A private special education school in Lewiston is suing Maine’s education department, the Lewiston school district and a family after it was ordered to keep teaching a student who had injured staff.

Spurwink, a Portland nonprofit that operates four special purpose private schools for students with developmental disabilities, filed a lawsuit last week in U.S. District Court in Portland alleging that the defendants are misinterpreting a federal law that says students with disabilities have a right to stay in their school placement.

According to the suit, a 19-year-old student referred to as “Tommy Doe” had several diagnoses, including nonverbal autism and a seizure disorder, which qualified him for special education services under the federal Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, known as IDEA.

Tommy attended Spurwink’s Lewiston Day Treatment school from January 2023 to November 2024. During that time, the complaint alleges, he was frequently violent toward himself and would bite, hit and kick staff members.

Spurwink says it started to discuss removing the student from the program in October 2024 because staff members did not think they could safely care for him, and it accelerated that decision the following month after he bit three staff members, all of whom needed emergency medical care.

The parents requested a due process hearing with the state in November, saying schools have an obligation under IDEA to keep a student in their current placement while the family seeks a new school.

A state hearing officer agreed, writing that Spurwink Lewiston Day Treatment was not allowed to unilaterally discharge Tommy, and ordered that the decision be reversed immediately.

But in its lawsuit, Spurwink argues that as a private school it is not subject to the provisions under IDEA, and the state erroneously applied the law.

“As this case illustrates, the untenable situation occurs when students need a more intensive level of supervision and treatment than the school can safely provide,” Spurwink wrote in the lawsuit.

FAMILY SHOCKED BY LAWSUIT

The student’s parents, who were not identified in the lawsuit and only agreed to speak to the Press Herald on the condition of anonymity, said they were surprised last week when they learned about the complaint.

“That was shocking and problematic for us,” the father said. The parents said Spurwink was well aware of their son’s behavioral issues when it took him in as a student two years ago.

Tommy’s parents said his behavior is characterized as low-frequency, high-intensity aggression, meaning most of the time he doesn’t lash out, but when it does it can be severe.

They know his aggression is sometimes dangerous, and said they’ve both had several injuries in the past. But they say that was laid out in detail in his Individualized Education Plan, or IEP, and in the contracts Spurwink signed when it took him on as a student.

Tommy’s mom said her son was diagnosed with autism at an early age and received in-home support until he was in sixth grade. That care allowed him to participate in normal family activities and thrive in school, she said. Then, a shortage of care workers led to Tommy sitting on waitlists for in-home care for more than seven years.

“I’m a stay-at-home mom to three kids, and one of them has a lot of challenges, and I can only do so much,” she said. “I cannot be focused on just one child to do the amount of work that you need to do to continue to maintain and improve skills. And the result of that is that the skills get lost.”

During that time, she said, his coping skills declined, his aggression and needs increased, and he didn’t learn as much in school. When he switched to remote learning during the pandemic, many of those issues got even worse.

Since then, Tommy’s home situation has been unstable. He stayed in a hospital for almost a year, then was placed in a Spurwink residential facility in Chelsea. But that facility closed in May 2024 because of workforce and funding challenges, and his parents say they called 40 to 50 different residential programs before finding one in Lewiston. His mom said all of those changes were traumatic for Tommy, but he enjoyed his school.

When Tommy moved into the facility in Lewiston, he enrolled in Lewiston Public Schools. The district worked with Spurwink’s school as an out-of-district placement. In a November letter to the organization, the district disagreed with its decision to discharge Tommy.

“Lewiston requests that you allow (Tommy) to return to Spurwink and implement his current IEP and that you comply with the IDEA’s ‘stay put’ requirements, which apply with equal force to state-licensed special purpose private schools,” Lewiston’s Director of Special Education Kirsten Crafts wrote. “Lewiston is willing to work collaboratively with Spurwink to create, implement and adjust, as appropriate, strategies to keep (Tommy) and Spurwink staff safe while he is at school. If Spurwink will not return (Tommy) to school, then Lewiston will file a motion to join Spurwink in the pending due process hearing proceedings requested by parents and seek stay put through that process.”

The district’s superintendent said Thursday that the administration was aware of the case but declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education also declined to comment Tuesday.

‘HE’S REGRESSING’

The parents aren’t arguing that the Spurwink school can’t discharge their son, eventually — he’s already being evaluated for placement in a new program. But they say IDEA and similar state guidance allow Tommy to stay at his current placement until he has a new school to attend. Spurwink not only didn’t honor that, but they also discharged Tommy without any consultation, which undermines the team-based IEP process. In the meantime, he isn’t learning, they said.

“If we got to the point through a normal IEP process where they said ‘He needs a new placement and we can’t support him anymore, but we’ll allow him to stay put until that new placement is found,’ we would have been very sad about it … but we would have gone through that process and waited for his placement,” Tommy’s father said. “Now he’s at home, he does pretty much nothing all day, he plays on the iPad, he gets very frustrated because there’s a lack of structure, and he’s regressing.”

Overall, they say Spurwink’s staff have been wonderful to them and their son. The parents attribute most of the problems to statewide understaffing, which they said is a symptom of low pay for behavioral heath care workers.

“They’re paid slightly above minimum wage, and they’re doing combat work,” his dad said.

But they’re unsure why they, and their disabled son, have been named as parties in the case.

Spurwink’s Vice President of Legal Affairs Kristen Farnham said in an email Wednesday that the organization does not comment on pending litigation, but shared a statement.

“Our highest priorities are the well-being of the people in our care and the safety of our staff,” she wrote. “We adhere to our internal policies and all applicable laws and regulations when it comes to the services we provide and the people we serve.”