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Haley Meshnik was thrilled to be working on her first one-on-one assignment with a special education student at Mililani High School in Honolulu. The student was making progress on the goals in her individualized education program. The girl’s parents and speech therapist told Meshnik she was doing a great job.

But Meshnik said she could not ignore the behavior of some of the other “skills trainers” who, like her, worked for a state Department of Education contractor, , that provides special education “paraprofessionals” in public schools.

The month she started, May 2014, Meshnik said she saw a skills trainer bounce a ball off the face of a student. A couple of months later, she said, that same skills trainer, watching the student bang her head against the wall, responded, “Hit your head harder, I hope you get brain damage.”

A different skills trainer routinely got leg, arm and shoulder massages from the student he was assigned to work with, Meshnik said.

Then, one day in October, Meshnik said, a student was told to leave the classroom. As the student hit herself on the head and banged on the door and railing, Meshnik said, the skills trainers laughed and taunted her, intentionally doing things they knew would aggravate her.

Twice, Meshnik said, she reported what was happening at the school to Hawaii Behavioral Health’s central office.

But the day after reporting the October incident to her on-site boss, Meshnik said she got a call from Hawaii Behavioral Health: She was banned from Mililani High School.

The company told Meshnik that school officials had listed several reasons for her removal, she said. She could fully agree with only one – that she had made allegations of inappropriate behavior, as she had been trained to do.

She was told not to contact anyone at the school, including the student she had worked with for five months or the student’s parents.

She continued to work for Hawaii Behavioral Health for another six weeks or so. Then she decided to move back to her home state of Oregon. She said she was demoralized by her inability to protect vulnerable students.

“I felt so defeated,” she said. “It was depressing.”

Company Says Allegations Weren’t True

Hawaii Behavioral Health says it did a thorough investigation of Meshnik’s allegations, including sending staff experts to interview her colleagues at the school, and concluded that they were unfounded.

“We took it very seriously, as we do when we get any” report of abuse, said Carla Gross, the company’s chief operating officer. “Nobody found that anything she was saying was accurate.”

How did the investigators make a determination when the principal witness and others at the school gave such conflicting accounts?

“If there are 20 people who say it hasn’t occurred, you get to the point where you have to stop grilling people,” Gross said.

The company puts children first, she said. “We looked into everything,” she said. “We would never let something like this happen, ever.”

Gross said that the DOE also did a thorough investigation and came to the same conclusion. A DOE spokeswoman could not confirm that investigation by Tuesday evening. In general, the department argues that it can say very little about investigations to protect the confidentiality of the parties involved.

Gross said she could not divulge whether the workers Meshnik identified in her reports were still working at the school because it was a confidential personnel issue.

After returning to Oregon, Meshnik worked for a year and a half at Bridgeway House in Eugene, which runs programs for autistic children. Patricia Wigney, the executive director, said Meshnik would never fabricate an allegation of abuse.

“She doesn’t make things up,” Wigney said. “She’s very truthful. She’s a rule-follower.”

She described Meshnik as “a dependable, caring, detailed person to work with these kids. She really loves them.”

Meshnik is also a stickler for the rules, Wigney said, who reminded her on more than one occasion if one wasn’t being followed. “To me,” Wigney said, “that’s a really good employee.”

Case Resembles Another Recent Incident

Meshnik contacted Civil Beat after reading our account of a similar incident at a different Honolulu school.

Civil Beat reported in August that a skills trainer working for another DOE contractor, Bayada Home Care, said he witnessed an educational assistant at Kaimuki Middle School pour iced coffee over the head of a special education student who had spilled some of it.

After being told that other school workers denied the incident occurred, the skills trainer, Aaron Hess, pressed education officials to answer his questions and investigate further.  A short time later, the Department of Education told Bayada that Hess was barred from Hawaii public schools.

The reasons: he had violated policy by using his cellphone’s camera to try to document the incident, failed to cooperate with colleagues and written emails to the school’s principal that were “demanding, somewhat threatening and disrespectful.”

Meshnik, like Hess, said she wanted to bring the abuse to light to alert the parents of the special education students, who were unable to speak for themselves.

“If it’s all true, it’s serious stuff,” said Louis Erteschik, executive director of the , which advocates for special education students.

Eric Seitz, a Honolulu lawyer she consulted, called it “outrageous.”

“They fired this gal for raising important concerns,” he said. “Their response was to get rid of her. It’s absurd to me that that’s the way these things are handled.”

A Lifelong Interest In Autism

Meshnik says her interest in special education dates to kindergarten, when she became friends with an autistic boy. In later years, the two were put in the same classes because they worked so well together. They went to the high school homecoming dance and remain the best of friends.

After graduating from college in 2009, she came to Hawaii for an internship at a child development center for military families and decided to become a skills trainer after hearing a friend talk about how rewarding the work could be.

But she hadn’t been on the job at Mililani High School very long, she said, before she started witnessing disturbing scenes.

During a break, a skills trainer was playing with a light plastic ball a little bigger than a soccer ball, Meshnik said, when she bounced it off the face of the student she was assigned to work with.  Meshnik recalls that the student stopped what she was doing, looked startled and confused, and then went back to the self-stimulatory behavior common among autistic people.

On two days in July, Meshnik said, she saw the same skills trainer do nothing to try to calm her student as she was banging her head against a wall or hitting her head with her hand. Instead, according to a chronology she kept at the time, the skills trainer said, “Harder, hit harder,” and on one occasion, “I hope you get brain damage.”

Erteschik of the disability rights center said such behavior would clearly be at odds with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires educators to write a plan to deal with disruptive behaviors.

“If a child is having behavioral issues, the first thing you try to do is de-escalate and try to calm them down in a way that’s not abusive,” he said.

Matt Bassett, litigation director at the disability rights center, said, “Anything that’s not therapeutic — ridicule, humiliation, teasing, torturing — that’s all inappropriate. Just like a doctor — do no harm.”

The job requires a very patient personality, Bassett said. “If you choose that profession, you have to have the disposition for it,” he said.

The ball incident wasn’t the only questionable thing Meshnik says she observed. Several times, she said, she saw the male skills trainer getting massages from his student.

According to the chronology she wrote at the time, the first incident occurred on Aug. 5, 2014. As the student massaged the trainer’s hand, he said, “Do this, harder,” Meshnik wrote. The student moved on to his shoulders. Then the trainer turned around in his chair, and the student sat in front of him and massaged his legs, according to her timeline.

Several other school workers witnessed the massages, she said, including a substitute teacher who spoke to him while it was going on and on another occasion asked, “What is he doing? Is he giving you a massage?” to which the skills trainer replied, “Yeah.”

Meshnik recalls that her boss at the school told her that the massages were a way for the student to interact with others and that the parents loved the skills trainer and were very pleased with their child’s progress.

Experts say such behavior would clearly cross a line. “You don’t touch a student and a student doesn’t touch you,” Bassett said. “There are boundaries you have to keep.”

Hawaii Behavioral Health agrees, but says it never happened.

“The DOE would never allow that to happen,” Gross, the chief operating officer, said. “It’s extremely inappropriate.”

Likewise, based on its investigation, the company concluded that Meshnik’s boss did not tell her it was acceptable.

Barred From Her School

Meshnik said she contacted the main office of Hawaii Behavioral Health on Aug. 19 to report the massages. It was the second time she had called. Meshnik’s chronology states that the program coordinator said he would take the information to Jill Tanioka-Ventura, the program manager for the company. Tanioka-Ventura is married to Brie Ventura, Meshnik’s on-site supervisor at Mililani.

Meshnik said this made her uncomfortable: How could Tanioka-Ventura be objective about incidents involving colleagues and friends of her spouse?

Three days later, Meshnik said, Brie Ventura took her aside to say that she had been instructed to deal with the issues Meshnik reported to the main office. Ventura urged her to talk to her directly in the future, Meshnik said, despite her concerns that Ventura was friends with the skills trainers whose conduct she had reported.

After the October incident when skills trainers taunted the student outside the door, Meshnik said, she did talk to Ventura, who agreed that they should have used techniques from the student’s plan to calm her down.

At the end of the following day, however, Meshnik said she got a call from a program coordinator at Hawaii Behavioral Health telling her not to return to the school. The student service coordinators at Mililani High School had called to request that she be removed for several reasons, ranging from asking too many questions about her student’s plan to communicating with her student’s parents.

Meshnik denied or had explanations for the complaints. But the last one puzzled her the most — that she had reported what she perceived to be abuse.

“They fired this gal for raising important concerns. Their response was to get rid of her. It’s absurd to me that that’s the way these things are handled.” — Eric Seitz, Meshnik’s attorney

Hawaii Behavioral Health’s handbook told employees that they were required to report abuse or neglect and that they could not be penalized for doing so, and that they were protected by whistleblower laws.

Tanioka-Ventura told Civil Beat that she was involved in the investigation, but that she resented the implication that she could not be objective because her spouse worked closely with those who had been accused. Hawaii Behavioral Health employs several hundred people, she said, and it should not matter that her spouse was one of them.

Gross also defended the arrangement. Brie Ventura had not been accused of anything improper, she said.

“If there had been any conflict of interest, we definitely would not have chosen her (Jill Tanioka-Ventura) to be part of the team,” she said. She also pointed out that Jill Tanioka-Ventura does not supervise her wife.

Meshnik says that, apart from her calls to Hawaii Behavioral Health’s program coordinator and her discussions with Brie Ventura, she never talked to anyone at the company or DOE about her allegations. Hawaii Behavioral Health never asked her to submit a report in writing, she said.

After being banned from Mililani, Meshnik traveled around Oahu on her moped for a series of temporary postings, then got a permanent assignment. Soon afterwards, however, she said the events at Mililani caught up with her.

“I loved going to work to do that job,” she said, “and I was really sad when it was over.”