Another gaffe for DPS: Kids' secrets left to rot
Another tragic disregard of and assault on Detroit schoolchildren.
by Charlie LeDuff
Detroit -- The secrets of 20,000 schoolchildren lie naked and abused in a deserted warehouse near the Michigan Central Rail Depot.
For example: Jeanette, 11, had an IQ of 57, was mentally unstable and lived in poverty.
The emotional troubles of Bobbie, 7, stemmed from being caught in an emotional tug of war between two bickering and divorced parents.
Johnnie, 8, liked to fight because, his psychologist surmised, his parents placed unrealistic pressure on him to perform.
These intimacies and more are revealed in a thousand spools of microfilm containing the psychological cases of former Detroit schoolchildren. They are not under lock and key, as one might assume, but lying around in the old Roosevelt Book Repository off Michigan Avenue.
The building was owned until the early '90s by the Detroit Public Schools and served as a storage facility for books, crayons and case records from the district's psychological clinic.
Chances are, if you attended Detroit public schools between the 1950s and the 1980s, and you saw a psychologist, then your childhood yearnings and anxieties are visible to anybody with a pair of boots and a crowbar who wishes to view them. Also in the dank, ruinous warehouse are crates of birth records and employment permits that in some cases contain Social Security numbers.
The repository has been raped and looted by scrappers and vandals since it caught fire more than two decades ago. Judging by the condition of some of the unspooled film, the looters also rummaged through the most personal details of some children's lives.
Little Johnnie is now 66-year-old John Brust. He is a businessman living in Rochester Hills and seemed amused that his past had come calling a half-century later.
"Let's face it, we're seeing firsthand what a failure the schools have been to the children of Detroit," Brust said. "The incompetence. How the money is being stolen from their own kids. I want the records destroyed. The world doesn't need to see my childhood problems. When I was a kid, I hated school, OK?"
The discovery of the records unmasks another colossal failure in a string of colossal failures within the Detroit Public School system, said Jack Kresnak, president of Michigan's Children, a nonpartisan advocacy group.
"It is unbelievable and outrageous and, sad to say, par for the course of how things have worked at DPS," Kresnak said. "The confidential nature of psychological evaluations for children is something that should be sacrosanct. Apparently, Detroit children don't deserve this basic dignity."
Detroit schools have a well-earned reputation as some of the worst in the nation. They are so bad, in fact, that closing them down might be considered something of an educational advancement. Recent audits have shown that millions of dollars have been siphoned off by employees, hundreds of no-show jobs and dead people still drawing health benefits. The graduation rate is 25 percent by some estimates. A school board member recently had his children taken away by the court.
Last week, it was announced that several thousand identification files of employees with Social Security numbers were found lying around unguarded in an undisclosed location. On Wednesday, the Wayne County prosecutor issued arrest warrants for five school employees for embezzlement, among other things. And the man brought in to clean it all up, Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager, was found this week to have given a million dollar no-bid contract to his former employer.
But the emergence of the unguarded psychological records may carry the most chilling consequences of all, said Dr. Gerald Shiener, a prominent psychiatrist at the Wayne State University Medical School.
"Patients have to be confident that their most inner thoughts and feelings will be safeguarded," he said. "It inhibits the patient's ability to speak honestly if they can't be sure that those thoughts remain confidential."
Jennifer Mrozowski, a spokeswoman for DPS, said in a written statement: "While we have not owned that building for years, we know that buildings owned by the Detroit Public Schools were not always properly secured when they were closed or sold, resulting in records, equipment, desks and other valuables left to vandals and thieves, in some cases."
Nevertheless, Mrozowski stopped short of claiming ownership of the files.
But in the opinion of Mayer Morganroth, a noted Detroit lawyer, the school district is responsible for the files and has exposed itself if not to criminal charges then certainly a multi-million dollar civil lawsuit. "Those records are the responsibility of the school district and the examining psychologists. They are privileged documents and should never have been arbitrarily exposed."
The building, owned by trucking magnate Matty Moroun, has been sealed off since January, when a man known as Johnnie Dollar was found there, frozen in an elevator shaft, only his feet and ankles protruding from the ice.
Told of the 10,000 other ghosts inhabiting the place, Dan Stamper, an adviser to Moroun, promised extra security at the building, until school officials remove the records, and trucks to help haul the records away.
As for little Johnnie Brust, he has done well. He now makes a good living in automobile parts. He has four grown children. "I'm happy in life," he says. "I'm just anxiously waiting on grandchildren."
— Charlie LeDuff
Detroit News
2009-08-13
http://www.detnews.com/article/20090813/METRO08/908130411/1439/METRO08/Another-gaffe-for-DPS--Kids--secrets-left-to-rot
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