At this private school, students scrubbed floors and attacked a classmate. The state still finances it.

At her private school just beyond the city limits of Jonesboro, Arkansas, Mary “Tracy” Morrison caught the attention of the 19 students sitting on the floor in a circle. She then asked a skinny 13-year-old boy wearing a Mario cartoon shirt to sit in the center.

“Raise your hand if he’s ever been mean to you, ever,” Morrison, the owner, urged the other middle schoolers, and some hands went up.

“Most people don’t think you’re a nice guy. You lie. You lie all the time,” she told the boy. She encouraged her classmates to name the things they don’t like about him.

Morrison’s voice grew louder. She knelt inside the circle just inches from the boy and punched him. On the head. On the neck. At first he flinched and started to raise his hands to block her. But she told him to keep his arms down: “You have no right!”

“Come here and get your hands on him, whatever you want,” Morrison told the students.

A boy volunteered. “I’m going to do it,” he said, as the other students cheered and clapped.

This student entered the circle, put his arm around the boy’s neck and choked him. Morrison gave him a high-five. The boy in the center cowered. Then other students took turns slapping, pinching and hitting the boy. Morrison picked up a foot-long plastic cylinder – it looked like a pipe – and hit him again and again, calling him a liar.

The attack lasted almost 40 minutes. In the end, Morrison asked the boy to apologize to his classmates for mistreating them. Three other school employees were in the room that day in April 2025 but did not intervene. The whole thing was captured on video.

Morrison had founded his school, the Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, the previous year, shortly after Arkansas lawmakers decided to allow families to use public money for private school tuition through his Education Freedom Account program.

Delta Institute has joined a wave of new private schools in Arkansas, mirroring a national proliferation. New schools are opening at a rapid pace as state legislatures set aside more public money for parents to spend on private schools, without meaningful oversight.

There were about 100 private schools in Arkansas in 2023, according to state records. There are now around 220. That doesn’t count the A hundred micro-schools in the mix – a version of the one-room schoolhouse that had not been followed or publicly funded before.

But even with this boom, Arkansas has largely chosen not to regulate private schools or microschools or monitor what happens there. Arkansas is so hands-off that the state only requires private schools to hold regular fire drills, maintain immunization records and have an American flag and flagpole. It does not examine the schools’ curriculum or the backgrounds and capabilities of their operators. Anyone is free to open one, including Morrison.

Known to parents and students as Dr. Tracy, she was not a licensed educator and had never run a school before. Her resume says she has a doctorate in occupational therapy and cognitive neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis. The university said this degree was only in occupational therapy.

The Delta Institute didn’t really look like a school: it operated in a white colonial house on the edge of a gravel driveway off a country road, its rooms converted into classrooms. But it seemed to be the answer that parents of students with disabilities, particularly those with autism, were desperately looking for. The families said they trusted Morrison, who presented herself as an expert on autism and ADHD. “I’m the best,” she texted a relative.

Morrison did not respond to ProPublica’s interview requests and questions.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has said she wants to be known as an education governor, and state education officials did not respond to specific questions from ProPublica about state oversight of private schools or how it responded to the revelations about the Delta Institute. His spokesperson said the governor defends the state’s education freedom accounts because they provide students with more and different educational opportunities.

The governor’s office and the Arkansas Department of Education emphasized that the state is stepping in to ensure student safety and that taxpayer dollars are being spent responsibly. “Student safety is ADE’s number one priority,” Department of Education spokesperson Kaelin Clay wrote in an email.

The day after Morrison and her children molested her son, the boy’s mother went to the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office to write a report in neat, looping cursive. This was not the first report about Morrison’s treatment of children at the Delta Institute that the sheriff’s office had taken on.

Another mother had reported abuse about three weeks earlier.

More money fuels growth

Before the passage of the Arkansas LEARNS Act in 2023, creating its voucher program, Public Schools Secretary Jacob Oliva promised that “there will be accountability for participating schools.

But the monitoring role that his ministry gave itself was above all linked to finances. The department has the power to conduct random financial audits of private schools, require schools to report their tuition and fees, and require schools to measure student achievement with whatever tests they choose, but little else.

Under pressure to change the rules this spring, the department again refused to monitor school quality and changed only how parents can use funds for expenses other than tuition, such as banning them from paying for travel for sports teams. Even this was controversial; some lawmakers have argued that there should be less government interference. They argue that it is up to parents to decide whether their children are safe and learning, and that if not, families can go elsewhere.

During the upcoming school year, Arkansas expects nearly 55,000 students to use their Education Freedom accounts for tuition and other expenses.

While most students receive about $7,000 each, the program cost about $310 million in state funds during the last school year. Most students who used Arkansas EFA money the previous year were already attending private school or were homeschooled, or were just starting kindergarten. Only 12% of participants reported ever attending a public school.

When the program began, the department set up a hotline and email address for people to report suspected fraud or misuse of EPT funds. A dozen emails raised concerns about student well-being.

But several plaintiffs told ProPublica they did not hear back from state officials after raising their concerns. One teacher said she received no response after sending an email in April stating that students transferring to her school had been deprived of a “basic education” at the micro-school they previously attended, state records show. She said first and second graders reported spending the majority of their time playing.

Contacted by a ProPublica reporter, she said: “I don’t mind you reaching out, but it’s very disturbing and in some ways aggravating that it’s an investigative reporter reaching out to me instead of my own state.” » She asked that her name not be made public because she works at another micro-school.

Jazzmin Little said she also hasn’t received a response from state officials, after telling them in February that the school where she sent her two children was at risk of misusing public funds. The department told her it would review the information, according to the emails, but she said she had not heard anything further.

“I sent them all kinds of red flags and they never got back to me,” Little said. “I don’t even know if anyone watched it.” The school’s founder confirmed that the Ministry of Education did not contact her after receiving the parents’ complaint, which she described as a billing discrepancy. She said the problem would have been resolved sooner if the state had intervened.

In order to accept EFA money, private schools must agree to meet certain conditions, including that they have or are seeking accreditation, have been in operation for one year, and agree to conduct background checks and fingerprinting of all employees. (It is not required that employees have no criminal history.) The schools say they will teach English, math, science and social studies and administer a standardized test of their choice once a year. It is not obligatory to communicate the results of s individual tests of students to the State or parents.

The bar is lower for microschools, some of which operate as smaller versions of private schools while others offer programs for homeschooled students. They do not need to be accredited or wait until they have been open for a year to get funding.

The contrast with what is required for public schools is stark. The Arkansas Department of Education oversees public schools, and state law regulates nearly every aspect of them, from teacher qualifications to the content of district websites. Each district is required to post online a portion of “state required information” that must include monthly spending details and even a list of each dyslexia intervention program in use.

State Sen. Bryan King, a Republican, said he supports school choice but said he voted against the LEARNS Act because there wasn’t enough accountability given the amount of state spending. He proposed legislation this spring that would have required all schools receiving EFA funds to administer the same standardized test — and that funding be tied to students’ performance on that exam.

“We can’t afford it and my concerns were about financial responsibility, accountability, transparency, everything related to it,” he said.

The proposal did not move forward. King was attacked in this year’s primaries for opposing “freedom of education” and Sanders supported his opponent. The king still prevailed.

None of the lawmakers who were lead sponsors of the LEARNS Act responded to ProPublica’s questions about how the state oversees student success and safety.

Several Arkansas groups have recently attempted to obtain an amendment during the November ballot This would require all schools that accept EFA funds to follow the same rules and minimum academic requirements as public schools. The groups, however, failed to gather enough signatures.

“If you’re going to use public money, then you have to meet public standards and be publicly accountable for how that money is spent,” said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a nonprofit organization founded in the 1960s focused on social justice.

He said the recent expansion of vouchers in the state has led to “a whole new industry of pop-up and risky private schools.” companies that have almost no regulations. They go to shopping malls or church basements,” he said.

During the three years of the EFA program, the state only intervened in two schools, records show. And it never permanently stopped any school from receiving public money, including at the Delta Institute — even after it became clear that terrible things had happened there.

“You are in the biggest problem”

Craighead County Sheriff’s Detective David Bailey, a Jonesboro native who often patrolled the area, didn’t even know there was a school set back from the country road.

He discovered the Delta Institute in the winter of 2025 after a student ran away and the school asked for help finding him. He didn’t know it at the time, but police and child welfare records show the boy allegedly fled after Morrison splashed water in his face and held his legs down. He jumped out of the window, barefoot, to escape.

The Craighead County Sheriff’s Office encountered the school again in March 2025 when Renee Johns, whose children Jacob and Addison attended Delta Institute, reported abuse there.

Johns had moved his family to Jonesboro about an hour away to attend school. But things had gotten worse. Jacob wasn’t getting the therapy he needed, and he and his sister were falling behind academically. But Johns said she was very troubled by a video Morrison once sent her to explain why Jacob was kept after school.

It showed Jacob, a 10-year-old autistic child, and two other boys scrubbing the floor and walls of the school with rags. Morrison chastised them: “This isn’t about having fun. Go ahead!”

“Both hands, clean!” » she barked like a drill sergeant at a boy on all fours. “You work like a slug! Go ahead! Go ahead! You’re in bigger trouble.”

The sheriff’s office alerted child welfare authorities. Then, three weeks later, a second mother arrived to report the assault on her son within the school circle. Bailey obtained a warrant for this video.

Teacher and counselor Ashley Williams stood nearby as another employee copied footage of Morrison berating, hitting and ordering other students to molest the 13-year-old boy. Horrified, she apologized, ran down the stairs of the house, to the gravel parking lot and vomited.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Williams had filed a detailed report with welfare authorities based on what some students had told him about Morrison’s “circle.” She wrote: “This is not the first time such abuse has occurred. Months earlier, she continued, Morrison had pinned two children together by the arms.

Bailey’s interviews with current and former parents and employees and interviews child advocates conducted with students revealed more. Documents show: allegations of “feigned drowning” on one child and cutting another’s hair as punishment. Slap a student. A wooden paddle named Fred.

Some parents, meanwhile, defended Morrison and praised his “unorthodox methods,” according to interviews and police records.

Morrison tried hard to keep her parents by her side. She texted a large group of staff members, including some whose children attended the school, to tell them she had made a mistake during the “group discussion” but was blaming the violence on the students.

She warned that the floor-cleaning video she sent to Johns would likely be made public and that she and the other employees would be arrested. “You can expect our mugshots on social media,” Morrison said, apologizing for letting everyone down. But she also called it a “witch hunt.”

“My ID photo will give me the finger,” she wrote.

Fragile investigations

Days after the April 2025 incident that prosecutors called a makeshift “Fight Club,” Morrison was indicted on 11 counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. Three other employees were charged with permitting child abuse and failing to report child abuse.

The day news of Morrison’s arrest broke, the state Department of Education stopped EFA payments to the Delta Institute. Nearly half of the students used the EFA program to pay their tuition, and the school had raised more than $300,000 so far.

There is no record of a visit to the school or an investigation by the state Department of Education. When asked if the department had gone to the Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, officials did not respond. Instead, a spokesperson said complaints or suspicious activity trigger a review and “often result in an on-site visit,” although they declined to specify how often that happened.

Reporters again asked the department directly if it had visited the school. The spokesperson responded: “We have addressed the issue of Developing Brain’s suspension from the EFA program on several occasions, including in statements sent to your outlet. »

In Delta, public money flowed again two days after it was stopped. A deputy education commissioner who oversees the EFA program told a colleague he was confident the school had “appropriate safeguards” in place, according to an email. He wrote that Morrison had resigned as school principal and a new school board had been formed.

During the EFA program’s three school years, records show state education officials temporarily suspended funding for another school, a Christian micro-school called Homestead Academy, which focuses on outdoor and individualized education. He rents space in a church near Hot Springs. Outside there is a playground and hammocks, as well as a red and white striped shed painted with “In God we trust” where fireworks are sold in summer.

For more than a month last fall, the state received a series of disturbing calls and emails from parents and at least one former teacher, records show.

Some shared safety concerns or described children playing unsupervised in a wooded area. Others shared concerns about insufficient academic teaching. One caller said Homestead was more like a daycare than an organized school. During the first months of the school year, 13 of 46 students dropped out, according to state records.

“Please stop” funding the school, pleaded one parent.

Oliva, the state education secretary, heard directly from a Homestead parent who said the school was not following a curriculum and had not adhered to her daughter’s education plan.

“Why aren’t there stricter regulations and accountability measures for EFA-funded programs? » she wrote in bold letters. (The parent asked that her name not be used because she works in education and fears retaliation.)

“This sounds like a serious and dire situation,” Oliva responded. “We will look into it immediately.”

A public education employee contacted Homestead’s owner in late October and told him the department would come by the next day for a “brief visit.”

While there, Department of Education employees watched students say the Pledge of Allegiance, then completed 10 to 15 minutes of instruction before meeting with owner Lindsey McCollum.

When asked about student work , progress reports and disciplinary policies, McCollum responded that she would send them later. “In hindsight, we should have said we were happy to wait while they made us copies, but we didn’t,” according to an employee’s written report of the visit.

Subsequently, the state suspended funding for EPT at the school. Oliva told McCollum in a letter: “Your actions have jeopardized the well-being of students and the responsible use of public funds. »

It took 10 weeks for EFA funds to become available again. The state required McCollum to provide certain documents and was satisfied with his response: a financial review of the school, policies on student supervision, program plans and student worksheets. Several parents also sent letters of support to the school, describing it as a nurturing environment where their students enjoy learning.

“We have been compliant and transparent,” McCollum said in an interview. She noted that she and the school’s other teacher are certified educators and emphasized that “student safety is of the utmost importance and our school has procedures in place.”

The school, she explained, is almost entirely funded by the EFA program, and has about 30 students in grades K-9. She said almost all of the students come back year after year. “Families have the opportunity to choose and they always choose us,” she said.

“We have families who know that their children who used to hate learning now love reading and writing and love learning,” McCollum said. “It’s our heartbeat.”

The state Department of Education said it was “wasting no time” in suspending private schools from receiving public funds, and that Homestead and Delta had convinced the state they deserved to be reinstated. “In both cases, we worked vigorously to ensure operations were moving in the right direction before families were allowed to spend taxpayer dollars at either school,” according to the department’s statement to ProPublica.

The parent who emailed Oliva said she enrolled her 10-year-old daughter at Homestead in hopes of finding something different from public school. But she said her daughter had fallen behind academically. Last fall, she pulled her out of school and re-enrolled her in public school.

She didn’t know the state had restored funding for Homestead until a reporter told her about it.

“No way,” she said. “This needs to happen with other microschools. It bothers me for the kids of Arkansas.”

Always open for business

Enrollment at the Delta school fell to about 60 students last school year, about half of what it was the year before.

“There’s been a lot of loss because of negative media,” Adrian Sportsman, who worked closely with Morrison at the school, said when a ProPublica reporter visited this spring. “I feel like it’s become disproportionate.”

Some students came back, she said: “They said, ‘There’s no school like this.’ »

In March, the mother of the boy who was assaulted on school grounds sued Morrison, his school, his therapy business and his insurance companies for compensatory and punitive damages for what happened to her son. In court filings, Morrison’s lawyer denied the allegations and said “the video speaks for itself.”

The criminal cases were scheduled to go to trial in May and June. None did. Charges were dropped against two employees whom authorities deemed less culpable because they had only been present in the classroom briefly. The two employees did not respond to requests from a journalist.

A third employee, Kathrine Lipscomb, who is a licensed teacher in Arkansas, would sometimes intervene to ask children to listen to Morrison and raise their hands to speak. In response to a reporter’s question about her role in the incident, she explained in an email: “For part of the time, I was behind the teacher’s desk, planning another class, and I wasn’t paying attention to the circle. »

The prosecutor and Lipscomb agreed to a pretrial diversion program in which Lipscomb would serve six months of probation. She must complete 40 hours of community service with disabled children and take anger management classes to avoid conviction.

She is now the director of education at the school.

Morrison pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 120 days of house arrest and five years of probation. She had to give up her Arkansas occupational therapy license. And she agreed not to work with children in any professional capacity while on probation.

No one seemed happy with Morrison’s punishment. But the prosecutor said the state decided the plea deal was the best option to ensure Morrison was held accountable. Under Arkansas law, the state would have to prove significant physical harm was caused to the victim in order to convict them of enabling abuse of a minor, and juries may judge that differently, said Sonia Hagood, who prosecuted the case on behalf of the state. For example, she said, a recent jury decided not to convict a defendant because the victim did not suffer serious physical injuries.

As part of her deal, Morrison got to choose where she served her sentence: the Greene County Detention Center, which is newer than the Craighead County Jail, and gave her a private cell. And she’s under house arrest at her boyfriend’s ranch in Missouri, where she can ride horses.

She passed the time during her incarceration on the phone and in video calls from a personal tablet. It is common for all communications from the prison to be recorded, and ProPublica has obtained more than 500 recordings. They show that she was still involved in school administration while incarcerated.

She frequently spoke to Sportsman about the school’s finances, including telling him to make sure the EFA money was still coming in. Sportsman, owner of Delta Therapy Group, the occupational therapy practice that works with Delta Institute students, said the prison conversations were “casual conversations between friends” and disputed the idea that Morrison was running the school while he was incarcerated.

Morrison talked for hours with the new board members and school employees and gave them to-do lists. She asked how some of the children were doing. In a call with the teacher who also struck a plea deal, she called the victim’s mother “mean” for going to the police.

She also spoke with a documentarian who is interested in the school’s history and plans to pitch a project to a major streamer, like Netflix or HBO. In a call with the documentarian, Morrison described the abuse she was jailed for as a “restorative” technique aimed at trying to help children treat each other with more respect.

“It was never about ‘Go hit him,’ was it?” she said. “And the concept is so sophisticated that it’s like if the prosecutor wanted to know my story, if the detective – they would have questioned me. They would have phrased it like this: “Oh, this is an intervention by high-risk individuals, who will end up in prison themselves if they behave this way.” They didn’t do that.

The prosecutor and detective attempted to question Morrison during the investigation, but she refused to speak to them.

Morrison was released from prison on June 1.

“I think she should be stopped from teaching anywhere in the United States of America and having children if she’s going to try to influence them the way she did,” said Bailey, the detective assigned to the case. “If we can’t protect our children, who can we protect?

The last complaint

Nothing in state law prevents Morrison from still owning Delta or another private school and receiving public funding.

Records still indicate that Morrison’s family business owns the Delta Institute property. State business records also show she is still the registered agent for a private school at the same address. The school recently took on a new name: North Star Academy.

Lipscomb said the school’s board changed the name “as part of the healing process for our community of families and students who are here and still trying to make sense of the world as we currently know it.” Lipscomb said Morrison has “no involvement” with the school at this time.

She said she expects up to 35 students to attend this school year.

Renee Johns said Jacob never recovered from his traumatic time at Delta School. He became more and more aggressive. He used martial arts moves that the school taught children instead of physical education to punch holes in the wall of her house and attack her.

Her daughter, Addison, returned to public school. She loves her new school, but she was so far behind that she had to repeat third grade. “School is about helping, not hurting,” the 10-year-old recently told a ProPublica reporter.

Johns said parents who chose Morrison’s school and accepted his methods were sold lies. “Honestly, we thought we were doing the best we could for our kids. »

The public continues to file complaints about private schools and micro-schools with the Department of Education. At the end of March, he received a new request to investigate the Delta Institute for the Developing Brain. This came from a woman who had heard reports of a family with a child at the school.

“Given the population served by this program, it is particularly important to ensure safe, structured and educational environment. I would greatly appreciate your office looking into these concerns,” the woman wrote to the state hotline.

Lipscomb said she was not aware of any active complaints. The state will not comment on whether it will open an investigation.