Browsing: Education

by Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel

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Ken Griffin, the multibillionaire CEO of the Citadel investment firm, sued the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department today for what he alleges was an “unlawful disclosure of Griffin’s confidential tax return information.”

Beginning in 2021, ProPublica started publishing The Secret IRS Files, a series of stories on the tax avoidance techniques of the ultrawealthy. The series is based on IRS tax information covering thousands of the wealthiest Americans over more than 15 years. Articles have detailed how Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other billionaires keep their income tax rates lower than those of average Americans and how some billionaires can go years and years without paying any income tax.

Republican members of Congress have repeatedly criticized the IRS over what they allege was a data breach and have vowed investigations now that the party has secured a majority in the House for 2023. Griffin is one the top Republican donors in the country.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and Justice Department have said they are investigating the tax record disclosures. The IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the suit.

Two ProPublica stories this year revealed Griffin’s income in recent years and his tax payments.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida, alleges the IRS “made these unlawful disclosures knowingly, or at the very least negligently or with gross negligence.”

“Despite being aware of its security deficiencies for over a decade, the IRS willfully failed to establish appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to insure the security of confidential tax return information, including Mr. Griffin’s confidential tax return information,” it says. “IRS personnel exploited these willful failures to misappropriate Mr. Griffin’s confidential tax return information and unlawfully disclose that information to ProPublica for further publication.”

Griffin, who Forbes estimates is worth $32 billion, is seeking $1,000 for each act of “unauthorized” disclosure, citing a specific IRS statute, as well as unspecified legal damages, and that taxpayers pay his legal costs.

In a comment, a Griffin spokesperson wrote: “IRS employees deliberately stole the confidential tax returns of several hundred successful American business leaders. It is unacceptable that government officials have failed to thoroughly investigate this unlawful theft of confidential and personal information. Americans expect our government to uphold the laws of our nation when it comes to our private and personal information — whether it be tax returns or health care records.”

He did not respond to a question about how much the legal effort is costing him.

In an essay published alongside the first article in the Secret IRS Files series, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, Stephen Engelberg, and its then-president, Dick Tofel, explained that ProPublica was publishing the tax information “quite selectively and carefully” because “we believe it serves the public interest in fundamental ways, allowing readers to see patterns that were until now hidden.” The Secret IRS Files series sparked a broad conversation about the fairness of the U.S. tax system, and a number of legislative proposals followed in its wake, including a proposal by the Biden administration for a billionaire’s tax.

ProPublica has declined to elaborate on how and when we obtained the tax information or to comment on any investigations of the leak. We do not know who the source or sources of the tax information was.

In an April story about the top earning Americans and what taxes they paid, ProPublica reported that Griffin had the fourth-highest income in the country between 2013 and 2018, according to the data. He reported an average annual income of nearly $1.7 billion. Griffin paid a tax rate of 29.2% during these years, a higher rate than many of his hedge fund manager peers but significantly lower than the top marginal income tax rate of around 40%.

That article explained that even though our system is designed to tax the rich at higher rates than everyone else, it doesn’t work that way for those at the apex of the income pyramid. On average, they pay far lower tax rates than the merely affluent do. And even among the top 400 earners, people from certain industries have it better than others: Tech billionaires pay rates well below hedge fund managers.

In response to that article, a spokesperson for Griffin said the tax rates in the IRS data “significantly understate” what Griffin pays, because the rates were lowered by charitable contributions and do not reflect local and state taxes. He also said Griffin pays foreign taxes, which aren’t included in IRS calculations of effective tax rate.

In a second story, ProPublica showed how much Griffin stood to gain from having bankrolled a fight against an income tax increase in his then-home state of Illinois. He spent $54 million fighting that tax. The effort was a success and the increase went down in defeat.

That campaign spending was worth it for Griffin. Based on his past income, the increase could have cost him as much as $80 million in a year. (Subsequently, Griffin moved from Illinois to Florida, which has no state income tax.)

In another series about the IRS, this one in 2018, ProPublica highlighted how the agency was gutted. Congress, driven by Republicans after the Tea Party wave election in 2010, repeatedly cut the IRS budget, resulting in a loss of billions of dollars of funding. Tens of thousands of IRS employees left. Audits, particularly of the wealthiest Americans and the largest corporations, plummeted. Criminal investigations of tax evasion fell dramatically.

During the years of budget cuts, IRS commissioners repeatedly pleaded with Congress for increased funding. This year, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress allocated $80 billion over ten years to the agency to rebuild its systems and hire staff.

by Annie Waldman, Aliyya Swaby and Anna Clark, with additional reporting by Nicole Santa Cruz, photography by Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In Amite County, Mississippi, where a third of adults struggle to read, evidence of America’s silent literacy crisis is everywhere.

It’s in a storefront on Main Street, in the fading mill town of Gloster, where 80-year-old Lillie Jackson helps people read their mail. “They can’t comprehend their bills,” she said. “So many of them are ashamed that they haven’t finished grade school.” She longs for the day she can retire, but she doesn’t want to abandon her neighbors. “That’s the only reason I really stay open,” she said.

It’s in the Greentree Lumber mill, where dozens of residents cut Southern yellow pine into boards, but supervisors — who must be able to page through machine guides and safety manuals — are recruited from other counties. “We’re going to have demand for jobs with no people to supply them,” mill accountant Pam Whittington said.

Lillie Jackson helps a customer pay bills from her business on Main Street in Gloster, Mississippi. Greentree Lumber mill in Liberty, Mississippi.

And it’s in the local high school, in a district where a fifth of students drop out, one of the highest rates in the state. Principal Warren Eyster has seen low literacy trickle from one generation to the next — an unusually American phenomenon.

In other wealthy countries, adults with limited education who were born into families with little history of schooling are twice as likely to surpass their parents’ literacy skills. Here, one’s destiny is uniquely entrenched. Though nationwide graduation rates have risen in recent decades, the number of adults who struggle to read remains stubbornly high: 48 million, or 23%.

If there were local programs that could teach adults the reading skills they never got, those parents could help educate their kids and get better jobs, Eyster said. The entire county would benefit: “Our tax base would go up,” he said. But in Amite County, no such program exists.

Amite County High School Principal Warren Eyster believes his community would benefit from an adult education program.

In a nation whose education system is among the most unequal in the industrialized world, where race and geography play an outsize role in determining one’s path to success, many Americans are being failed twice: first, by public schools that lack qualified teachers, resources for students with disabilities and adequate reading instruction; and next, by the backup system intended to catch those failed by the first.

Nearly 60 years ago, the federal government established funding to provide free education for adults who could not read to help them improve their literacy and obtain employment. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson recognized how low literacy intertwined with poverty and all the ills that came with it. The adult education system they built was supposed to give people everywhere a second chance at success.

States Vary Widely in Funding Adult Education

(Source: Data for state funding came from the 2020-21 <a href=”https://nrs.ed.gov/”>initial federal financial reports</a> through the National Reporting System for Adult Education, as required by the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act, Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Data for the eligible number of students by state came from U.S Department of Education estimates of qualifying adults obtained through a records request. The funding data is derived from initial reports and is subject to change. Note: As of Dec. 13, 2022, Kentucky’s <a href=”https://nrs.ed.gov/rt/ky/2020″>initial federal financial report</a> for 2020-21 was not available through the National Reporting System for Adult Education.)

But, ProPublica found, access to this instruction is limited, increasingly insufficient and — much like the nation’s school systems — highly dependent on geography and the political will of elected officials.

The federal government provided roughly $675 million to states for adult education last year, an amount that’s been relatively unchanged for more than two decades when adjusted for inflation. It’s not enough, and states that oversee these programs are required to commit their own share of funding. A review of adult education spending found glaring disparities among states, with some investing more than four times as much as others for each eligible student.

“The magnitude of the need for adult education services has long eclipsed Congressional appropriations,” a U.S. Department of Education spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Funding levels have not kept pace with the rising cost of service delivery, nor are funding levels commensurate with the millions of people who could benefit from adult education services.”

ProPublica reporters interviewed dozens of students and adult education workers in states that historically have contributed some of the least funding. We found that in some states, programs keep adults on waitlists, unable to meet demand. Some students succeed in these programs, but many drop out within weeks or months, before they are able to make progress. Students often find themselves in overstuffed classes led by uncertified part-time or volunteer teachers.

Resources are scant. An adult education manager at Copiah-Lincoln Community College in Mississippi said she can’t afford enough practice exams. The supervisor of Nevada’s programs, unable to hire enough teachers, worries about having to put students on waitlists. And most programs across the country lack the specialized staff to help adults with learning disabilities that public schools failed to have diagnosed.

In fact, the entire system is set up to prioritize students who can quickly graduate with a high school or work credential, often leaving behind those who need more time to overcome greater reading gaps. Programs that offer more personalized assistance frequently say they can only do so with private support.

Vast swaths of some states are literacy deserts, lacking any government-run adult education classes. This is the case for about a fifth of Mississippi counties, where hundreds of thousands of people live. Students are forced to cross county lines to attend classes or forgo them altogether. “In an ideal world, each county would have a physical location where adult education classes are offered,” said Kell Smith, the interim executive director of the state’s Community College Board, which oversees adult education. “However, due to financial constraints, this is not possible.” (Read the full response here.) Gov. Tate Reeves did not respond to a request for comment.

Many counties that lack programs also double as hot spots of low adult literacy. These are primarily in the mountains of Appalachia, the Southern Black Belt, the Central Valley of California and along the Texas border with Mexico, but they exist throughout the nation. In about 500 American counties, nearly a third of adults struggle to read basic English, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal literacy data. These adults may have a basic vocabulary and be able to interpret short texts, but their reading comprehension may be limited beyond that.

Hot Spots of Low Literacy Persist Across the Country

(Source: National Center for Education Statistics. Note: The NCES defined adults with low literacy skills as those who tested at or below Level 1, the lowest outcome of its <a href=”https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/”>national survey</a>, or those who were unable to participate in the survey because of cognitive, physical or language barriers. People with low literacy skills may be able to read a basic vocabulary and decipher short texts, but their reading comprehension abilities are limited.)

In communities with lower literacy, personal challenges magnify into collective crises. In Detroit, for example, former police Chief James Craig recalled how, in their coursework, academy recruits from poorly performing schools had the most trouble with reading. It was harder for them to complete the program, he said, which added to the recruitment challenges faced by the police in Detroit and other cities.

Back in Amite County, Cartina Knox, 50, said she’d jump at the chance to learn what she missed after dropping out of school in ninth grade. But the nearest program is 30 miles away, and she can’t afford a car to get there. “They need places like that out here,” she said.

Standing before a sea of glaring television lights in the packed congressional chamber, President Kennedy exposed an invisible epidemic, reflected in the rates of military rejections, welfare enrollment and incidents of crime.

Millions of Americans were “functionally illiterate,” Kennedy told the nation during his 1962 State of the Union address. In the distinctive clip of his Boston accent, he called for a “massive attack to end this adult illiteracy,” marking a shift from decades of limited and sporadic federal action.

“The economic result of this lack of schooling is often chronic unemployment, dependency or delinquency,” he later told lawmakers. “The twin tragedies of illiteracy and dependency are often passed on from generation to generation.”

President Johnson soon delivered on this call to action, launching the nation’s first federal adult education program as part of his War on Poverty. The goal: Educate Americans whose inability to read or write kept them impoverished and out of the workforce.

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The federal government covered the vast majority of costs for free, state-run adult literacy classes. The funds were initially limited to basic instruction, excluding high school credential programs. As the effort expanded, the government mandated that states recruit adults with the highest literacy needs and urged programs to help with transportation and child care. Buoyed by federal funds, enrollment that started at 38,000 in 1965 soared to a peak of about 4 million by 1996.

But in more recent years, fundamental shifts in the program’s goals and funding impeded its success.

The adult education system began to morph into what is now effectively a credentialing program largely aimed at pumping out students with high-school equivalency or workforce certificates. The federal government started tracking student gains as a way to measure performance. States can use these indicators to determine local funding levels or even eliminate funding to programs not meeting high enough standards. This shift led programs to prioritize more advanced students, often at the expense of those originally envisioned by Kennedy: adults who lacked basic reading skills and needed more help.

“The purpose of these programs is no longer to provide literacy education. That is not what they do anymore,” said Amy Pickard, an assistant professor of education at Indiana University Bloomington.

All the while, as federal funding stagnated, states were called on to put up more money or risk atrophying their programs. National enrollment has careened down to only 700,000 students last year. Despite the country’s immense need, less than 3% of eligible adults receive services.

Jacqueline Davis in front of her home in Memphis. She was kept out of school as a child.

By the time Jacqueline Davis sought reading help, the system was no longer built to serve her. The 62-year-old lives in Shelby County, Tennessee — home to Memphis — where more than a quarter of adults struggle to read. Her father, who was traumatized by a racist assault he experienced as a child, kept her out of school. He read history books to her but didn’t provide any formal instruction. As an adult, Davis stumbled over large words and grammar. Her low reading level made chores out of basic tasks. At the doctor’s office, she had to ask for help filling out intake forms, and she later looked up unfamiliar words in the privacy of her home.

For most of her life, Davis worked as a cashier at places like Popeyes and Kmart, which sometimes required applicants to have a high school credential. She usually lied on the forms so they would hire her, she said. To her knowledge, no one found out. She dreamed of running a small produce business, sustaining herself with what she could grow with some dirt and her own hands. But her inability to fill out hiring or grant paperwork stopped her.

A family portrait taken in the mid-’80s shows Davis, left; her father, Samuel Gathing; and her daughters, Ginger Foster, right, and Mecca Stevenson.

More than a decade ago, Davis signed up for free classes with Messick Adult Center in East Memphis — one of the few in the county at the time. The program, like many across the nation, catered to adults who were close to getting a high school credential, not those who lack basic reading skills like she did. Davis tried to follow the lessons but quickly fell behind. “I just didn’t have the foundation,” she said. “My writing skills are not good, my spelling is not good.”

Her daughter, Mecca Stevenson, recalls watching Davis struggle with homework, too proud to ask her children for help. She only found out her mother had dropped out when the center called their home phone to check on her. Years later, Tennessee shut the center down for failing to graduate enough adults with a high school credential. The state has since worked to improve the quality of instruction in adult education, including providing more training to teachers, according to Jay Baker, the assistant commissioner of adult education.

After she dropped out, Davis kept looking for other options, frustrated by her inability to keep up in a group setting but determined to find something that worked. Several years later, she saw a television advertisement encouraging adults to sign up for classes at the library. She enrolled in a program run by the nonprofit Literacy Mid-South, which provides one-on-one tutoring for adults with a sixth-grade reading level or less. It was exactly what she needed.

Davis reads with her grandsons before they head to school, first image, and fixes the hair of her mother, whom she cares for.

Over five years, her abilities and confidence have risen, as her tutor encouraged her to take apart long words and sound out each letter. She says the program has changed her life. “I’ve learned how to pronounce words and read words that I’ve never seen,” she said.

The difference: Literacy Mid-South is not part of the government’s adult education system, so it has more flexibility to help students at Davis’ level.

While it’s one of the only programs in Memphis offering free tutoring for adults like Davis, it doesn’t get federal or state funding to do so. Adult program coordinator Lee Chase said he hasn’t applied because his program doesn’t work the way those funded by the government do, pushing students to get their high school credentials as quickly as possible. “Our learners choose their goals and we don’t want to limit what those are,” he said.

Lee Chase is the adult program coordinator of Literacy Mid-South, which provides one-on-one tutoring for adults with a sixth-grade reading level or less.

The lack of additional funding has hampered the program’s ability to grow. All tutors are volunteers, and only two employees receive salaries. Applicants often face a monthslong waitlist for a tutor.

“We’re just plugging holes in a lifeboat,” Chase said.

The nation’s approach to adult education has so far failed to connect the massive number of people struggling to read with the programs that could help them. ProPublica reporters heard time and again that in communities stricken with low literacy, programs had to close sites because not enough students had enrolled. Meanwhile, more than two dozen adults in these hot spots told us that a lack of transportation or child care or busy work schedules prohibited them from attending classes. As a result, many have fallen through the cracks.

Steven Binion couldn’t get the kind of help he needed from Detroit’s troubled schools.

For years, Steven Binion wanted to improve his reading level beyond the eighth grade. He didn’t get the one-on-one help he had needed in Detroit’s notoriously troubled schools. Then, he said, after family fights began to escalate, he left home at age 14. Knowing he would have to support himself, he soon dropped out. He survived for years on low-paying jobs: trimming lawns, sorting packages, working at factories. When he had a baby, his worries escalated as he struggled to afford diapers and shoes for his son’s growing feet and couldn’t rent an apartment for his family. He tried several times to attend education programs, but he couldn’t sacrifice the time spent earning a paycheck.

Meanwhile, Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit was watching this pattern play out at scale. When he was elected in 2013, the city was bankrupt and nearly 1 in 5 adults were unemployed. Adults struggled to read — so many of them, generation after generation, that the city had grown to epitomize the nation’s literacy crisis. While difficult to measure, low literacy estimates for Detroit and its surrounding county have ranged from more than a quarter to nearly half of all adult residents.

The lack of skilled workers stunted the city’s ability to attract industrial investment. Middle-wage jobs all but disappeared. The city struggled to expand its tax base and maintain its public services. “At the time I got elected, the streetlights weren’t on in the city and the ambulances didn’t show up for an hour,” Duggan told ProPublica. “It was pretty much nonfunctional.”

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan spearheaded a plan to increase the education of the city’s residents.

The mayor realized that to interrupt this cycle, the city needed to better educate its residents. But even with the handful of literacy programs available, not enough adults were attending to make a meaningful difference. Too often, people like Binion couldn’t balance learning with work. While the earlier vision of America’s adult education system prioritized helping students overcome these barriers, many programs today cannot offer this support.

Eric Murrow, at left in the first image, is tutored in math by senior adult education manager Aubrey Williams as he prepares for a GED practice test. Deonte Ruff studies for a GED practice test at St. Vincent and Sarah Fisher Center in Detroit.

Duggan and other city officials came up with an unprecedented plan, one that accounted for the city’s responsibility in creating the crisis. They launched Skills for Life last year; unlike most municipal job programs, it pays participants to go to school. Two days a week, they can improve their reading abilities, prepare for high school credential exams or develop skills like masonry or electrical wiring. The other three days, the city employs participants either in blight remediation, clearing vacant lots or as park ambassadors, tending the city’s green spaces. They’re paid at least $15 an hour — about $5 more than the state minimum wage — for all five days. The city also provides assistance for participants without transportation or child care.

As many as 2,200 residents are expected to participate in Skills for Life over three years; it has up to $75 million in funding committed through 2024.

“The first responsibility of government is to show folks who dropped out because they thought things were hopeless, who didn’t learn to read because they thought there was no value — to show them there is a real and immediate benefit,” Duggan said.

Relying on a temporary stream of pandemic aid dollars, the city pays local adult education programs to run the classes. Detroit is simultaneously addressing some of the root causes of the literacy crisis: With an additional $1.3 billion in federal relief funding, the school district is on its way to dramatically improving facilities and expanding literacy tutoring for children.

While it’s too early to measure the success of the Skills for Life program, the mayor says he is confident that it will prove an integral part of Detroit’s turnaround.

“By the end of 2024, we’re going to be able to show definitively: Yes, you can fundamentally reduce poverty rates, raise literacy rates, raise income,” said Duggan, who believes this could be a model for other communities. “At least so far, we’re feeling very optimistic.”

After searching online, Binion, now 32, came across Skills for Life. Though incredulous that it would provide him with paid time to learn alongside a city job, he showed up an hour early to the interview, he said, and was hired that day.

Binion takes part in Detroit’s Skills for Life program.

Three days a week, he cleared the city’s abandoned lots, and two days a week, he worked with a tutor through the nonprofit St. Vincent and Sarah Fisher Center. The city’s program also set him on a path to earning a certificate in masonry, which will open up dozens of job opportunities. But first, he had to attain his high school credential.

Within months of starting the program, he passed the exam’s science and math sections. But he stumbled on language arts, failing the section twice.

Without the encouragement of his tutors, Binion would have given up. But after several more months of the city paying him to learn, he passed.

One in Five Americans Struggles to Read. We Want to Understand Why.

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Andrew Perez and Aditi Ramaswami, The Lever

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Flush with money after receiving the largest-known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, conservative activist Leonard Leo and his associates are spending millions of dollars to influence some of the Supreme Court’s most consequential recent cases, newly released tax documents obtained by ProPublica and The Lever show.

The documents detail how Leo, who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as an adviser to President Donald Trump, has used a sprawling network of opaque nonprofits to fund groups advocating for ending affirmative action, rolling back anti-discrimination protections and allowing state legislatures unreviewable oversight of federal elections.

The records also show that the Leo-aligned nonprofits paid millions of dollars to for-profit entities connected to Leo.

Leo and one of his top associates did not respond to requests for comment.

The money flowed mostly through so-called dark money groups, which don’t have to disclose their donors. They are required to reveal the recipients of their spending in their annual tax returns, which are released to the public, but often those are also dark money groups or other entities that have minimal disclosure rules.

As ProPublica and The Lever detailed in August, Leo was gifted a $1.6 billion fortune last year by a reclusive manufacturing magnate, Barre Seid. The newly revealed tax documents cover last year, just as Leo was in the process of receiving that enormous donation.

The Supreme Court case involving a Colorado-based website designer who refuses to work for same-sex couples provides a window into Leo’s strategy.

At least six groups funded by Leo’s network have filed briefs supporting the suit, which seeks to overturn Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. The Ethics and Public Policy Center, which records show received $1.9 million from Leo’s network, submitted a brief supporting the web designer. So did Concerned Women for America, which has received at least $565,000 over the past two years from the Leo network, as well as an organization called the Becket Fund, which got $550,000 from a Leo group.

Leo’s network has also been the top funder of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which spends money to elect GOP attorneys general and serves as a policy hub for the state officials. Twenty Republican attorneys general have also filed a brief in support of the case. One Leo group donated $6.5 million to RAGA during the 2022 election cycle, according to the association’s federal filings.

The largest donation by Leo’s network was $71 million given to DonorsTrust, a so-called donor-advised fund that pools money from numerous funders and gives it out to largely conservative and libertarian groups. Past reports have described DonorsTrust as a “dark-money ATM” of the conservative movement.

Another case that Leo groups have sought to influence is Moore v. Harper, which could have sweeping implications for American democracy. The question posed in the case is whether the Constitution affords state legislatures the power to create rules for federal elections without state court oversight or intervention.

The Honest Elections Project, an initiative within another key Leo organization, the 85 Fund, has backed the plaintiff’s case with an amicus brief. The tax documents show that the 85 Fund also donated $400,000 in 2020 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indianapolis-based conservative legal group that filed a supportive brief in the case.

Thirteen Republican attorneys general filed a brief backing the suit as well.

The Supreme Court is also hearing two cases this term brought by the conservative group Students for Fair Admissions that are challenging universities’ affirmative action policies. The group received $250,000 from the 85 Fund in 2020, the tax records show, more than a third of the total it raised that year.

Speech First, which the records show received $700,000 in 2020-21 from the 85 Fund, filed briefs backing Students for Fair Admissions in both cases. Republican attorneys general, backed by Leo’s network, submitted briefs, too.

The other theme to emerge from the new tax records is the large amount of expenditures going to for-profit entities run by or connected to Leo. The 85 Fund’s largest outside vendor for 2021 was CRC Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm chaired by Leo. The 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors $22 million last year, tax records show.

The largest outside vendor to the Concord Fund, another hub in Leo’s network, was also CRC Advisors, which received nearly $8 million over the course of a year. Concord also paid $500,000 to BH Group, another for-profit firm led by Leo.

There is no prohibition on nonprofits sending business to companies they have connections to, but any deals must be made at a fair market value.

The companies did not immediately respond to questions about the payments.

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

by Maya Miller, ProPublica, and Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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

Update: Dec. 15, 2022: This story was updated to include comments from U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.

State and federal lawmakers in the Pacific Northwest, as well as the region’s tribal leaders, are calling for environmental policy changes and increased funding to address toxic contamination in salmon following an investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Salmon is a pillar of tribal diets and culture, often served at ceremonies and largely considered a medicine.

Although tribal members and researchers have been raising concerns about this contamination for decades, federal and state governments have failed to consistently monitor the waters of the Columbia River Basin for pollution in fish. Given the gaps in testing, ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting did their own, revealing levels of contaminants in Columbia River salmon that, when consumed at average tribal rates, would be high enough to put many of the 68,000 tribal members living in the basin at risk of adverse health impacts.

“These deeply troubling results directly endanger people’s health and must lead to change,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wrote in an emailed statement in which he also referenced recent Congressional funding for the Columbia River Basin Restoration Program. “I intend to continue to fight for funding for this and other programs, as well as policy changes, to end this toxic threat to Tribal members from the salmon they count on.”

When pressed for specifics, many of the lawmakers did not offer any. A spokesperson for Wyden said the longtime elected official will be working on the issue with his counterpart Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.

“Our rivers and waterways are the lifeblood of our communities, and if they are filled with toxic chemicals, everyone and everything suffers — these results showing their devastating impact on our salmon confirms that,” Merkley said in an emailed statement. “I will keep pushing to expand and protect the Columbia River Basin Restoration Program I created, and support other changes and funding that will help tackle toxic pollutants.”

Washington’s Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee wrote in an emailed statement that the state “must carry on our work to identify and clean up contaminated sites, find safer alternatives to keep toxics out of products in the first place, and use our regulatory and enforcement authorities to limit the amount of toxics going into the water.”

Tribal members and researchers say the problem requires multiple approaches. They say lawmakers must make sure companies are legally and financially responsible for the pollution they emit, and regulators must enforce stricter water quality standards while fast-tracking industrial cleanups. Right now, when health agencies issue advisories warning people against eating fish from contaminated waters, environmental agencies are not required to act, which can allow the contamination to fester.

“We have fish advisories just about everywhere,” said Laura Klasner Shira, an environmental engineer for Yakama Nation Fisheries. “I can’t think of one that has been lifted.”

Staff with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a coordination and management agency representing area tribes, said that Wyden and Merkley have been responsive to tribal leaders’ calls for action in the past, conducting listening sessions with tribal members and incorporating tribes’ proposed solutions into legislation. If the lawmakers fail to institute changes that would protect tribal health going forward, the commission plans to quote their own statements to them in response. “I’m looking forward to publishing a letter back to them the next time” a rule or regulation falls short, said Dianne Barton, the group’s water quality coordinator.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., also said that failing to take action in response to the findings could open up the government to legal liability. In the mid-1850s, the United States government signed binding treaties to preserve tribes’ right to fish for salmon as the country overtook millions of acres of tribal land. “This is the federal government’s obligation,” Blumenauer said.

For its investigation, ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting purchased 50 salmon from Native fishers along the Columbia River and paid to have a certified lab test them for 13 metals and two classes of chemicals known to be present in the river. The testing showed concentrations of two chemicals — mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as Oregon’s and Washington’s health agencies, deem unsafe at the levels consumed by many of the tribal members of tribes living in the basin today.

A spokesperson for Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., said she is considering introducing legislation to address this toxic contamination impacting salmon and other fish in the Columbia.

Additional members of the congressional delegations in Oregon and Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

The federal government has taken modest steps this year to clean up the region. In August, the EPA received $79 million over five years to reduce pollution in the Columbia River after Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. While this is the most money ever dedicated to cleaning up the Columbia, tribal leaders, local legislators and environmental advocates say it is just a fraction of what is needed to truly address pollution in the river.

At the White House Tribal Nations Summit two weeks ago, the federal agency announced proposed revisions to the Clean Water Act that would require tribal health and culture to be incorporated into federal water quality standards. These standards are used to sustain environmental objectives like clean drinking water and fish healthy enough for people to eat.

“The ability to exercise treaty rights to fish is completely dependent upon clean water and healthy ecosystems,” Aja DeCoteau, the executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission wrote in a letter to the EPA last September, when the agency first began engaging with tribes on this potential revision. “EPA must consider their treaty-based obligations.”

Staff with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission said that while the Clean Water Act revisions would be a major step in the right direction, there are still gaps in the regulatory system that enable toxic pollution to continue to be dumped into and spread throughout the river.

For one, reports have found that the Clean Water Act does not sufficiently regulate materials like pesticides and fertilizers that end up on the ground then flow into waterways. This type of pollution, generated by large-scale farming, timber harvesting and other industries, is responsible for a significant share of contamination reaching the Columbia River today.

There are also new chemicals constantly entering the market and ending up in waterways like the Columbia, courtesy of what Barton describes as the reactive nature of the Toxic Substances Control Act. Historically, the law has not required companies to disclose the health impacts of new chemicals.

The general public, as well as tribal members, will have more opportunities to weigh in on the proposed revisions to the Clean Water Act during public meetings in January. Anyone interested in submitting written feedback to the EPA can do so until March 6.

As these processes play out, the results from the testing effort will be front of mind for many, especially those who continue to consume Columbia River salmon. “It’s definitely concerning,” said Jarred-Michael Erickson, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, a group of tribes whose land abuts a section of the Columbia River in northern Washington. “It gives me more fuel to work on these issues.”

by Nick Blumberg, WTTW/Chicago PBS, and Vernal Coleman, ProPublica

This story was co-published with WTTW/Chicago PBS. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In 2013, Roseland Community Hospital was looking for a new leader. Its former chief executive had alienated the Illinois governor and other lawmakers amid a messy fight over the hospital’s funding.

The small nonprofit facility on Chicago’s South Side turned to Tim Egan, a longtime hospital executive who had begun to make a name for himself as a political operative and fundraiser with an ability to navigate the insular circles of state and local government.

Egan ran for alderman of the North Side’s 43rd Ward in 2007 and 2011, and he has served as the leader of the Cook County Democratic Party’s 2nd Ward committee since 2016, during his time as head of the hospital.

In his close to nine years as Roseland’s president and chief executive, Egan’s political activities and the hospital’s operations have become increasingly entwined: hospital business awarded to friends and associates, employees and contractors making donations to Egan’s campaign funds, at least one fundraiser using the hospital’s name on invitations.

In the runup to the November elections, Egan appeared in a commercial for Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s reelection campaign that, according to experts in nonprofit governance, blurred the lines even further between Egan’s stewardship of Roseland and his efforts in state and local politics.

“Susana is a giant for saving the New Roseland Community Hospital,” Egan declared in the commercial for Mendoza, a Democrat and longtime ally who last month won a second full term. As the state’s chief financial officer, Mendoza pays the state’s bills, including reimbursing hospitals like Roseland for patients on Medicare and Medicaid.

Egan this year also co-hosted a Mendoza fundraiser at which tickets cost as much as $5,000.

Tim Egan, president and CEO of Roseland Community Hospital

(Courtesy of WTTW/Chicago PBS)

Samuel Brunson, a professor and associate dean at Loyola University Chicago, said Egan’s appearance in the commercial crossed a line. IRS rules bar nonprofits from participating in political campaigns.

“That looks to me like a pretty flagrant violation of this rule,” said Brunson, who specializes in nonprofits and the tax code and viewed the Mendoza commercial at the request of WTTW/Chicago PBS and ProPublica.

In the commercial, Egan is identified as Roseland’s president and CEO and stands in what appears to be a hospital setting in front of two people dressed in lab coats.

“It’s not him saying the hospital endorses her, but it’s him saying, ‘I am the CEO of the hospital, I’m speaking in my capacity as CEO … about what she did for the hospital itself,’” Brunson said.

A spokesperson for Egan and the hospital said in a statement that Egan’s political work is not a secret to Roseland’s leadership, and it has only helped the hospital achieve its goals in the community. The spokesperson did not address the question of whether Egan’s appearance violated federal nonprofit rules.

“Mr. Egan has an excellent relationship with his board and keeps board members fully apprised of all of Roseland’s major contracts and business developments, often times to seek their advice and approval,” said the spokesperson, Dennis Culloton. “Similarly, the board members are updated on his efforts to establish strong government contacts to support the mission of Roseland Community Hospital.”

Rupert Evans, a health care consultant and the chair of Roseland’s board of directors, said in a statement that Egan has done a “tremendous job” in his role leading Roseland and that the hospital board is “fully aware” of his political activities.

“None of his activities outside of his primary duties cause any conflict of interest for the hospital and have been fully disclosed,” said Evans, a former chair of the health administration program at Governors State University.

The most serious penalty for violating rules barring political activity by nonprofits is termination of an organization’s nonprofit status — though that sanction is rarely levied for this kind of activity.

The Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, declined to comment on the commercial.

A spokesperson for the Mendoza campaign said the commercial refers to the comptroller’s work getting Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to cash-strapped hospitals, including to Roseland.

“Roseland Hospital plays a critical role in providing healthcare to the underserved communities on Chicago’s South Side, so we asked Tim Egan to attest to the Comptroller’s work in our video spot which ran this fall,” campaign manager Jack Londrigan said in a statement. “We would have never asked Tim to do anything we thought would pose a problem for him or the hospital as we believe his efforts to save and protect the lives of Roseland residents are of the utmost importance.”

Longtime hospital consultant James Orlikoff, a Chicago-based adviser on governance and leadership issues for the American Hospital Association, said Egan’s appearance in the campaign commercial “probably pushed the boundary, if not crossed it.” But he also says given the “unprecedented financial pressure” hospitals are facing, having an experienced political operator at the helm could be beneficial.

Egan’s appearance in the commercial follows a trying period for Roseland. ProPublica and WTTW/Chicago PBS reported in October that federal inspectors found that, since January 2020, errors or neglect had contributed to the deaths of at least seven Roseland patients, including one who was pregnant.

Those incidents prompted federal watchdogs to admonish the hospital and threaten sanctions unless the facility took corrective measures. Federal records indicate that Roseland leaders fixed those immediate safety violations. A spokesperson for the hospital and a top official there have said that the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to many of Roseland’s challenges.

A 2021 federal whistleblower lawsuit alleges other problems at Roseland. Unsealed this month in federal district court in Chicago, the complaint claims that Roseland was complicit in a scheme by a physician who worked at the hospital to bill for millions of dollars in unnecessary or fraudulent COVID-19-related medical care.

Culloton, the spokesperson for Roseland and Egan, said neither Egan nor the hospital had been involved in any improper conduct. The lawsuit is pending.

The campaign commercial for Mendoza wasn’t the first time Egan has used his position as part of Mendoza’s campaign. An invitation to a $250-to-$5,000-a-ticket fundraiser in May at the swanky 95th-floor Signature Room of what was once the John Hancock Center was billed as an opportunity to join “Roseland Community Hospital President Tim Egan for a healthcare heroes reception in support of Susana Mendoza.”

“That looks a whole lot like an endorsement, and it looks like an impermissible endorsement,” Brunson said.

Neither Culloton nor Mendoza’s campaign responded to questions about the campaign event.

For a hospital executive like Egan, such a move into politics may have pitfalls, especially if their preferred candidate loses an election. “Now,” said Brunson, “they’re on the outs with whoever got the office.”

The board has signed off on at least one move Egan has made that tied the hospital to a friend and political associate. In October 2020, the board’s executive committee voted unanimously to transfer the management of Roseland’s emergency department from the medical group that had long held the contract to a wholly owned subsidiary company.

That December, that subsidiary of Roseland signed a three-year, $10,000-a-month consulting contract with P2C Healthcare Consulting, a company that had registered with the state just a month earlier. P2C’s manager, Leonard Cannata, has no apparent experience in health care management.

Cannata is a lawyer and political consultant who has worked for at least one of Egan’s political campaigns. Several photos posted to the Roseland CEO’s personal social media accounts show the two smiling as Cannata displays holiday gifts given by Egan. In a 2011 endorsement of Cannata’s skills on LinkedIn, Egan described him as a “detail oriented and determined” professional. “Len is destined to succeed in life,” he added.

Watch the WTTW/Chicago PBS Report

Egan’s spokesperson didn’t answer questions about the political relationship between Cannata and Egan, but said the contract with P2C “significantly lowered the costs to Roseland, including lower insurance costs. This arrangement was arrived at in collaboration with and with the approval of the Roseland Community Hospital Board.”

P2C, according to its contract, is charged with physician recruitment, performance metrics, and business plan implementation. In an internal hospital email obtained by WTTW/Chicago PBS and ProPublica, a hospital executive said P2C was the management group for the emergency department.

Cannata did not respond to requests for comment. Evans, the board chair, did not respond to questions about the contract.

In another instance, Roseland signed a contract with the company American Medical Lab to run the hospital’s in-house lab for five years at an annual cost of $1.5 million. That deal was signed in February 2021. That fall, the company donated $5,000 to one of Egan’s political funds.

The president of the lab company did not respond to a request for comment.

Culloton also did not respond to questions about the American Medical Lab contract.

Roseland serves a majority-Black community on Chicago’s far South Side that has long faced segregation and disinvestment. According to the hospital, 86% of the people living in its service area are Black. In 2020, nearly 92% of the people receiving care at the hospital relied on Medicare or Medicaid.

But on at least two occasions during the fall of 2020, while the hospital provided on-site coronavirus testing, it also offered clinics in mostly white Chicago neighborhoods where residents had average incomes far higher than those of the residents that Roseland is supposed to serve. In September and December of 2020, Roseland offered COVID-19 testing in the North Side’s 2nd Ward, where Egan works as the Democratic committeeperson. One of the testing events was held in the city’s upscale Gold Coast neighborhood. It’s not clear how many such events Roseland provided.

The Roseland and Egan spokesperson said the testing clinics served a need in the community.

“Roseland Community Hospital,” the spokesperson said in the statement, “makes no apologies for its effort to assist the City of Chicago Department of Public Health and other public health authorities in making COVID-19 testing available to as many people as possible.”

Meanwhile, Egan’s political activities have received contributions from people and businesses associated with both Roseland and his former employer Norwegian American Hospital, which is now known as Humboldt Park Health.

Between Egan’s first run for alderman in 2007 and this year, political funds that he chairs have received nearly $100,000 in donations, loans and in-kind contributions from hospital staff and leadership, board members for both hospitals and their respective charitable foundations, and people and businesses who have done work for the hospitals.

Among those donors is Dr. Tunji Ladipo, former director of Roseland’s emergency department. Ladipo, who was listed as a member of Roseland’s board of directors in its most recent available tax filing, donated $14,000 to Egan’s political committees between 2016 and July 2022.

Ladipo did not respond to requests for comment.

Enrique Lopez, another of Egan’s donors and political allies, has prepared hospital tax returns and has audited its financial statements. Lopez and his accounting firm have given more than $7,000 in donations and in-kind contributions to Egan’s various political funds; Lopez is treasurer of one of those funds.

Angel Chatterton, a senior accounting instructor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said those kinds of political and financial ties could make outside observers question whether the audits conducted by Lopez’s firm were swayed by “undue influence” from hospital leadership.

“Auditors not only need to be objective, they need to be perceived as objective as well,” Chatterton said. “That’s at the heart of the credibility of our profession.”

She added that while the arrangement may be entirely aboveboard, “when you’re dealing with any type of political situation like this, I would say additional safeguards need to be put into play.”

Culloton, the Egan spokesperson, defended the use of Lopez’s firm, saying the firm was brought in after the hospital had not performed an audit or filed some key documents for close to 20 years.

Egan “is grateful for the excellent work of the hospital’s auditor Mr. Enrique Lopez who holds his firm up to the highest standards of professionalism,” Culloton said. “Mr. Egan complies with Roseland Community Hospital Board policies and procedures including those addressing disclosure and potential conflicts of interest.”

Lopez did not respond to a request for comment.

by Sharon Lerner

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Before his shift at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant in Niagara Falls in May 2021, a worker peed in a cup.

Before he clocked out, he did it again.

Goodyear shipped both specimens to a lab to measure the amount of a chemical called ortho-toluidine. The results, reviewed by ProPublica, showed that the worker had enough of it in his body to put him at an increased risk for bladder cancer — and that was before his shift. After, his levels were nearly five times as high.

It’s no secret that the plant’s workers are being exposed to poison. Government scientists began testing their urine more than 30 years ago. And Goodyear, which uses ortho-toluidine to make its tires pliable, has been monitoring the air for traces of the chemical since 1976. A major expose even revealed, almost a decade ago, that dozens of the plant’s workers had developed bladder cancer since 1974.

What is perhaps most stunning about the trail of sick Goodyear workers is that they have been exposed to levels of the chemical that the United States government says are perfectly safe.

The permissible exposure limit for ortho-toluidine is 5 parts per million in air, a threshold based on research conducted in the 1940s and ’50s without any consideration of the chemical’s ability to cause cancer. Despite ample evidence that far lower levels can dramatically increase a person’s cancer risk, the legal limit has remained the same.

Paralyzed by industry lawsuits from decades ago, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has all but given up on trying to set a truly protective threshold for ortho-toluidine and thousands of other chemicals. The agency has only updated standards for three chemicals in the past 25 years; each took more than a decade to complete.

David Michaels, OSHA’s director throughout the Obama administration, told ProPublica that legal challenges had so tied his hands that he decided to put a disclaimer on the agency’s website saying the government’s limits were essentially useless: “OSHA recognizes that many of its permissible exposure limits (PELs) are outdated and inadequate for ensuring protection of worker health.” This remarkable admission of defeat remains on the official site of the U.S. agency devoted to protecting worker health.

“To me, it was obvious,” Michaels said. “You can’t lie and say you’re offering protection when you’re not. It seemed much more effective to say, ‘Don’t follow our standards.’”

David Michaels, then-director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, attends a hearing on Capitol Hill in 2010.

(Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

The agency has also allowed chemical manufacturers to create their own safety data sheets, which are supposed to provide workers with the exposure limits and other critical information. OSHA does not require the sheets to be accurate or routinely fact-check them. As a result, many fail to mention the risk of cancer and other serious health hazards.

In a statement, Doug Parker, the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, acknowledged the agency’s impotence. “The requirements of the rulemaking process, including limitations placed by prior judicial decisions, have limited our ability to have more up to date standards,” he said. “Chemical exposure, including to o-toluidine, is a major health hazard for workers, and we have to do more to protect their health.”

Agency officials did not reply to a follow-up question asking what more they will do.

Goodyear, in a statement, said it “remains committed to actions to address ortho-toluidine exposure inside our Niagara Falls facility.” The company said it requires workers to wear protective equipment, invests in upgrades like ventilation and offers regular bladder cancer screenings “at no cost” to workers. It pointed out that ortho-toluidine levels at Goodyear’s Niagara Falls plant had plummeted over the past decades and that the levels have “consistently been far below the permissible exposure limits as set by government regulators,” meaning 5 parts per million.

James Briggs worked for 20 years in the Niagara Falls plant before taking a job with the United Steelworkers union, which represents dozens of Goodyear employees there. While pushing for changes that would reduce its members’ exposure to ortho-toluidine at the plant, the union has essentially given up on eliminating the risk.

“If I could have my way, would I like to be able to wave a magic wand and take the risk away? Yes, I would,” he said. “Everybody that works in that plant realizes there’s some risk that comes with it. They all get it. We tell them. It’s part of the orientation for new employees.”

Former Goodyear plant worker James Briggs at the Niagara-Orleans AFL-CIO central labor council workers’ memorial at Reservoir Park in Niagara Falls

(Matt Burkhartt for ProPublica)

Gary Casten never got such a talk when he started at the plant in 1965, he alleged in court testimony. A devoted union leader, bowler and Yankees fan, he let the government test his urine in 1990; he, too, had a chemical level five times as high after his shift than before it. More than once in his 39 years at Goodyear, Casten’s lips and fingernails turned blue, a well-known sign of ortho-toluidine poisoning.

Still, it came as a shock to Casten when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020. “If you looked up ‘nice’ in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of Gary,” said Harry Weist, one of his former co-workers. Casten underwent surgery and chemotherapy and lost his strength and his appetite. It soon became clear that the cancer had spread.

Along with dozens of other Goodyear employees, he sued the chemical companies that manufactured the ortho-toluidine used at the plant; workers’ compensation law prevented them from suing their employer. When asked at a legal proceeding in April 2021 whether anyone had warned him about the risks, he said, “If I had been told that from the first day I walked through the gates, I wouldn’t have worked there.”

He died four months later.

Last year, the grim tally of Goodyear plant workers’ bladder cancer diagnoses reached 78.

The recent test results suggest it is likely to keep climbing.

“The System Is Broken”
Created in 1970 in response to mounting injuries, illnesses and deaths from workplace hazards, OSHA was supposed to issue regulations based on scientific research conducted by its sibling agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

At first, the pair got off to a somewhat promising start, with OSHA using NIOSH research to issue more protective standards for lead, arsenic, benzene, asbestos and several other carcinogens. “The goal of the early administrators was to set lower and lower and lower standards so that industries could adapt and ultimately eliminate the use of these materials,” said David Rosner, a historian of public health at Columbia University.

But within a few years, asbestos, which was already well established as a carcinogen, presented a political challenge. “For asbestos, NIOSH said nothing other than a number approaching zero can be considered safe,” said Rosner. “But then they sent that science over to OSHA, and OSHA realized if you do that you’re going to have to shut plants everywhere.”

Chemical companies pounced, warning that OSHA’s standards would lead to job losses amid a recession; they turned the agency into “a whipping boy for why American industry was in chaos,” as Rosner put it. By 1973, the Asbestos Information Association/North America suggested that health-based regulation of its members’ product might be a “nefarious conspiracy afoot to destroy the asbestos industry.”

Two years later, the director of NIOSH declared that there was “virtually no doubt that asbestos is carcinogenic to man” and proposed lowering the safety threshold. But OSHA hedged. It acknowledged that no detectable level of asbestos was safe, but put off changing its standard due to a legal requirement to take “technical and economic factors” into consideration.

While OSHA eventually updated its asbestos standard more than a decade later, lawsuits helped chill — and ultimately all but freeze — progress on setting limits for most chemicals by requiring the agency to do more and increasingly complex analyses.

One such suit, brought by the American Petroleum Institute and decided by the Supreme Court in 1980, challenged OSHA’s limit for benzene. Although there was no scientific question that benzene causes leukemia, the court decided that, before setting a new standard, OSHA would have to first establish that the old one put workers at “significant risk” of harm. Another lawsuit, filed by the lead industry, left OSHA responsible for not just calculating the costs of complying with its standards but also demonstrating “a reasonable likelihood” that they would not threaten “the existence or competitive structure of an industry.”

Faced with massive requirements for updating a single limit, in 1989 OSHA tried another tack: lowering and setting safety thresholds for 428 chemicals at once. The move could have prevented more than 55,000 lost workdays due to illness and an average of 683 fatalities from hazardous chemicals each year, according to the agency’s estimates.

But that attempt was stymied, too. The American Iron and Steel Institute, the American Mining Congress, the American Paper Institute, the American Petroleum Institute and the Society of the Plastics Industry were among the dozens of trade associations that joined to sue OSHA, criticizing the agency’s decision to lump the chemicals together and claiming that they had inadequate time to respond to the proposed changes. While most unions supported the agency’s effort, some sued OSHA as well, arguing that some of the updated standards were not protective enough.

In 1992, the court of appeals vacated all of the safety limits that OSHA had set and updated three years earlier, finding that the agency had failed to prove that exposure to the chemicals posed a significant risk of health impairments and that the proposed changes were not economically and technologically feasible for the companies that used the chemicals.

By the time he was appointed to run OSHA in 2009, Michaels was well aware of the risks of the chemical used at Goodyear. Just before he took the helm of the agency, he devoted a chapter of his book about industry influence over science to ortho-toluidine, chronicling the cancers at the Niagara Falls plant and the fact that manufacturers had evidence of the chemical’s carcinogenicity as far back as the 1940s.

Outside the Goodyear plant in Niagara Falls

(Matt Burkhartt for ProPublica)

But given how onerous the limit-setting process had become — and how many other chemicals were in even more desperate need of accurate limits, in part because greater numbers of workers were exposed to them — he decided not to attempt to update the ortho-toluidine standard.

In the past 25 years, OSHA has updated just three standards.

Forced by a lawsuit, in 2006 the agency issued a standard for chromium, the carcinogen featured in the movie “Erin Brockovich,” which was also causing cancer at exposure levels far below its outdated limit. In 2016, OSHA issued a protective standard for silica, a cancer-causing dust that millions of workers are exposed to each year. And, in 2021, OSHA put the finishing touches on a rule for beryllium, an element that can scar the lungs and cause cancer and that thousands of shipyard and construction workers are exposed to every year. The prior limit was nearly 70 years old when OSHA revised it in January 2017, then tweaked the rule over the next four years. Each update took more than a decade to complete as the agency amassed the voluminous data it needed to justify the changes.

While the 1972 standard for asbestos was just five pages long, the one for silica stretched across 600 pages. “And that’s mostly because of the requirements that followed all these lawsuits,” said Michaels, who worked on the silica standard throughout his time as administrator and is now a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health.

Michaels argues the problem isn’t the agency itself as much as its small budget and the court-imposed burdens resulting from the lawsuits.

“Don’t blame OSHA,” said Michaels. “The system is broken.”

“A Form of Self Regulation”
Tucked in a binder in the foreman’s office at the Goodyear plant is another tool that might have helped workers. Since 1983, OSHA has required chemical manufacturers to create safety data sheets: documents that present clear information about a chemical’s hazards. Workers and employers consult these to make decisions on what kinds of precautions to take.

The Goodyear plant in Niagara Falls

(Matt Burkhartt for ProPublica)

OSHA does not routinely check to see whether the data sheets contain inaccuracies or even require them to be accurate. Companies must note carcinogens as cancer-causing only if they are on OSHA’s own very truncated list, which notably omits ortho-toluidine. OSHA specifies that companies “may” rather than “must” rely on the National Toxicology Program or the International Agency for Research on Cancer for determinations on whether a chemical causes cancer.

In comments submitted to OSHA in 2016, the advocacy groups Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the BlueGreen Alliance said the agency’s hands-off approach ignored the inherent conflicts of interest.

“Allowing manufacturers to disregard hazard assessments by two authoritative bodies and to conduct their own hazard assessment of products in which they have significant financial investment is a form of self-regulation that will undoubtedly compromise transparency, accurate and timely disclosure of information, and ultimately workplace health and safety,” the environmental organizations wrote.

The groups suggested the agency should take the job of evaluating chemicals away from the companies that make them. But OSHA again failed to act. As a result, experts say, the safety data sheets for hazardous chemicals are still riddled with errors.

Almost one-third of more than 650 sheets for dangerous chemicals contain inaccurate warnings, according to a study, published today, that was conducted by the BlueGreen Alliance, an organization that focuses on the intersection of labor and environmental issues, and Clearya, a company that alerts consumers to the presence of toxic chemicals in products. Of 512 sheets for carcinogenic chemicals the groups reviewed, 15% did not mention cancer in the hazards identification section, and 21% of 372 safety data sheets for chemicals that pose a risk to fertility and fetal development omitted that fact.

Even sheets for well-known carcinogens like benzene and vinyl chloride often don’t include warnings that they cause cancer. One for asbestos, for example, fails to say in its hazard section that the mineral causes lung cancer and mesothelioma, instead warning only of skin irritation, serious eye irritation and the possibility of respiratory irritation.

While the inaccuracy of safety data sheets is a global problem, companies in the U.S. are among the worst offenders, according to the analysis by the BlueGreen Alliance and Clearya. Safety data sheets in the U.S. are far more likely to be missing information about health hazards than those in Europe, their analysis showed. In part, that’s because of differing approaches to regulating chemicals.

“In other jurisdictions like Europe, Australia and Japan, they say, ‘There’s a list of chemicals we’re concerned about, and here’s how we’re classifying them.’ So they can’t play around with the truth,” said Dorothy Wigmore, an industrial hygienist based in Canada.

By law, OSHA can fine companies no more than $14,502 for each violation of its hazard communication standard, which amounts to a slap on the wrist for most companies, according to experts. The agency most recently responded to a complaint at the Goodyear plant in 2015, when it issued a citation for violation of its Respiratory Protection Standard but did not issue a fine.

Of the regulatory approach to safety data sheets in the United States, Wigmore said, “It’s a series of situations that are just designed to let all kinds of hazards get out into the marketplace.”

“Impermissible Secrecy”
The primary law governing the regulation of chemicals in the United States, called the Toxic Substances Control Act, contains a provision designed to keep chemical makers honest and the public informed.

If companies that manufacture, import, process or distribute chemicals find any evidence that their products might present a substantial risk to human health or the environment, they must immediately share that information with the Environmental Protection Agency.

DuPont, which had supplied ortho-toluidine to the Goodyear plant since 1957, had just that kind of information back in 1993. An industrial hygienist named Tom Nelson who worked at DuPont calculated that the permissible exposure level was at least 37 times too high to protect workers.

Almost three decades later, an attorney named Steven Wodka stumbled upon Nelson’s calculations while reviewing thousands of documents he had obtained from the company through discovery, in cases his clients — Goodyear plant workers, including Casten — brought against DuPont. The information should have been public. Yet, when Wodka checked Chemview, an EPA database that contains such information supplied by companies known as 8(e) reports, he found no mention of Nelson’s bombshell discovery. The agency did make public five reports that DuPont submitted about the chemical, but none disclose the calculations showing just how ineffective the permissible exposure level is.

In January 2021, Wodka wrote to the agency to report that DuPont was violating the 8(e) provision of the chemicals law by withholding information about just how dangerous ortho-toluidine is.

“There is a direct connection between DuPont’s failure to abide by this statute and the continuing cases of bladder cancer in the Goodyear workers in Niagara Falls, New York,” the letter stated, before urging the EPA administrator to “enforce this statute to its full extent against DuPont.”

After months of silence, Wodka received a response from the EPA this September. “We did not take further enforcement action because we had a document that demonstrated that they met their 8e obligations,” Gloria Odusote, a program manager in the agency’s waste and chemical enforcement division, wrote to Wodka. She said the document contained “confidential business information” and was exempt from public disclosure.

The kind of exemption she cited was designed to allow companies to keep secret information that could give their competitors a window into their business practices, such as manufacturing processes and chemical formulas whose disclosure could “cause substantial business injury.” But companies routinely use the exemption to shield all kinds of information, including the names of chemicals, the amounts produced and the location of plants that make them. The chemicals law forbids companies from claiming health and safety studies as confidential business information.

“EPA can’t keep this information secret,” said Eve Gartner, an attorney who directs the Toxic Exposure & Health Program at Earthjustice. The agency’s failure to list the document on Chemview and make it available to the public upon request, she said, “adds an additional layer of impermissible secrecy.”

DuPont declined to comment, noting in an email that ortho-toluidine was produced by “E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., not DuPont de Nemours,” as the company now calls itself after relaunching in 2019. It has settled all 28 lawsuits in which Wodka represented Goodyear workers with bladder or urothelial cancer.

EPA officials said they are looking into the matter.

“Shouldn’t Have to Struggle Like This”
On a snowy November morning in western New York, Harry Weist awaited his next cystoscopy. A 66-year-old retired Goodyear worker with a graying buzz cut and a horseshoe mustache, Weist has already undergone dozens of these tests, in which a tiny camera is inserted through his urethra and into his bladder. On three occasions, in 2004, 2019 and 2020, the images revealed cancerous tumors that had to be surgically removed.

Harry Weist

(Matt Burkhartt for ProPublica)

It can take days and sometimes weeks for the pain and discomfort from the surgery to ease. What never goes away, though, is the dread about the cancer that future probes will find. “My doctor said it’s not if it will return, but when,” Weist said.

During his 34 years working at the Goodyear plant, Weist ran the Super Bowl pool, served in the union and became “thick as thieves” with a few of his co-workers. He also breathed in fumes so stinging and strong that he was left gasping for air. But on that November day, he preferred to think about the lifelong friends he made at the plant.

One, a close relative who has also had three bouts of bladder cancer and undergone chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to treat it, has gotten a job delivering car parts at age 84 to cover some of his medical costs. According to Weist, the family member (who declined to be interviewed) is so loyal to the company that “if you cut him, he would bleed Goodyear blue.” Weist makes the joke affectionately; the men remain close, even as they sharply disagree about their former employer.

“He says we made these bills so we’re going to pay them,” Weist said. It is difficult to definitively prove the cause of any individual cancer. But Weist feels sure his and that of his relative were due to decades of extreme exposure to a chemical known to cause bladder cancer. “I tell him, ‘Goodyear gave us cancer. We worked at their factory and wound up getting bladder cancer. You shouldn’t have to struggle like this.’”

Weist thinks often of Casten, who died at 74, leaving behind a daughter and grandkids who called him Popcorn. Like his old friend, Weist would have made a different choice had he been warned about the risks of working around ortho-toluidine. “Of course I wouldn’t have taken the job if I knew I was going to go through this,” he said.

Last year, NIOSH scientists published a risk assessment of ortho-toluidine that put the finest point yet on exactly how dangerous the chemical is — and how egregiously wrong the permissible exposure limit remains. OSHA says it strives to keep worker risk under one in 1,000, meaning one in every thousand people being harmed, after the Supreme Court suggested this threshold more than four decades ago. To bring the risk at the Goodyear plant to that range, the safety threshold for ortho-toluidine in the air should be about one three-thousandth that level, the assessment concluded.

The current permissible limit, 5 parts per million, is the same as 5,000 parts per billion. Yet even just 10 parts per billion in the air would cause each 1,000 exposed workers to contract between 12 and 68 “excess” cases of bladder cancer, meaning the number they’d likely develop above the number expected in the general population, according to the study.

The average amount of ortho-toluidine in the air at the plant is even higher: 11.3 parts per billion, according to testing completed by Goodyear in 2019. The company said that it has continued to measure air concentrations of the chemical in the plant since then, but declined to share results of that testing with ProPublica.

That measurement along with pre- and post-shift urine samples from workers at the plant “provide conclusive evidence that the Niagara Falls workers are still absorbing ortho-toluidine into their bodies during the workshift,” Wodka wrote to OSHA in March in a petition co-authored by a physician and a toxicologist who have served as expert witnesses in Goodyear worker cases, as well as an epidemiologist who previously worked for the American Cancer Society and the U.S. Public Health Service.

The occupational health experts asked OSHA to update the standard. Specifically, they asked that the permissible exposure limit in air for eight hours be reduced from5,000 parts perbillion to 1 part per billion and that the agency require companies to clearly inform their workers that the chemical causes bladder cancer.

OSHA has not responded to their petition.

Clarification, Dec. 15, 2022: This story has been updated to clarify that OSHA revised the beryllium limit in 2017 and, after some making changes, finalized the rule in 2021.

by Lynzy Billing

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For more than two decades, the U.S. military has been barred from providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

The law, named for its author, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, applies to military assistance for foreign units funded through the Defense or State departments. Lawmakers including Leahy, a Democrat, acknowledged that it does not cover commando outfits like Afghanistan’s Zero Units.

In an email, Leahy said he believes that the law’s human rights requirements need to be expanded to “cover certain counter-terrorism operations involving U.S. special forces and foreign partners.

“U.S. support for foreign security forces, whether through the Department of Defense, Department of State, CIA or other agencies,” Leahy wrote, “must be subject to effective congressional oversight so when mistakes are made or crimes committed, those responsible are held accountable.”

Leahy called on the Biden administration to apply the law “as a matter of policy” to all overseas military forces that work with any U.S. government agencies.

Tim Rieser, an aide to Leahy, acknowledged that the Leahy Law “is not all-encompassing, as much as we wish it were.” The Leahy Law, he said, applies only to congressional appropriations that fund the State and Defense departments.

“Sen. Leahy’s position has always been that the policy should be consistent, that we should not support units of foreign security forces that commit gross violations of human rights regardless of the source of the funds, but that is not what the law says.”

A source familiar with the Zero Unit program said the CIA’s officers in the field, and special forces soldiers working under their direction, are required to follow the same rules of combat as American service members. The agency does not fall under the Leahy Law.

U.S. military operations fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate and House Armed Services committees. Congressional oversight of the CIA and other intelligence agencies is handled by separate committees in the House and Senate that hold most of their meetings and hearings in secret. By law, the agencies are required to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” of all covert operations. Intelligence committee staffers have the authority to ask the CIA for documents and testimony about classified missions like the support for the Zero Units under the broad national security law known as Title 50.

Congressional officials said the two oversight committees are ill-equipped to monitor the complexities of paramilitary operations in foreign countries. The Pentagon and State Department have created entire bureaucracies to make sure foreign units meet the requirements of the Leahy Law. The intelligence oversight committees, with their relatively small staffs, are not set up to track what’s happening on the ground when U.S. military officers on loan to the CIA work with elite units in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria.

“The sense I get from former operators is they don’t give a shit,” said one congressional source. “Their attitude is, the world’s dangerous and you partner with bad people, that’s why we have Title 50.”

Congressional staffers said they believed the failure of Congress to extend the Leahy Law to intelligence agencies was no coincidence.

“I mean, it’s a huge and intentional gap,” one said. “It’s designed to not have oversight; it is meant to not be under the public view.”

In his email, Leahy said an amendment to the Leahy Law, which would expand the scope to certain counter-terrorism operations, is now in the works.

The lack of consequences for blatant human rights violations, he said, “foments anger and resentment toward the U.S., undermines our mission in these countries where we need the support of the local population, and weakens our credibility as a country that supports the rule of law and accountability.”

Stephen Engelberg contributed reporting.

by Seth Freed Wessler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906.

“This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.”

Mecklenburg County, along with Microsoft and a pair of consulting firms, immediately began a campaign to downplay the cemetery’s significance. Their most urgent task was to make sure the cemetery wouldn’t be deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, the federal government’s list of sites worthy of protection. That designation would likely trigger an archaeological investigation overseen by the state and could force the developers to steer clear of the graves. Without such a designation, the graveyard could be moved with relative ease.

After the discovery of the cemetery, the county and its consultants turned to archaeologists, which federal law required they retain. But that didn’t go as they hoped. In a detailed report, the archaeologists determined that the cemetery “is eligible for inclusion” on the historic registry. The report stressed the cemetery’s significance to African American life and death in Southside Virginia, citing the fact that Stephen Moseley and his relatives were Black. “It is recommended that the area be avoided,” the report said.

To the county and its consultants, whose costs Microsoft covered, this was unacceptable. “We will challenge his recommendation,” wrote Alexis Jones, a consultant with a firm called Enviro-Utilities.

The firm and the county pressed the archaeologists to reverse their conclusion that the cemetery belongs on the National Register. And they asked the team to cast doubt on the central finding that made the cemetery historically significant: that all the people buried there — members of a community of landowners who farmed tobacco in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction — were Black.

The archaeologists would only comply with the latter request. They edited their report to say, “It cannot be ruled out that the burials are associated with white tenant farmers.” But when they sent Jones and her boss the revised report, they acknowledged that the new assertion was dubious: “All the evidence available at this stage suggests” the cemetery was the final resting place of an African American community, they wrote.

Asked about the addition of the white tenant farmer claim, one of the archaeologists, David Dutton, told ProPublica: “We hadn’t exhumed any bodies. We hadn’t done any DNA. We hadn’t done any analysis. So could we say 100%? I mean, look, this is archaeology, you don’t know until you actually know.”

Jones and her colleagues still wanted the eligibility for the historic registry designation nixed, so they sent the report to another archaeologist, seeking a second opinion. But the archaeologist didn’t go along, and in fact he rejected the notion that some of the people buried there might be white. “Jim Crow would not have had whites and blacks buried that closely together,” he wrote.

He suggested that the original firm conduct additional historical research. “More work needs to be done on Moseley family members to identify who’s in the graves,” he wrote in an email to Jones’ boss, who forwarded it to the county.

The county and its consultants ignored the advice.

What the county had to do, because Virginia law requires it, was run a legal notice tucked among the ads and classifieds in several weekly print editions of The Mecklenburg Sun. Even that, Jones had warned in an email to Microsoft and the county, would “risk” the “chance of a local family member coming forward.”

The second week the notice ran, in November of 2014, the paper published a front-page story about a controversy over new helmets for the high school football team following the death of a player from blunt force trauma. It appeared under the byline Mike Moseley. Moseley is a staff writer. He is also Stephen Moseley’s great-grandson.

“The Moseleys have been here a long time,” Mike Moseley said of his family’s roots in that part of Virginia.

When asked if he’d seen the notice in the pages of his own newspaper, he responded: “Do you read the classifieds and the ads? I do not.”

Mike Moseley would not have been hard to locate, had the county actually tried to find Stephen Moseley’s descendants. The tall, lanky 60-year-old went to high school in Mecklenburg County and played basketball on the school team. After high school, he moved away for a time — he wasn’t interested in following his father into the funeral home business — but he returned to Mecklenburg more than two decades ago. Since then, he’s worked a series of jobs at local papers, including at the Sun, where he is still a reporter.

“Everyone who works for the county knows me,” he said. “They know who we are. It’s hard to understand how they didn’t come talk to us.”

Mike and David Moseley

(Christopher Smith, special to ProPublica)

Mecklenburg County did not reply to detailed questions about the handling of the cemetery and the contents of the emails, which were obtained through state open records requests. But in a phone interview, County Administrator Wayne Carter said that the newspaper notice was sufficient to comply with the law. He added that he asked some people who hunted on the land if they’d noticed anyone visiting the cemetery. “They had not seen anyone down there,” Carter said.

Jones, the consultant, declined to answer questions, referring them to Microsoft. Enviro-Utilities did not respond to emailed questions and multiple calls and text messages. In response to questions, a Microsoft spokesperson said, “the County followed all applicable federal, state and local laws.”

Like his nephew, David Moseley heard nothing from the county about the threat to the cemetery. The soft-spoken retired schoolteacher and administrator, who is now 85, grew up on the land adjacent to where Microsoft was building its data center and currently lives outside of Lynchburg, Virginia. “Yes,” he said, when asked in August about his relatives’ resting place, “there’s a cemetery there.” He did not at first believe that the remains of his grandfather, Stephen Moseley, were somewhere else. “Somebody would have called me if they moved the cemetery,” he said.

Plaques and a handle found during the archaeological excavation of the Moseley family cemetery

(Obtained by ProPublica through a public records request)

In the months after the notice that ran in The Mecklenburg Sun, workers kept finding graves, ultimately 37 of them. Some of the plots were marked with pieces of quartz or with yucca plants, which were used by many Southern Black families who could not afford stones. Each burial site added days to the excavation, to the frustration of the county and its consultants. A crew dug up each of the graves, collecting bones, casket fragments, metal handles and hinges, etched epitaph plaques, a pair of eyeglasses, an ivory comb. The remains and other items were packed in plastic crates and stored in an office. Months later, all of it was reburied in four tightly packed, $500 cemetery plots one town to the north.

David Moseley’s grandparents, Stephen and Lucy Moseley, and great-grandparents, James and Ellen Walker, in 1899 purchased 169 acres in a fertile region near the North Carolina border. His father, Douglas Moseley, inherited the Moseley homestead, and as a teenager, David woke in the early mornings to work with an uncle harvesting their tobacco crop. As far back as David knew, his ancestors had been buried on that land. In one of his earliest memories, from when he was about 4, he joined his parents in the graveyard to bury his stillborn sibling. “I remember being out there and the open grave,” he said.

David, along with his last living sister, Christine Moseley, and their children, nieces and nephews, still own the eastern 83 acres of the property, which they call “the farm.” The family sold the adjacent tract, which Microsoft now owns, generations ago; David said his family entered a handshake agreement with the white people who bought the other half of the property that allowed the Moseleys to continue to visit the graves. Today, the farm is surrounded on nearly every side by land zoned for industrial use, including three of the 17 parcels that Microsoft has acquired in Mecklenburg County for the ongoing expansion of its data center there. Every so often, David Moseley or his niece who lives outside Washington, D.C., gets an offer to buy their remaining land. Sometimes the correspondence is signed by Wayne Carter, the county administrator who oversaw the permitting process for the Microsoft data center.

“If they can find us to buy the land,” David said, as he sat at his dining room table, beside a stack of papers about the family property, “why couldn’t they find us for the cemetery?”

The relocated gravestone of Fred D. Moseley, who died in 1906 at the age of 2

(Christopher Smith, special to ProPublica)

The cemetery’s disappearance proceeded despite layers of federal and state regulations nominally intended to protect places like it and to facilitate consultation with people who might have an interest in what happens to historic sites.

But in Virginia, as in most of the country, the power over what ultimately happens to these sites often belongs to whoever owns the land. And the labor of investigating what could make the site historic is often outsourced to for-profit archaeological firms working for property owners who have a financial stake in finding as little as possible.

“We are among the only developed countries in the world that considers archaeological sites on private property to be private property themselves rather than cultural heritage,” said Fred McGhee, Ph.D., an African American archaeologist in an overwhelmingly white field.

“Black historic places are some of the first to get maligned,” he said.

African American cemeteries that are deemed abandoned or untended have routinely been treated as little more than a nuisance in the path to development. Historic preservation laws and regulations rarely protect them.

On the campus of the University of Georgia, builders discovered a cemetery of enslaved people, and in 2017 the remains were reportedly loaded onto a moving truck and reburied “in secret,” according to a faculty review. In Texas in 2018, the graveyard of dozens of men held as convict laborers, a site whose significance was long known to community members, was found by construction workers, and the remains were exhumed. In each case, the developers have said they treated the burials with dignity.

Earlier this year, an agricultural company called Greenfield LLC applied for a federal permit to build a Statue of Liberty-sized grain transfer facility on 248 acres along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. An archaeological firm had initially concluded that the development put several notable Black historic sites, including a restored plantation that serves as a memorial to enslaved people, in harm’s way. But in May, ProPublica revealed that the firm changed its report to back away from that conclusion after facing pressure from its client. The firm told ProPublica at the time that no one had forced it to make the revisions and that the report itself was a draft, noting that drafts often change “after clients review them.”

Without first consulting the communities that live beside the development site and trace their ancestry to the people enslaved on the same land, the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency considering the permit, allowed Greenfield to drive enormous metal beams into a sugar cane field — even before the Corps signed off on the project. That field, researchers and community members say, likely holds unmarked graves of people who were held as slaves. Greenfield has said that it considers the protection of historic sites a priority and that it would stop construction if any such sites were discovered.

For decades, the Army Corps has been criticized by other federal agencies, advocates and community and tribal organizations for failing to engage with affected groups about potential damage to cultural sites, as the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act requires.

“The way this is supposed to work is that the Army Corps, or whatever federal agency is issuing a permit, should have told the developers that the descendant community needs to be identified and interviewed and that their perspectives need to be taken into account,” said J.W. Joseph, an archaeologist with New South Associates, a cultural resources firm in Georgia that has done archaeological work in dozens of cemeteries, often as part of projects regulated by the federal law.
“Far too often, that doesn’t really happen.”

In Mecklenburg County, before Microsoft took possession of the land — for free, with significant tax breaks, along with state development dollars earmarked for struggling tobacco farming regions — the Army Corps raised no concerns about the development’s compliance with the Preservation Act. Nor did the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the agency tasked with enforcing state and federal preservation laws, make any effort to step in and protect the site. (The department said it has never denied a landowner application for a reburial permit and preservation experts said Virginia judges almost never do either.)

The Army Corps and the Department of Historic Resources facilitated the cemetery’s legal erasure. The graves were dug up in near silence.

“Although the Department’s position is that those laid to rest should be left undisturbed,” a Department of Historic Resources spokesperson said, “we also understand that this is not always possible.”

Once they had permission from the state Department of Historic Resources to excavate the remains, Microsoft, Mecklenburg County and its consultants showed little concern for anything other than speed and cost. It was a rainy spring in 2015, and the ground was soaked. The graves that an excavation crew dug open would sometimes fill with water. According to one crew member, Eric Mai, who had recently started a master’s program in archaeology, the already-fragile remains were further degraded — exposed, sometimes for days, to the wet muck.

Everyone knew it was the wrong time for the work. “The conditions on site are about as bad as they can be for exhumation,” Jones, the consultant, wrote to Microsoft and the county, explaining why the dig was taking longer than expected. “It’s a nasty sticky wet clay,” she said of the soil that had primed the land decades ago for prolific tobacco yields. But Jones pressed the gas. “THEY need [to] find additional help and work 7 days a week until it is done.”

The “remains were saturated and in very poor condition,” according to a report by the firm hired to do the excavation, Circa-Cultural Resource Management LLC. The Department of Historic Resources agreed with Circa that there wasn’t enough physical matter left to justify sending the bones to the Radford University forensic anthropologist they’d planned to hire to study markers of age, race and sex. It “would probably not add any new information to the record,” a Circa report said.

“WAYNE, this is a GOOD thing!” Jones, the consultant, wrote to Carter, the county administrator. “This would be a huge money and time savings for us.” (This year, Jones took a job with Microsoft, as an environmental permitting program manager, according to her LinkedIn profile.)

Mai said in an interview that he worried that in the rush to dig up the Moseley cemetery, the Circa team may have missed important artifacts and grave offerings. “I think it would probably be concerning for descendants to learn that the people out there doing the work, me included, did not really know what we were looking at,” said Mai. “Nobody on the team knew anything about African American burials.”

Circa CEO Carol Tyrer wrote in response to questions that the team members did have “knowledge of African American cemeteries and burial practices.” Tyrer referred other questions about the Moseley cemetery excavation to Microsoft.

In part because of his ethical concerns, Mai left the field of for-profit archaeological and historic survey work. “There is a disrespect in this process,” Mai said recently. “The people, the descendants, are not really part of what we do.”

Had the county or any of its consultants made more of an effort to determine who they were digging up, they might have learned from public death certificates and census records that in one of the graves lay the remains of Ellen Walker and likely her husband, James Walker, the parents of Lucy Walker, who married Stephen Moseley, a preacher’s son from one county away. They might also have found living relatives like Mary Taylor, who is now 83 and is one of Stephen and Lucy Moseley’s many great-grandchildren. She lives in Norfolk and keeps a worn folder full of records showing that one of her mother’s brothers was buried in the Moseley cemetery. They might have come upon the records of other cousins and aunts and uncles by marriage, who formed their own branches of the family tree, whose descendants still own other plots of land in Mecklenburg County, and who appear to have been laid to rest there, too.

In the final weeks of the dig, Microsoft began pushing harder, flying a drone over the Circa workers to monitor their progress. “There will be no hiding place!” a Microsoft project manager wrote in an email as crews prepared to cut down the trees still standing in a ring around the cemetery.

Microsoft flew a drone over the grave excavation site and took photos of its location in the middle of a ring of trees.

(Obtained by ProPublica through a public records request)

Once the dig was complete, the Army Corps told Mecklenburg County that it had met its obligations under federal law. Construction crews leveled the ground where the cemetery had been. Ownership of the land was transferred from the county to Microsoft.

In response to questions, the Corps wrote that it had consulted with the Department of Historic Resources and with Mecklenburg County before issuing the permit. A spokesperson also stated that the Corps had posted a notice on its own website around the same time the county ran its notice in the Sun “soliciting comments on the project.” Nobody responded.

Aerial photos of Mecklenburg County going back to the 1990s show rows of evergreen trees that wind across both of the old Moseley plots like the whorls and arches of a thumbprint. Then, in a 2016 satellite image of the terrain, the contours of trees and their center point have disappeared. A row of rectangles, the backfilled graves, appear in the tan earth. By 2020, an aerial view shows only an undeveloped dirt patch on the far eastern edge of the Microsoft site, just over the line from the land the Moseleys still own.

“Because the cemetery has been relocated from its original location,” the final archaeological record on file with the state said, “it is no longer eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.”

The portion of the Microsoft data center that was built where the Moseley cemetery used to be

(Christopher Smith, special to ProPublica)

In 2019, four years after the Moseley cemetery was dug up, Mecklenburg County began building a sorely needed new middle and high school. On the uncleared land, surveyors discovered a cluster of headstones inscribed with the last name Tunstall, a white family with a long history in the region. The graves would need to be moved for construction to proceed as planned, and the school board put a notice in the newspaper, like the one that had been placed about the Moseley cemetery. But in this case, the relocation was also discussed in open school board meetings. A construction firm that worked on the project trumpeted its effort to help find relatives.

A Mecklenburg County sheriff’s deputy named Dustyne Lett saw the news of the cemetery on Facebook. She is a descendant of the Tunstalls.

“By us being involved, we could have a say about where they would be moved,” Lett said recently.

A county judge issued an order giving the school board permission to disinter the remains. They were reburied in a family cemetery several towns away.

“Family members need to be buried with family members,” Lett said. “It’s not like they get together to have dinner. But for us living people, we want to have one spot where we can visit them, talk to them.”

David and Mike Moseley do not imagine that they would have won a fight against Microsoft or the county to keep the cemetery where it was, though they would have wanted the chance to wage one. They also were denied the chance to decide where their ancestors would be reburied.

“We would have wanted them to be moved here, where the rest of the family is,” David Moseley told me when we met in the Jerusalem Temple United Holy Church Cemetery, where the Moseleys have buried their relatives since the 1960s, after they moved off the farm. David’s sister Dorothy Tolbert, who passed away in New Jersey in May, is buried there, not far from Lucy Moseley’s grave — a grave that had been publicly logged online three years before the Microsoft project. “That would have been respectful, that would have allowed them to be together,” David said. In 1967, when Lucy Moseley died at the age of 96, relatives figured moving her husband’s grave to the Jerusalem Temple cemetery would have been too expensive. They would let their ancestors rest in peace.

At least, David Moseley said, Microsoft or the county could have placed a sign or historical marker on the land where the cemetery had been, noting the names of everyone who’d been buried in the old graveyard.

Mike and David Moseley visit the cemetery where the family chose to bury many of its members in recent decades. If they’d known that the old family cemetery was being relocated, they would have asked to rebury the remains at this church, they said.

(Christopher Smith, special to ProPublica)

State and local officials have actively worked to honor and preserve white cemeteries in Mecklenburg County. In a 2003 book about the successful effort to have several historic town centers listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the view from a white cemetery is described as “bucolic.” That view has been protected by a Virginia historic preservation easement. Another cemetery, with only three visible stones, is noted for its impressive gateposts, which are inscribed with the words “Love Makes Memorial Eternal” and which were donated in 1941 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

In August, I met David and Mike Moseley to look for their relatives’ reburied graves in a cemetery in Chase City, 15 minutes north of the Microsoft data center. The final excavation report had said there would be a marker placed “indicating how many remains, where they were removed from, date, and known family names.”

We drove slowly through the cemetery, looking for a sign. We did not find one. Over lunch at a local restaurant, we called the Chase City municipal office. A clerk told us that she thought she knew what we were talking about; in the new section of the town cemetery, past the mausoleum, we’d find “the graves the county sent.”

“There are no names. It just says ‘assorted bones,’” she said, reading off a paper on file in the town office. She gave us directions, listing the names on several other stones in the vicinity of the reburial plots.

Past the mausoleum, we spotted a grave with one of those names and stopped the car. David peered out the window. “I know that stone,” he said quietly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.”

Stephen Moseley’s gravestone had been set in the ground. Six feet to the right stood the stone of his toddler son, Fred D. Moseley. There is nothing noting the existence of any other remains, just an unmarked stretch of grass.

David and Mike Moseley placed their hands on the top of Stephen’s gravestone. “I would not have known where he was buried,” Mike Moseley said, repeatedly, and then sat down in front of the stone, his hand still resting on the top, and cried. Being here with them now, he said, “this connects us.”

(Christopher Smith, special to ProPublica)

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Mick Dumke

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

It was called the Plan for Transformation, the most ambitious public housing makeover in U.S. history.

Under the plan, launched in 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority would demolish most of the city’s public housing developments, displacing thousands of families. Then, over the next 10 years, the agency would replace or repair 25,000 units of housing while bringing new investment to low-income communities.

More than two decades later, the CHA used just a few sentences in an obscure report to declare that the “revitalization” of 25,000 housing units — the plan’s central promise — was complete.

“CHA has achieved the goal of this activity,” the agency informed the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in March.

But the agency’s claim hides a fundamental failure to meet its original commitments.

The agency padded its unit count by including types of housing and assistance that weren’t in the original plan, an analysis by ProPublica found. The questionable units add up to more than a fifth of the 25,000 total.

At the same time, the CHA has fallen short of providing the family housing it promised, leaving it with less than half the family units it once had.

In claiming to meet its overall unit goal, the CHA also sidesteps the fact that it is nowhere close to fulfilling its obligations to build homes and redevelop communities where its high-rises once stood. Agency officials told ProPublica they remain committed to those goals but can’t provide a timetable on when they’ll achieve them.

Community leaders, local politicians and families seeking homes have been frustrated by the CHA’s delays and unfulfilled promises. The criticism grew in recent months after ProPublica reported on the agency’s plans to turn over prime vacant land to a soccer team owned by a billionaire supporter of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. ProPublica also revealed how HUD has allowed CHA to sell, lease and give away parcels of land it says it no longer needs, even though its redevelopment work is far from done.

David Moore, a former agency official who is now alderman of the 17th Ward on the South Side, said HUD needs to pressure the CHA to finish redeveloping its former public housing communities. He said the growing number of homeless encampments around the city is tied to the agency’s slow pace of housing construction.

“We should be building more public housing units so people have options,” Moore said.

In a written statement, a CHA spokesperson said the agency remains committed to its mission of providing housing and “building strong communities.” The statement did not mention the Plan for Transformation.

“CHA’s investments today go beyond replacing the failed public housing model of the past,” the statement said. By partnering with developers, nonprofits and other government entities, “CHA will continue to leverage all available tools to accelerate the pace of new mixed-use, mixed-income development projects to ensure that more subsidized and affordable homes are available to people in need.”

The CHA’s claim to have revitalized 25,000 units is misleading in several ways, ProPublica’s analysis found.

For starters, the math doesn’t add up, the analysis found. The agency boosted the numbers by including apartments that aren’t finished yet or had no direct connection to the public housing communities the CHA promised to redevelop.

For example, the CHA has counted more than 5,000 privately owned units that it subsidizes through what are called project-based vouchers. But unlike public housing, these vouchers aren’t necessarily permanent: They keep the units affordable for a set amount of time, usually five to 30 years. The Plan for Transformation made no mention of replacing permanent public housing with project-based vouchers.

And more than a third of these same voucher units were designated as affordable housing years before the plan was launched or before the CHA subsidized them.

That’s true of the Major Jenkins Apartments, a privately owned, 156-unit building in the Uptown neighborhood on the North Side. Built in the 1920s, the building was fixed up to provide apartments for homeless and other low-income people in 1995, five years before the Plan for Transformation. That’s also when the CHA began subsidizing half the units with project-based vouchers.

The Major Jenkins Apartments in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood were fixed up to provide housing for homeless and other low-income people in 1995.

(Carlos Javier Ortiz, special to ProPublica)

Yet in 2010, the agency began counting those apartments toward its 25,000-unit goal. That happened after the CHA argued to HUD that it should be allowed to count project-based vouchers toward its Plan for Transformation total. The vouchers offered “more opportunity to provide affordable units” and options in neighborhoods long resistant to affordable housing, the CHA told HUD. Agreeing that the vouchers would be “beneficial,” a HUD official signed off.

None of the project-based vouchers should be included in the Plan for Transformation tally, Moore said.

“It’s a skirt around,” he said. “If they’re claiming those, they need to build more units. And HUD should be holding them accountable.”

The CHA’s claim also ignores the sites where the city’s major public housing complexes once stood. Most of the locations still have stretches of empty land.

Two decades ago, while displacing thousands of residents and razing most of its large developments, the agency promised to rebuild the sites with new homes for people with a range of incomes. At least a third of these would be sold at market value. But the agency also agreed in court to reserve thousands of units as public housing, and former residents were guaranteed a right to return.

Since then, the CHA has been slow to build the new homes. It’s now sitting on blocks of vacant, undeveloped land on every side of the city.

The CHA’s largest development, the Robert Taylor Homes, once stretched along 2 miles of South State Street. Under the Plan for Transformation, all 28 Taylor high-rises were razed — a loss of more than 4,400 apartments altogether.

The Robert Taylor Homes in 1988

(Archival photo by Camilo Vergara)

Eventually the CHA proposed replacing them with a new development, Legends South, that included about 2,400 total units, a quarter of them reserved for CHA residents. So far the agency has finished 335 of the public housing units, while more than 25 acres at the Taylor site remain vacant and “not prioritized” for redevelopment, according to a city planning document.

The CHA is also required to build hundreds of additional public housing units at the Lathrop Homes, on the North Side; the Ickes Homes, now renamed Southbridge, on the South Side; and the ABLA Homes, now known as Roosevelt Square, on the West Side. The CHA has offered to lease 23 acres at the ABLA site to the Chicago Fire soccer team, which is owned by billionaire Joe Mansueto, an ally of the mayor’s.

“You have not done your work at bringing back all of the units under the Plan for Transformation,” said Etta Davis, a housing activist and vice president of the residents’ group at the Dearborn Homes on the South Side.

She noted that more than 44,000 people are on the CHA’s public housing waiting list: “So you’re way behind in the market in what’s needed.”

CHA officials said they remain committed to redeveloping Lathrop, Ickes, ABLA and other sites. More than 500 new homes are under construction, including 83 public housing units and 238 supported by project-based vouchers, and others are on the way, they said.

There’s another way the CHA’s 25,000-unit count fails to deliver what the Plan for Transformation promised: It includes far less housing designated for families.

The Past 20 Years Have Seen a Drop in CHA Units, Especially Apartments for Families

(Sources: Plan for Transformation, CHA records. Note: “Supportive” includes housing for people who are disabled or homeless, veterans, and others.)

At the time the plan was launched, the CHA had about 29,000 units for families. The plan pledged to replace or rehab 15,000 of them.

But even if project-based voucher units are included, the CHA now has about 13,000 units for families — 2,000 fewer than the plan envisioned. That means the CHA lost 16,000 homes for families over the last 22 years.

Adella Bass, a mother of three who’s been on the agency’s waiting list for 13 years, sees the CHA falling short.

“Everybody deserves a place to live — a clean place to live, a suitable place to live,” Bass said. But apartments have grown so expensive that many families are concluding “there’s just no hope for housing in Chicago.”

Bass serves as a home-aide caretaker for her mother while working on her college degree. Several years ago, after struggling to pay bills, she moved into a North Side homeless shelter with her kids and her boyfriend, now her husband.

Eventually they were able to find a subsidized apartment on the South Side, which she’s grateful for. But she said it’s infested with mice and mold, and she would like something better. Bass is still hoping the CHA will call, and her long-term goal is to get into a program that leads to homeownership.

Adella Bass said she’s been on a waiting list for housing for 13 years.

(Carlos Javier Ortiz, special to ProPublica)

Bass noted that the CHA is sitting on empty land and unoccupied apartments — more than 1,200 as of earlier this year, records show. “All of their steps, protocols, procedures, just their way of doing things needs a complete and total transformation,” she said.

The Plan for Transformation was not intended to replace all of the city’s public housing.

At its peak, the CHA had more than 42,000 units. But in 1995, citing mismanagement, HUD took direct control over the CHA. The agency then began emptying and tearing down thousands of its apartments, leaving it with just under 39,000 citywide. About a third of those units were vacant or occupied by people without a lease, which would have a significant impact on the Plan for Transformation.

In the mid-1990s, for instance, the Robert Taylor Homes included more than 4,400 units stretching over 2 miles on the South Side. By 1999, the development was down to 3,800 units, only 1,600 of them occupied by leaseholders.

Theresa Boler lived at the Taylor Homes in the late 1990s and recalled the CHA picking up the pace of evictions. “They were putting people out for any little reason,” she said.

When the word spread that the CHA planned to tear the high-rises down, many residents were scared and angry. “They’d never lived outside the projects,” she said. “They really had no place to go.”

Theresa Boler, a former resident of the Robert Taylor Homes, now lives in a Chicago Housing Authority senior building.

(Carlos Javier Ortiz, special to ProPublica)

In 1999, HUD agreed to return control of the CHA to a board and leaders selected by Chicago’s mayor, Richard M. Daley. As part of the deal, federal and local officials worked together on a new set of goals for the agency. Decades of inadequate funding and poor maintenance had left many of the CHA’s buildings so rundown that they would cost billions of dollars to fix up. The Plan for Transformation mapped out how the CHA would dismantle most of its aging developments and replace them with mixed-income communities.

The plan’s goal of 25,000 units was based on the number that were leased to tenants at the end of 1999, after the agency had already emptied thousands of apartments.

The plan acknowledged that thousands of family units would be lost in the transition. “There is no alternative,” the plan stated.

The CHA can claim some successes over the last two decades. The agency has used project-based vouchers and other partnerships to help provide almost 1,800 apartments to disabled people, veterans and others struggling with homelessness or mental illness. Many of these residents live in the units with their families, the agency says. The CHA has also expanded its options for seniors.

Over the last 20 years, the Chicago Housing Authority has subsidized apartments around the city for veterans, disabled people and low-income families, including 30 units in this building on the Northwest Side.

(Carlos Javier Ortiz, special to ProPublica)

The CHA said it serves more total households than it did 20 years ago, largely through the expanded use of vouchers to subsidize rent in privately owned apartments. But rents continue to climb, and the city is struggling with a shortage of affordable housing. In addition to the list for public housing units, 35,000 people are waiting for a voucher. The number would be even higher if the CHA hadn’t closed the list.

Boler now lives in the Lincoln Perry Annex, a CHA senior building. She’s also a member of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, a neighborhood group that has pressed the CHA to build more replacement housing. She said the need is greater than ever.

“We’re not stopping,” she said. “You can’t just take things from us.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On the last street before leaving Jacksonville, there’s a dark brick one-story building that the locals know as the school for “bad” kids. It’s actually a tiny public school for children with disabilities. It sits across the street from farmland and is 2 miles from the Illinois city’s police department, which makes for a short trip when the school calls 911.

Administrators at the Garrison School call the police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. And because staff members regularly press charges against the children — some as young as 9 — officers have arrested students more than 100 times in the last five school years, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found. That is an astounding number given that Garrison, the only school that is part of the Four Rivers Special Education District, has fewer than 65 students in most years.

No other school district — not just in Illinois, but in the entire country — had a higher student arrest rate than Four Rivers the last time data was collected nationwide. That school year, 2017-18, more than half of all Garrison students were arrested.

Officers typically handcuff students and take them to the police station, where they are fingerprinted, photographed and placed in a holding room. For at least a decade, the local newspaper has included the arrests in its daily police blotter for all to see.

((Jacksonville Journal-Courier))

The students enrolled each year at Garrison have severe emotional or behavioral disabilities that kept them from succeeding at previous schools. Some also have been diagnosed with autism, ADHD or other disorders. Many have experienced horrifying trauma, including sexual abuse, the death of parents and incarceration of family members, according to interviews with families and school employees.

Getting arrested for behavior at school is not inevitable for students with such challenges. There are about 60 similar public special education schools across Illinois, but none comes anywhere close to Garrison in their number of student arrests, the investigation found.

The ProPublica-Tribune investigation — built on hundreds of school reports and police records, as well as dozens of interviews with employees, students and parents — reveals how a public school intended to be a therapeutic option for students with severe emotional disabilities has instead subjected many of them to the justice system.

It is “just backwards if you are sending kids to a therapeutic day school and then locking them up. That is not what therapeutic day schools are for,” said Jessica Gingold, an attorney in the special education clinic at Equip for Equality, the state’s federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities.

Doors lead to classrooms at the Garrison School, a public special education school for students with severe emotional or behavioral disabilities.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

“If the school exists for young people who need support, to think of them as delinquents is basically the worst you could do. It’s counter to what should be happening,” Gingold said.

Because of the difficulties the students face in regulating their emotions, these specialized schools are tasked with recognizing what triggers their behavior, teaching calming strategies and reinforcing good behavior. But Garrison doesn’t even offer students the type of help many traditional schools have: a curriculum known as social emotional learning that is aimed at teaching students how to develop social skills, manage their emotions and show empathy toward others.

Tracey Fair, director of the Four Rivers Special Education District, said it is the only public school in this part of west central Illinois for students with severe behavioral disabilities, and there are few options for private placement. School workers deal with challenging behavior from Garrison students every day, she said.

Tracey Fair, director of the Four Rivers Special Education District, which runs the Garrison School, speaks at a November meeting of the district’s board.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

“There are consequences to their behavior and this behavior would not be tolerated anywhere else in the community,” Fair said in written answers to reporters’ questions.

Fair, who has overseen Four Rivers since July 2020, said Garrison administrators call police only when students are being physically aggressive or in response to “ongoing” misbehavior. But records detail multiple instances when staff called police because students were being disobedient: spraying water, punching a desk or damaging a filing cabinet, for example.

“The students were still not calming down, so police arrested them,” wrote Fair, speaking on behalf of the district and the school.

This year, the Tribune and ProPublica have been exposing the consequences for students when their schools use police as disciplinarians. The investigation “The Price Kids Pay” uncovered the practice of Illinois schools working with local law enforcement to ticket students for minor misbehavior. Reporters documented nearly 12,000 tickets in dozens of school districts, and state officials moved quickly to denounce the practice.

This latest investigation further reveals the harm to children when schools abdicate student discipline to police. Arrested students miss time in the classroom and get entangled in the justice system. They come to view adults as hostile and school as prison-like, a place where they regularly are confined to classrooms when the school is “on restriction” because of police presence.

A “Police Incident Report” form used by the Garrison School details a student’s behavior and arrest.

(Obtained by ProPublica and Chicago Tribune; identifying information removed by the school.)

U.S. Department of Education and Illinois officials have reminded educators in recent months that if school officials fail to consider whether a student’s behavior is related to their disability, they risk running afoul of federal law.

But unlike some other states, Illinois does not require schools to report student arrest data to the state or direct its education department to monitor police involvement in school incidents. Legislative efforts to do so have stalled over the past few years.

In response to questions from reporters about Garrison, Illinois Superintendent of Education Carmen Ayala said the frequent arrests there were “concerning.” An Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson said a state team visited the school this month to examine “potential violations” raised through ProPublica and Tribune reporting.

The team confirmed an overreliance on police and, as a result, the state will provide training and other professional development, spokesperson Jackie Matthews said.

“It is not illegal to call the police, but there are tactics and strategies to use to keep it from getting to that point,” Matthews said.

Ayala said educators cannot ignore their responsibility to help students work through behavioral issues.

“Involving the police in any student issue can escalate the situation and lead to criminal justice involvement, so calling the police should be a last resort,” she said in a written statement.

In 2018, Jacksonville police arrested a student named Christian just a few weeks into his first year at Garrison, when he was 12 years old. His “disruptive” behavior earlier in the day — he had knocked on doors and bounced a ball in the hallway — had led to a warning: “One more thing” and he would be arrested, a school report said. He then removed items from an aide’s desk and was “being disrespectful,” so police were summoned. They took him into custody for disorderly conduct.

Christian has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and oppositional defiant disorder. Now 16, he has been arrested at Garrison several more times and was sent to a detention center after at least one of the arrests, he and his mother said.

He stopped going to school in October; his mother said it’s heartbreaking that he’s not in class, but at Garrison, “it’s more hectic than productive. He’s more in trouble than learning anything.”

“If they call the police on you, you are going to jail,” Christian told reporters. “It is not just one coming to get you. It will be two or three of them. They handcuff you and walk you out, right out the door.”

Handcuffs and Holding Rooms

Just over an hour into the school day on Nov. 15, two police cars rushed into the Garrison school parking lot and stopped outside the front doors. Three more squad cars pulled in behind them but quickly moved on.

Principal Denise Waggener had called the Jacksonville police to report that a 14-year-old student had been spitting at staff members. When police arrived, one of the officers recognized the boy, because he had driven him to school that morning. The student had missed the bus and called police for help, according to a police report and 911 call.

School staff had placed the boy in one of Garrison’s small cinder-block seclusion rooms for “misbehavior,” police records show. A school worker told the officer she had been standing in the doorway of the seclusion room when the boy spit and it landed on her face, glasses and shirt.

“He Spit in the Staff’s Face”

Denise Waggener, the Garrison School principal, called Jacksonville police in November after a student spit on an employee. The student was arrested for aggravated battery.

(Audio obtained by the Tribune and ProPublica from the Jacksonville Police Department. Audio was condensed for clarity.)

The child “initially stated he did not spit at anyone, but then said he did spit,” according to the police report, “but instantly regretted doing so.” The report said the child “stated he knew right from wrong, but often had violent outbursts.”

The worker asked to press charges, and the officer arrested the boy for aggravated battery.

((Jacksonville Journal-Courier))

One officer told the child he was under arrest while another searched and handcuffed him. They put him in the back seat of a squad car, drove him to the police station, read him his rights and booked him. Officers told the boy the county’s probation department would contact him later, and then they dropped him off with a guardian, records show.

The Tribune and ProPublica documented and analyzed 415 of Garrison’s “police incident reports” dating to 2015 and found the school has called police, on average, once every two school days.

The reports, written by school staff and obtained through public records requests, describe in detail what happened up until the moment police were called. These narratives, along with recordings of 911 calls, show that school workers often summon police not amid an emergency but because someone at the school wants police to hold the child responsible for their behavior.

Jacksonville police respond in November to a call from a Garrison School administrator about a student’s misbehavior. Officers arrested the student.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

About half the calls were made for safety reasons because students had fled the school. Those students rarely were arrested. Students whom police did arrest were most often accused of aggravated battery and had been involved in physical interactions such as spitting or pushing; by state law, any physical interaction with a school employee elevates what would otherwise be a battery charge to aggravated battery. The next most common arrest reasons were disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and property damage.

The school once called police after a student was told he couldn’t use the restroom because he “had done nothing all morning,” records show. The boy got upset, left the classroom anyway and broke a desk in the hallway.

The school called police on a 12-year-old who was “running the halls, cussing staff.”

And the school called the police when a 15-year-old boy who was made to eat lunch inside one of the school’s seclusion rooms threw his applesauce and milk against the wall.

Police arrested them all.

“These students, I would imagine, feel like potential criminals under threat,” said Aaron Kupchik, a sociologist at the University of Delaware who studies punishment and policing in schools.

“We are taking the actions of young people, and, rather than trying to invest in solving real behavioral problems that are very difficult, we are just exposing them to the legal system and legal system consequences.”

Jacksonville Chief of Police Adam Mefford said officers respond to every 911 call from Garrison on the assumption it’s an emergency, and as many as five squad cars can respond. Police often find a child in a seclusion room, Mefford said.

Adam Mefford, Jacksonville police chief.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

Officers determine whether a law has been broken but leave the decision whether to press charges to the school staff, he said. Police sometimes issue tickets to Garrison students for violating local ordinances, though arrests are far more common.

“The school errs on the side of pressing charges,” Mefford said. “They typically have the student arrested.”

He wondered whether school administrators call police so frequently because it’s become a habit that’s difficult to stop. “The school has gotten used to us handling some of these problems,” Mefford said.

Once arrested, the students are taken to the police station until parents pick them up or an officer takes them home. One mother told reporters that her 10-year-old son, who has autism and ADHD, was “bawling, freaking out,” when she picked him up after he was booked at the jail.

Mefford said he tried to make the experience less traumatic by moving the booking process from the county detention facility to the police station in 2021. He also said police refer students and their families to services in the community, such as counseling or substance abuse help.

After they are booked, students are screened to determine if they should be sent to a juvenile detention facility. Most are assigned to an informal alternative to juvenile court that Morgan County court officials regularly use, said Tod Dillard, director of the county’s probation department.

Jacksonville police bring the Garrison School students they arrest to this booking area at the police station to be fingerprinted and photographed. Students often wait in the room for a guardian to pick them up.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

These young people avoid going to juvenile court, but the “probation adjustment” process also requires them to admit guilt and denies them a public defender. Students must periodically report to a probation officer, typically for a year.

Violating the probation terms, such as by skipping school or getting arrested again, could lead to juvenile delinquency charges. In a juvenile court case, a student’s record of previous informal probation can be used when considering bail or sentencing.

Garrison has some students who are 18 and older, and they can be charged as adults. In 2020, an 18-year-old Garrison student was arrested for disorderly conduct after he “caused a disturbance” when he threw a cup of water and punched a pencil sharpener, court records show. That student spent four days in jail and was held on $3,000 bail. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay $439 in court costs and $10 a month in probation fees.

An 18-year-old student was charged with disorderly conduct after an incident at the Garrison School.

(Obtained from the Morgan County Circuit Court. Redacted by ProPublica.)

Even for younger students, juvenile charges related to Garrison can later have consequences in adult court. If they are arrested again after they turn 18, prior cases can be used to illustrate that they have a police record.

The boy who spit in anger this fall at Garrison now has an aggravated battery arrest on his record. Even Fair, the school’s director, found the decision to arrest the child troubling.

The day after the boy was taken into custody, Fair told reporters she knew the child had been arrested but said she did not know why school administrators had called police. Reporters told her it had been for spitting on one of her employees.

“That’s not arrestworthy. That is not what we should be about,” Fair said. In a later interview, after learning more about the incident, Fair said staff considered the student aggressive and said, “I guess they did what they thought was right.”

From Empathy to “Coercive Babysitting”

Bev Johns, a local educator, founded Garrison in 1981 with just two students — and a belief that with a caring staff and the right support, they could be successful.

The children had exhibited such disruptive behavior that staffers at their home schools felt ill-equipped to teach them. Her solution: Open a school designed to teach students not just academic subjects but how to manage their behavior. It became part of the Four Rivers Special Education District, a regional cooperative that today provides services to students in school districts across eight mostly rural counties.

The school was considered groundbreaking, and many of the techniques that Johns implemented at Garrison are still widely considered best practice for managing challenging behavior: giving students space when they’re upset, teaching them ways to manage their emotions and giving them choices rather than shouting demands.

Those techniques often involve trying to understand what’s driving a student’s behavior. A student shoving papers off their desk may feel overwhelmed and need assignments in smaller increments. A student struggling to sit still may need classwork that involves them moving around the room.

Taking the students’ disabilities into account when they misbehave is now a firmly entrenched concept in education. In fact, it’s federal law.

“There’s a requirement both in the law — and just morally — that kids with disabilities are not supposed to be punished for behaviors that are related to their disability, or caused by it, or caused by the school’s failure to meet their needs,” said Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Johns, who led Garrison until 2003, has dedicated her career to these ideas. She published research about “the Garrison method” to help other educators, taught at a nearby college and continues to speak regularly at conferences.

“Choice is such a powerful strategy. It’s such an easy intervention,” Johns recently told a standing-room-only crowd at an Illinois special education convention in Naperville. And schools should look welcoming too, she said. “I see some schools that look like prisons. Why would a child want to go there?”

Buses from school districts throughout an eight-county region of rural Illinois bring students to the Garrison School on a morning in November.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

The Garrison of today isn’t a prison, but it relies on rules and methods meant to manage students.

In recent years, staffers sometimes took away students’ shoes to discourage them from fleeing, though Fair said that has not happened under her watch. Before a recent Illinois law banned locked seclusion in schools, Garrison workers used to shut students inside one of the school’s several seclusion rooms — staff members would stand outside and press a button to engage a magnetic lock. The doors have since been removed, but the “crisis rooms” are still used. The Four Rivers district reported to ISBE that workers had restrained or secluded students 155 times in the 2021-2022 school year — three times as many incidents as students.

One of the seclusion rooms at the Garrison School, called “crisis rooms,” shown in 2019.

(Obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune)

“They would lock me in a concrete room and then close the door on me and lock it. I would freak out even worse,” said an 18-year-old named Max, who left the school in 2020.

Some of the school’s aides are assigned to one of two “crisis teams” of four employees each that respond to classrooms and can remove students who are upset, disobedient or aggressive.

Employees’ handwritten records describe several incidents where they confined a child to a small area inside the classroom. In one case, the crisis team made a “human wall” around a 14-year-old student who was wandering in the classroom, swearing and being disruptive. A 16-year-old student told reporters that school employees drew a box around his desk in chalk and told him not to leave the area or there would be consequences.

Charles Cropp, who has worked as part of crisis teams at Garrison on and off since 2009, said he and his colleagues try to help students learn how to calm down when they are upset. He said teams aim to help students learn how to manage their emotions but that sometimes the young people also need to be held “accountable” when they are physical or disruptive.

“I was one that never really cared to watch kids get escorted out in handcuffs,” said Cropp, who returned to the school full time in late November. “I never liked it but in the same sense, they have to learn when you graduate and you are an adult in the public, you can’t do those things.”

Garrison workers were recently trained in the Ukeru method, a crisis intervention system that uses blue shields to block students’ physical aggression in place of physical restraint.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

Jen Frakes, a board-certified behavior analyst who worked at Garrison in 2015-16, described the culture at Garrison as “coercive babysitting.” She said she never saw a situation that warranted arresting a student.

“It seemed more of a power dynamic of ‘You’ll either follow my rules or I will show you who’s in charge,’” said Frakes, who runs a Springfield business that helps schools and families learn to work through challenging behavior. “When I saw a kid get arrested, he was sitting underneath his desk calm and quiet, and they came in and arrested him.”

This isn’t how other schools similar to Garrison are handling difficult student behavior.

Reporters identified 57 other public schools throughout Illinois that also exclusively serve students with severe behavioral disabilities. To determine how often police were involved at those schools and why, reporters made public records requests to all of the schools and to the police or sheriff’s departments that serve each one. Reporters were able to examine police records for 50 schools.

The two schools with the most arrests during the last four school years had 16 and 18, respectively. At 23 of the schools, no students were arrested in that period; six schools had only one arrest.

By comparison, five students were arrested at Garrison by mid-November of this school year alone, according to school and police records.

John McKenna, an assistant professor specializing in special education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said arresting students not only criminalizes them but also takes them out of the classroom.

“Kids are supposed to be receiving instruction and support and not opportunities to enter the school-to-prison pipeline,” he said.

“If you don’t provide kids with academic instruction, particularly those with behavior and emotional needs, the gaps between their performance and the peers who don’t have disabilities grows exponentially and sets them up for failure,” McKenna said.

The fact that Garrison students have disabilities that may explain some of their behavior appears to be lost on many of the officials who encounter them in the justice system; some described Garrison as a school for delinquents, not disabled children. A public defender tasked with representing students in juvenile court described the children as having been “kicked out” of their regular schools. An assistant state’s attorney thought students at Garrison had been “expelled” from traditional schools. Neither of those descriptions is accurate.

Rhea Welch, who worked under Johns and retired in 2016, said that during her 26 years as a teacher at Garrison it was not a place that relied heavily on police. “You don’t want your kids arrested, for heaven’s sake. You want to be able to work with them so that doesn’t happen, so they’re more in control,” she said.

For Johns, Garrison is no longer the school she remembers. Students need positive feedback, she said, not constant reprimands from and clashes with the adults they are supposed to trust.

“I always say when you’re having trouble with a child, the first place you look is yourself,” she said.

Johns read some of the school’s recent police incident reports and said she found them “bothersome,” adding, “It’s obviously hard for me to watch what’s happened.”

“I Did Everything I Could to Get Him Out”

Gabe, a 12-year-old boy with autism, likes to share with anyone who will listen all the details of his Pokemon collection and has gotten good at using online translators to read the cards with Japanese lettering on them. His stepmother, Lena, said that over the years Gabe has learned to ask for what he needs. When he gets overstimulated at home, he asks for space by saying: “I need you to back up.”

(When using the last name of a parent would identify the student —– and in doing so, create a publicly available record of the student’s arrest —– ProPublica and the Tribune are referring to the parent by first name only.)

After an incident at the Garrison School, Gabe and his family decided he couldn’t go back. Shown with his father, Billy, and stepmother Lena, Gabe, who is 12 and has autism, now goes to a school 90 minutes away.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

Gabe ended up at Garrison in 2019 after having difficulty in traditional schools. He will sometimes yell and lash out when frustrated.

Lena said school officials asked her to pick up Gabe if he got upset. “I would hear Gabe screaming, and then heard them screaming back at him,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’ And they’d still get up in his face.”

And then one day, Gabe and Lena said, school workers barricaded him at his desk by pushing filing cabinets around it. He pushed over one of the cabinets while trying to get away, and the school called the police, Lena said.

“We had to pick up our 10-year-old at the police station,” Lena said. “I would freak out if I got boxed in with filing cabinets.”

It got so that Gabe would wake up angry and not want to go to school.

“That school is at the bottom of the food chain. If you got all the schools in the world, they would be at the bottom of the food chain. The workers there are mean,” said Gabe.

Other parents described their children becoming angrier, more withdrawn; the students dreaded going to school at Garrison. Some families begged their home districts to find another school for them.

“It was like hell,” said one mother, who said her son was miserable while he was a student there. “I did everything I could to get him out.” Her son attended Garrison for about five years before she got him returned to his home school. He is in his first year of college now.

Michelle Prather, whose daughter Destiny attended Garrison from fifth grade until she graduated in 2021, said school employees threatened to call police over minor missteps: throwing a piece of paper, or pushing a desk.

“She would walk out of a room and they’d say, ‘We’re going to call police,’” Prather said. Destiny was arrested at least once after she shoved an aide while trying to leave a classroom.

Prather and other caregivers said watching their children be arrested over and over was troubling, but it was also upsetting to realize that the school wasn’t providing the support services the students needed.

Destiny has intellectual disabilities and ADHD as well as acute spina bifida, a defect of the spine. Because of her medical condition, Destiny had difficulty sensing when she needed to use the restroom. She would sometimes get up from her desk and tell staff that she urgently needed to go.

“They would say, ‘No you don’t,’” said her mother. “She would have accidents. I would have to bring her clothes.”

Destiny, 19, who graduated from Garrison in 2021, plays with her family’s dog inside their home.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

Madisen Hohimer, who is now 22 and working as a bartender, said she transferred to Garrison in sixth grade when her home school recommended it. She remembers Garrison as a place that failed to help her. Hohimer said she frequently ran away from the school and employees took her shoes to try to keep her from fleeing.

“I was never involved with the police before Garrison. I started mostly acting out when I got sent over there because I felt like I had nobody,” she said. One time, she said, she swung and kicked at staff after they cornered her in a seclusion room. She wound up being arrested for aggravated battery.

Just weeks before Hohimer was set to graduate, she left for good. “I wish they would have found a way to help me,” she said.

After Gabe’s filing cabinet incident, his parents kept him home until he could be placed at a private therapeutic school three counties away. He’s been going there since last year.

“It’s an hour and a half ride and he’d rather do that than go to Garrison,” said Lena, a nursing student. He’s thriving there, she said, and noted that the school has never called police about Gabe’s behavior.

At their home in Jacksonville, Gabe shows his mother, Lena, a record player he made at school out of a cup and paper clip.

(Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

But one of Lena’s other children, Nathan, remained at Garrison.

Then one morning in late September, she got a text from her son:

“I’M AT THE POLICE STATION THERE GOING TO GET MY FINGERPRINTS AND TAKE A PICTURE OF ME AND BRING ME BACK TO THE HOUSE.”

“A Staff Member Will Probably Press Charges”

A 14-year-old student pushed an aide and then left the school. A school employee called police to request help finding the student and having a school worker press charges.

(Audio obtained by the Tribune and ProPublica from the Jacksonville Police Department. Audio was condensed for clarity.)

Nathan, who was 14 at the time, had been arrested after he hit a classmate and then shoved an aide who was trying to physically keep him in the classroom, according to a school report. He then left the school. In a 911 call, a school administrator asked police to find Nathan and also to come to the school “because a staff member will probably press charges.”

Nathan’s family decided not to send him back to Garrison. He’s taking classes online instead.

“That was my worst mistake, putting either of my kids in Garrison,” Lena said. “If I could take it back, I would.”

((Jacksonville Journal-Courier))

No One Watching

Warning signs that Garrison was punishing students with policing have been there for years, waiting for someone to take notice.

Since as far back as 2011, the federal government has published data online about police involvement and arrests at schools. That year, the data showed, Garrison called police on 54% of its students and 14% were arrested. Three subsequent publications of similar data show the arrest rate climbing each time — until, in 2017-18, more than half of Garrison’s students were arrested.

Though the federal data could have raised red flags, Illinois does not collect data on police involvement in schools and does not require that the state education board monitor it. The state does monitor other punitive practices in schools, such as their numbers of suspensions and expulsions, and requires schools to make improvements when the data shows excessive use.

Illinois legislation that would have required ISBE to collect data annually on school-related arrests and other discipline stalled last year.

The state board, however, has issued guidance about involving police in school discipline. Earlier this year, ISBE and the state attorney general’s office told school districts across the state to use social workers, mental health professionals and counselors — not police — to create a “positive and safe school climate.”

Before last week, no one from ISBE had been to Garrison for at least the last seven school years. There had been no complaints that would have triggered a monitoring visit, said Matthews, the state board spokesperson.

Garrison has its own school board, and it — not the state board — is responsible for monitoring the school, including police activity, ISBE officials said. The school board is made up of representatives from some of the 18 school districts that rely on Four Rivers for special education staffing and placements at Garrison.

The board president, Linda Eades, said after a November board meeting that she couldn’t answer questions about the police involvement at Garrison and described the board as hands-off. “We don’t get down in the trenches,” she said.

Fair, the district’s director, said she is trying to understand the scope of police involvement at Garrison and is “digging into” school reports. “I’m trying so hard. It’s a lot of stuff to change,” she said in an interview. “There are a lot of things that need to improve.”

Earlier this year, Garrison was awarded a $635,000 “Community Partnership Grant” through ISBE for training to help students with their behavioral and mental health needs and help schools reduce their reliance on punitive discipline. ​

Some of the grant money has been used to pay for training in Ukeru, a method of addressing physical aggression that doesn’t involve physically restraining a child.

The Ukeru method focuses on training workers in how to prevent challenging behavior from becoming a crisis and uses soft blue pads to block kicks and punches if necessary. Garrison workers were trained in the method in October; blue pads are now propped up in the hallways in the building.

Starting two weeks ago, Fair said, the school began using its two social workers and a social work intern in a new way. One of the social workers is now available to go into a classroom when a student needs help, providing a way to intervene before behavior escalates into a crisis. Fair said she also plans to incorporate social emotional learning into the curriculum.

School administrators mentioned the Ukeru training and some of Garrison’s latest efforts at the November board meeting, which lasted about 20 minutes. Fair said the school had begun to monitor police involvement and arrests and said she is trying to “boost up some of the supports for the kids.”

Her priority now, she assured them, is to “really help make it a therapeutic place for the kids.”

That’s what it was always supposed to be.

Lynn Dombek contributed research.