ANTIOCH (KRON) — Dealing with accusations of abuse, Antioch special education school Tobinworld has been under scrutiny since a viral video surfaced.
KRON’s Maureen Kelly has been investigating the privately-run schools.
And on Thursday night, her in-depth report reveals that Tobinworld schools are being paid millions of dollars from publicly-funded school districts.
The alleged abuse captured on cellphone video happened at Tobinworld 2 in Antioch. But the boy being slapped by an aide was placed at this school by the Oakland Unified School District.
Tobinworld documents turned over to KRON from the state Department of Education shows that during the 2014-2015 school year, students were being bused in from all over the East Bay.
In addition to the Antioch Unified School District, students are coming from public school districts in Oakland, Oakley, Brentwood, Pittsburg, Rio Vista, Martinez, Concord, the San Ramon Valley, Livermore, Mountain House and Tracy, usually because their home districts don’t have enough trained personnel to provide the monitoring that autistic, severely emotionally or developmentally disabled students require.
Tobinworld is one of several private schools in the area that fills that need.
KRON’s public records request also turned up dozens of individual service agreements between the private school and public school districts. Digging through them, KRON found that while the basic cost of education for a student during a 210-day school year was just over $28,000, the price tag could be much higher.
That is because some kids need more specialized care than others, like counseling or physical therapy, as does the cost of bussing them from far-flung locations.
According to these contracts, some districts agreed to pay Tobinworld $60,000, $70,000, and in one case, nearly $90,000 for just one student.
But just like public school, if the student doesn’t show up, the school doesn’t get paid.
Former Tobinworld teacher’s aides KRON spoke to said when they worked at the Antioch campuses, the administration would pay students to come to school.
“When i was there, it was like $10 that each student would get at the end of the month if they were there the whole month, perfect attendance,” former aide Ayesha Viaan said.
“They’ll do everything in their power to make sure kids are there because the more kids that are there, the more money they get. And I’ve heard them talking about it…so, it’s like they’re lining their pockets more than their concern about the children,” former aide Nic Aldrete said.
KRON sorted through the data turned over by the state and found that the majority of students at Tobinworld 2 and 3 are from the Antioch Unified School District. Tobinworld 2 started in Brentwood in 1998, relocating to Antioch 10 years later.
Tobinworld 3 opened on the campus of Fremont Elementary in 2014. Three more branches of Tobinworld opened on Antioch public elementary school campuses, DVT Academy at Diablo Vista, KT academy at Kimball, and A&T Academy for autistic preschoolers at Grant Elementary, all in the summer of 2015.
According to the school’s 2013 tax record, the non-profit brought in nearly $15 million in revenue. Their founder and executive director, Judy Weber, is their highest paid employee, making $350,000 a year, a far cry from what the former aides KRON talked to said they made that same year.
Their hourly wage?
“$9, maybe a couple cents above,” former aide Vanessa Depina said. “I think people at McDonalds were probably making the same thing I was making at the time.”
“I think people at McDonalds were probably making the same thing that I was making at the time,” Viaan said.
The former aides said they only needed a high-school diploma to get a job there, one saying before she left, she saw a disturbing trend among newer incoming employees.
“Employees that were maybe like a year, two years, maybe three years older than the students that they were in charge of,” Viaan said.
KRON asked Weber about why she wasn’t paying more money for more experienced staff. She did not address that question directly but released a written statement saying:
“Tobinworld staff are required to complete California Department of Education-approved specialized education training before they are allowed in our classrooms. In addition, staff members are retrained periodically to help ensure policies and procedures are consistently followed and enforced.”
The Livermore Unified School District is not paying Tobinworld as much as they used to.
In 2013, a program specialist with the district filed a suspected child abuse report after a 13-year-old girl soiled herself while being restrained and allowed to go home in wet clothes. That caused the district to send in their own staff to observe what was going on inside Tobinworld.
Based on those observations and other feedback, the district suggested that their parents look into alternative placement for their kids.
Now, the Livermore Unified School District does still have students attending Tobinworld if parents choose to keep their kids there, but the district has stopped placing new students in that school because they do not believe the action that instigated this report was an isolated incident.
On Friday night, you will hear from an advocacy group for the disabled who said they believe what is happening in the viral video is a pervasive problem that goes beyond Tobinworld.