by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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It was during a summer visit to their son’s boarding school that Cian Roy’s parents said they realized something had gone terribly wrong.

Cian, who has autism and intellectual disabilities, could no longer make out the numbers on the elevator buttons, his parents said. He held his iPad up to his nose to try to see images like the icon for the Netflix app. He struggled to distinguish level ground from stairs. His eyes looked cloudy.

Michael Roy and D’Arcy Forbes, who had driven about 2,900 miles from their home near Seattle to New York in August 2022 with plans to mountain bike with their son, decided instead to take him home to try to save his eyesight.

“We were concerned he’d be blind by Christmas,” Michael Roy told ProPublica.

By then, Cian had spent about six months at Shrub Oak International School, a private, for-profit school that enrolls students with complex needs who are often rejected by other schools. Shrub Oak leaders opened the school in 2018; they had experience in other education areas but had never run a boarding school. But Cian’s parents said school officials assured them that they could handle the then-20-year-old’s diagnosis of autism with a language impairment as well as his impulse control disorder.

The school also said it could handle Cian’s unusual and dangerous behavior: compulsively poking his eyes.

Instead, Shrub Oak workers did not follow Cian’s detailed behavioral plan and their neglect caused him to have a “catastrophic eye injury” that has permanently impaired his vision, the family alleges in a lawsuit filed in late January in King County Superior Court, a Washington trial court.

The lawsuit alleges that both Shrub Oak and Cian’s public school district “routinely ignored their obligations by neglecting” Cian. Shrub Oak failed to keep him safe and the Lake Washington School District, which agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to send Cian to Shrub Oak, failed to ask about Cian’s “condition, achievement, or safety” while at the school, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit — which appears to be the first by a family against the school — asks for an unspecified amount of damages that include past and anticipated medical costs. Shrub Oak and the Lake Washington district, in responding to the lawsuit, denied responsibility for any injuries.

Shrub Oak did not respond to questions and a request for comment from ProPublica. The Lake Washington district said it is “committed to the health and safety of all of our students” but declined to comment further because of the lawsuit. A........

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