By the time the Chicago Board of Education approved a residential special education school for Daniel Raney, they couldn’t locate him.
The emotionally disturbed 16-year-old had run away from home and was living by his wits on the North Side.
A few weeks later, he was found dead in a lakefront hotel room, shot through the heart by a 33-year-old man who was wanted by police for drug dealing.
Since he was 11 years old, Margoe Raney had been trying to get special education for her only child. At 14, psychiatrists said he belonged in a secure therapeutic boarding school where he could be taught, counseled and supervised 24 hours a day.
Instead, the last years of his life were spent being shuttled from locked psychiatric units that his single working mother couldn’t afford to Chicago public school classrooms where he couldn’t cope.
Raney’s story and those of Clifford, Willie and Pauletta, also profiled here, illustrate the costly and calamitous results of failing to identify children who need special education.
Recent federal and academic studies estimate that 12 to 15 percent of the nation’s children suffer from emotional or cognitive disorders that warrant special education or counseling.
Only 8.6 percent of the Chicago Public Schools’ students have been so identified.
Dr. Thomas Hehir, chief of special education in Chicago from 1989 until January, conceded that 12 to 15 percent is a more realistic figure and that it could be as high as 20 percent in the inner city, as several recent government and academic studies have shown.
That would mean 14,000 to 40,000 or more Chicago children need help but are drifting through the system unidentified.
Hehir’s replacement, Associate Supt. Charlene Green, dismisses such estimates. After two months running the department, she said she had heard of only one disabled child who had gone unidentified, a case exposed in the media. “Our referral process is not slack in any way.”
The odds are high that children with untreated mental disabilities will drop out of school and turn to delinquency or remain chronically unemployed.
A study that tracked learning disabled dropouts in the Pittsburgh public schools reported that many said they had been asked to leave by administrators because of their poor attendance and disruptive behavior-the very reasons that they needed intensive special education.
Three-quarters of those dropouts were unemployed, the study found.
Dan Raney was a child of prodigious energy-one who drew on any scrap of paper that was left around his cozy Northwest Side townhouse. He won grade school science prizes, took Saturday painting classes, and played ice hockey in a traveling league.
Raising him “was like chasing a comet,” his mother said.
But when he was 11, Dan stopped being able to stay on track in his classes at Newberry Academy, a magnet school in the Old Town neighborhood. When he turned in his homework, he got 100’s, but often he didn’t and got 0’s. It averaged out to failing grades. Whenever another kid started acting up, he jumped into the thick of the action.
He asked his mother “What’s the point of being smart if you can’t control it?”
Margoe Raney took him to school psychologists to see if he needed special education classes. But because the 5th grader performed above the norm on all their tests, they told her he probably just needed to see a private therapist.
She secured one through a Christian charity, but Dan’s ability to control himself continued to deteriorate.
An entry in his 8th-grade journal says: “Stupid me. Just took my mother’s keys, jumped in the car and drove away. I have no idea what was going through my mind.”
Once when he disappeared for six days, his mother found him sleeping on the roof of the Irving Park Presbyterian Church.
Sometimes when Margoe Raney was at work, he and his friends would break into the house to raid the refrigerator. When they started taking more valuable things, she bought a safe and put a padlock on her bedroom door.
Over the next few months, Dan was diagnosed as severely emotionally disturbed. One psychiatric evaluation noted his “extreme uncontrolled behavior.” Another diagnosed major depression at the core of his problems and said he was hyperactive and afflicted with an attention-deficit disorder.
His mother said she began to understand how it was that Dan’s baby-sitters and teachers had complained about his unruly behavior, while he complained that they were picking on him. “When I found out about attention-deficit disorder, it meant that Danny could be right and everybody else could be right, too, and finally it all made sense,” she said.
Between 1987 and 1989, his psychiatrists hospitalized him five times at adolescent mental health clinics.
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“When I began to see that the hospitals weren’t having any luck, my parental guilt began to subside,” Margoe Raney said.
Dan’s psychiatrists said he belonged in a therapeutic boarding school, but Chicago school officials decided in January 1988 that he should be in a less expensive place: a regular high school in a special class for children with behavior disorders.
They told his mother that “he’d have to get a situation where they could see he couldn’t cope, and then we would be able to go the next step,” she said. “It’s like destroying the kid to work that way.
“When the kid is flunking life, he cannot think about school.”
Dan did indeed fail in the behavior-disordered classes, so in 1988 Margoe Raney went back to the school and again tried to get him into a residential program.
This time, there were long delays while officials waited for results of an eye-and-ear test.
Finally in February 1989, school officials agreed that Dan ought to be in a therapeutic boarding school. The Raneys chose one in Wisconsin, and Dan was approved there. But then there was an additional delay while the Chicago and the state boards of education processed the paperwork.
As the weeks wore on, Dan waited in limbo in a locked psychiatric unit. Unsure if he would ever be approved and crushed because he had not been allowed out for months, his mother decided to take him on a 3-hour pass.
On March 25, they went to get a haircut and buy some jeans.
Dan asked for a little time alone with his girlfriend, but Margoe Raney refused. Then Dan “made this great big presentation to me about how he knew he had screwed up and he wanted to get his life back together. It was like Lee Iacocca making a speech to the board of Chrysler.”
He nearly had her in tears.
After Dan promised that he and his girlfriend would walk straight back home, Margoe Raney relented and dropped them off a few blocks from their townhouse.
That was the last she saw of him.
In early May 1989, the letter arrived approving his placement at the Wisconsin facility. But Margoe Raney had no way of talking with him about the chance he had for a new start.
On May 31, he was killed.
On a shelf in her living room, she keeps a picture of the handsome teenage boy with a broad smile and earnest brown eyes.
She used to take that photograph to Dan’s school conferences to show officials that the problematic case they were considering was a boy who had a face, a name and a future.
“If you look at Dan, you’d say there’s no way this kid has a problem in the world,” she said. “Kids who have obvious problems, you might even say they’re lucky.”
Clifford
When Clifford Cash was 5 years old, he banged his head against the wall until his nose bled.
“I was scared he was going to come up with some brain concussion,” said his mother, Dorothy Cash. “I would just try to grab him and hold him. It was like he didn’t feel no pain.”
When he grew a little older, “he would start to shake his head and just shake it and shake it,” she said. “He’d say, `Mommy, there’s something in my ear. She’s singing and whistling.’ “
Clifford told his mother that he heard the voice of an old woman with white hair.
Raising four boys alone on public aid in the South Side’s tough Roseland neighborhood, Dorothy let her youngest son run the streets, family and neighbors said.
Clifford became a tiny crime wave.
At 11, police accused him of breaking into a woman’s car. At 12, charged with purse snatching. At 13, suspected of trying to steal a man’s wallet with a handgun. All of these cases ended in acquittals, but then, during a 6-week period in the summer of 1990, 14-year-old Clifford was charged with three sexual assaults so brutal that his arrest made the 10 o’clock news.
According to police, he raped a 17-year-old at gunpoint and took $7 from her, he attempted to take a 45-year-old woman into an abandoned building and rape her but only succeeded in shredding her clothes and breaking a finger and a toe, and he raped an 11-year-old, holding her close to him with a screwdriver, then defecating on her when he was finished.
He weighed 112 pounds at the time, police records show.
Court psychologist Phillip Sweet reported that in addition to being paranoid, eccentric and violent, Clifford displayed “odd beliefs in magical thinking.”
Another evaluator measured Clifford’s IQ at 69 and noted that he had trouble keeping a hold on reality.
But throughout most of his school career, the boy was taught along with other Chicago public school students in regular classes.
When he began 8th grade at Hope Community Academy, 5515 S. Lowe Ave., in the fall of 1989, he was evaluated as having a learning disability so mild that he needed a special class for only one period a day, according to principal Joseph Lee.
Lee said he knew that Clifford actually had more profound problems and needed to be in a self-contained class for behavior-disordered youngsters, but those classes are “very limited with the Board of Education. It is difficult to get youngsters in. The services are just not there.”
During that year, school records show Clifford ditched classes, threatened teachers, and was subject to erratic mood swings.
He received so many 10-day suspensions, his mother said, that “when he left out the door to go to school, he’d say, `Momma, most likely I got 10 coming.’ “
It wasn’t until May 1990 that Lee succeeded in getting Clifford transferred to the Montefiore Special School, 1310 S. Ashland Ave., the public school for adolescents with behavior disorders.
But those classes were not scheduled to start until 5 months later. By that time, Clifford had been arrested in connection with the sexual-assault spree.
Dorothy Cash told Clifford that his arrest was a result of a curse placed by a distant relative.
Many years ago, she said, her grandmother got into an argument with a great-aunt over a social slight. The great-aunt said, “You’re going to be cursed down, and all your boy children will be cursed down.”
“Now I don’t believe in no hoodoo, and I don’t believe in no voodoo, but I have watched the pass of life,” Dorothy Cash said. “Ain’t none of the men folk in our family right.”
She goes through the litany: One of her brothers is serving time in a Wisconsin penitentiary, while another is out of work and living with his mother. The most successful of her sons never walked a day because he was stricken with cerebral palsy. Another son was called by the spirit of God to preach, but he got involved with drugs and is serving 7 years in prison. The third was sentenced in May to a 25-year term in the Joliet Correctional Center.
“And who knows what they fitting to do with my baby Clifford.”
When Clifford was arrested, Dorothy told him about the curse.
“I said, `This is Auntie’s hunt. Baby, please watch yourself ’cause it’s here and it’s near.’ “
It is his auntie that Clifford hears whistling and singing in his ears, his mother said. She is the old woman with long white hair who tells him to do things.
Clifford is awaiting trial.
Lee, who has been a Chicago Public Schools principal for 21 years, said he has never seen the system so burdened with mentally disabled children like Clifford. “The problems are getting worse, and the resources are getting less and less,” he said.
“I think it would be really useful if the people who write the laws that say schools must carry all the burdens of society would come in here and walk in our shoes for a couple of days.”
Willie
Walking through the hallways of Libby School, John Hayes says he vaguely remembers Willie.
“A wild boy, right?”
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But the assistant principal at the South Side school doesn’t recall if Willie was in special education or not and can’t seem to find any records on him.
Willie’s report cards, made available by his mother, Geraldine Collins, show that he was a pupil in the school’s regular classes. In 5th grade, he got D’s in reading and was absent 104 days out of 192 and tardy 57 others.
His 6th-grade report card only records one grade, a F, but at the bottom, someone wrote in neat script, “Willie needs to be placed in a classroom that could help him academically. Awaiting placement due to low scores and nonreading.”
The placement in a classroom that could help Willie never came. By last summer, he was running the streets with a group of older boys.
His mother, a slow-moving, heavyset woman who frequently remarks in a high-pitched and trembling voice that “the pressures” of raising seven children alone are overwhelming her, said Willie often stayed with one of his sisters.
Police said he hung around a corner at Garfield Boulevard and Laflin Street with a 17-year-old who was awaiting trial for dealing crack from the curbside.
Someone took a stash of drugs the dealer had hidden in an abandoned building, prosecutors said, so Willie, the dealer and another juvenile combed the neighborhood, questioning people until they came upon a man pushing a shopping cart. Police said Willie and the other juvenile hit the man with sticks, then the dealer shot him twice, killing him.
At age 13, Willie was charged with murder.
While he awaited trial, school psychologist Diane Stone measured Willie’s IQ at about 47. He was functioning academically at the level of a 6-year-old, Stone testified, and could not read.
Willie looked impish and spry as he took the witness stand in his defense. A tiny boy with short cropped hair and a charming smile, he took long, painful seconds to respond to questions about whether he understood his Miranda rights.
Asked what is meant by the phrase, `You have the right to remain silent,’ he said, “That I commit a crime or something?”
Asked to define a prosecutor, he said, “Somebody there to help you?”
Asked to define a proceeding, he said, “I don’t know.”
“Then what are we doing here today?” he was asked.
“We trying to see what going to happen to me,” Willie said.
In November, he was convicted of murder.
Pauletta
A big, disheveled woman with a weary face, Lorraine Robinson walks as if her feet hurt.
She makes her way out of the Cook County courtroom where her 16-year-old daughter, Pauletta, is being tried for murder and heads toward Cook County Hospital, where, she said, her youngest son is recovering from a fractured pelvis-an injury that he sustained when “some boys threw him into a wall.”
When she was younger, Pauletta was twice taken from her mother’s care by the state and sent to live with relatives, and officials twice put the girl in psychiatric hospitals because she threatened to kill herself.
“It seemed like her mother couldn’t keep her under control,” said Ruby Saunders, Pauletta’s former guardian.
Pauletta’s father is listed on court records as “unknown.”
She is decribed by psychiatrists as a child who was abused, abandoned and had no lasting or meaningful help in her life.
At the Armstrong School in Rogers Park, where she attended 7th and 8th grade from January 1990 to June 1991, Pauletta was in regular education classes, although she was “constantly being suspended or disciplined,” said Principal Arline Hersch.
In 8th grade, Pauletta was absent 44 days, school records show. She wasn’t academically qualified to graduate, Hersch said, but “she was just at that age where we had to pass her on.”
Just before dawn on July 28, 1991, when she was 14, Pauletta went cruising on North Clark Street with another 14-year-old, two older women who have been identified in court records as prostitutes, and a man with a handgun.
Their plan was to lure a drunken man into an alley, then rob him, according to prosecutors and confessions Pauletta and the 14-year-old signed.
But the robbery went awry, and the young man shot the drunk.
All five were charged with murder. Pauletta and the other juvenile will be tried as adults.
Pauletta has spent 20 months in detention.
In court, she wears her hair in a small, neat bun. A pug-nosed girl, her coal-black eyes flash with pain and anger. There are scars on the coffee-and-cream-colored skin of her arms, where psychiatrists say she has bitten herself.
When Pauletta was a little girl, Saunders said, “sometimes she was very nice and then it was like something would blow up inside her. She would get angry at the least little thing, and you really had to talk to her and try to show her that you cared.
“That’s what she really needed to hear.”
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Next: A puzzling case, a fractured system.