimed its son was abused while at the facility.

According to the November 17 Boston Globe, the Suffolk County jury found the executive director, three teachers, a doctor, and an administrator of the Boston Higashi School responsible for the physical abuse that Scott Tedeman suffered before his family withdrew him from the facility in July 2000.

Police investigations revealed that an instructor at the school dragged the 18-year-old Tedeman by the ankles across the floor when he refused to make his bed. His father, John, described the bloody abrasions on his son's back, forehead and elbow as looking as if he had been on the "losing end of a vicious fight".

The facility has come under scrutiny in recent years over allegations of abuse. In October 2002, a Wall Street Journal investigation detailed 17 abuse allegations lodged against the school since 1995.

Last year, a former Boston Higashi School teacher was convicted of injuring a student.

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Reproduced here under special arrangement with Inclusion Daily Express international disability rights news service.
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