Kids forced to beat classmate and scrub floors at state-funded private school

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

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

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

Morrison’s voice got louder. She knelt inside the circle just inches from the boy and swatted him. On the head. On the neck. At first he flinched and started to raise his hands to block her. But she snapped at him to keep his arms down: “You don’t have the right!”

“Come over here and put your hands on him, however you want,” Morrison told the students.

A boy volunteered. “I’ll do it,” he said, and the other students cheered and clapped.

That student entered the circle, looped 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 punching the boy. Morrison picked up a footlong plastic cylinder — it resembled a pipe — and thwacked him over and over, calling him a liar.

The attack went on for nearly 40 minutes. At the end, Morrison made the boy apologize to his classmates for mistreating them. Three other school employees were in the room that day in April 2025 but didn’t intervene. The whole thing was captured on video.

Morrison had founded her school, The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, the year before, soon after Arkansas legislators decided to allow families to use public money for private school tuition through its Education Freedom Account program.

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

There were about 100 private schools in Arkansas in 2023, state records show. Now there are about 220. That doesn’t count the 100 or so microschools in the mix — a version of the one-room schoolhouse that wasn’t tracked or publicly funded previously.

But even with that boom, Arkansas largely has chosen not to regulate private or microschools or monitor what’s happening inside them. Arkansas is so hands-off that the state only requires that private schools conduct regular fire drills, keep immunization records and have an American flag and a flagpole. It doesn’t review 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 wasn’t 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 that degree is only in occupational therapy.

The Delta Institute didn’t look much like a school — it operated in a white colonial house set down a gravel driveway off a country road, its bedrooms transformed into classrooms. But it had seemed like the answer that parents of students with disabilities, including autism, were desperately seeking. Families said they put their faith in Morrison, who presented herself as an expert in autism and ADHD. “I am the best,” she texted one parent.

Morrison did not respond to interview requests and questions from ProPublica.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has said she wants to be known as the education governor, and state education officials didn’t respond to specific questions from ProPublica about the state’s oversight of private schools or how it responded to revelations about the Delta Institute. Her spokesperson said the governor championed the state’s Education Freedom Accounts because they give students more and different educational opportunities.

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

The day after Morrison and the children assaulted her son, the boy’s mother walked into the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office to write out a report in neat, looping cursive. It was not the first report about Morrison’s treatment of children at the Delta Institute that the sheriff’s office took.

Another mother had reported abuse about three weeks earlier.

More Money Fuels Growth

Before Arkansas’ LEARNS Act passed in 2023, creating its voucher-style program, state schools secretary Jacob Oliva promised that “there is going to be accountability for the schools that participate.”

But the oversight role his department gave itself was related primarily to finances. The department has the power to conduct random financial audits of private schools, mandate that the schools report their tuition and fees and require schools to measure student achievement with tests of their choosing, but little else.

Under pressure to tweak the rules this spring, the department again declined to monitor school quality and tinkered only with how parents can use the funds on items other than tuition, banning them from paying for travel sports teams, for instance. Even that was controversial; some lawmakers argued there should be less government interference. They argue the onus is on parents to decide whether their children are safe and learning, and if they’re not, the families can go somewhere else.

This upcoming school year, Arkansas expects that nearly 55,000 students will use their Education Freedom Accounts for tuition and other expenses.

With most students getting about $7,000 each, the program cost about $310 million in taxpayer funds this past school year. Most of the students who used EFA money in Arkansas the prior year were already attending private school or being homeschooled, or were just starting kindergarten. Only 12% of participants reported that they’d previously attended a public school.

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

But several complainants told ProPublica that they did not hear from state officials after sharing their concerns. One teacher said she got no response after she emailed in April that students who transferred to her school had been deprived of a “basic education” at the microschool they previously attended, according to state records. She said first and second graders reported that they had spent the majority of their time playing.

Contacted by a ProPublica reporter, she said: “I don’t mind that you are reaching out but it is very concerning and in a way aggravating that I have an investigative reporter reaching out instead of my own state.” She requested that her name not be made public because she works at a different microschool.

Jazzmin Little said she hasn’t heard back from state officials either, after telling them in February that the school where she sent her two children might be misusing state funds. The department told her it would review the information, according to emails, but she said she heard nothing more.

“All kinds of red flags I sent to them and they never got back to me,” Little said. “I don’t even know if anyone has looked at it.” The school’s founder confirmed that the Education Department did not reach out to her after receiving the parent’s complaint, which she described as a billing discrepancy. She said the issue would have been resolved sooner if the state had intervened.

In order to accept EFA money, private schools have to agree to meet some requirements, including that they have or are seeking accreditation, have operated for a year and promise to perform background checks and fingerprinting on all employees. (There’s no requirement that employees have no criminal history.) Schools affirm they’ll teach English, math, science and social studies and administer a standardized test of their choosing once a year. There’s no requirement to report students’ individual test scores to the state or to parents.

The bar is lower for microschools, some of which operate like smaller versions of private schools while others provide programs for homeschoolers. They don’t need to be accredited or wait until they’ve been open for a year to get funding.

The contrast with what is required for public schools is striking. Arkansas’ Education Department monitors public schools, and state law regulates nearly every aspect of them, from teacher qualifications to what’s on district websites. Every district is required to post a tranche of “state-required information” online that must include breakdowns of monthly expenses and even a list of every dyslexia intervention program used.

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 public spending. He proposed legislation this spring that would have required all schools receiving EFA funds to administer the same standardized test — and for funding to be tied to student performance on that exam.

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

The proposal did not advance. King was attacked in the primary this year for being against “education freedom,” and Sanders backed his opponent. King still prevailed.

None of the legislators who were the lead sponsors of the LEARNS Act responded to questions from ProPublica about how the state is overseeing student achievement and safety.

Several Arkansas groups recently tried to get an amendment on the November ballot that 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 are going to take public money, then you should 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 that was formed in the 1960s and focuses on social justice.

He said the state’s recent voucher expansion has led to “this whole new industry of pop-up, subprime private schools that have almost no regulation. They go into shopping malls or the basements of churches,” he said.

In the three years of the EFA program, the state has only intervened at two schools, records show. And it’s never permanently blocked a school from taking public money, including at the Delta Institute — even after it became clear that terrible things had happened there.

“You Are in the Biggest Trouble”

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

He discovered the Delta Institute in the winter of 2025 after a student ran off 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 had allegedly fled after Morrison sprayed him in the face with water and held his legs down. He jumped out a window, barefoot, to get away.

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

Johns had moved her family to Jonesboro from about an hour away to attend the school. But things had unraveled. Jacob wasn’t getting the therapy he needed, and he and his sister were falling behind academically. But Johns said she was most troubled by a video Morrison had texted her one day to explain why Jacob was being kept after school.

It showed Jacob, a 10-year-old with autism, and two other boys scrubbing the floor and walls inside the school with rags. Morrison berated them: “This doesn’t get to be about fun. Go!”

“Both hands, cleaning!” she barked like a drill sergeant to one boy on his hands and knees. “You’re working like a slug! Get at it! Get at it! You are in the biggest trouble.”

The sheriff’s office alerted child-welfare authorities. Then, three weeks later, a second mother walked in to report her son’s assault within the circle at school. Bailey got a warrant for that video.

Teacher and counselor Ashley Williams was standing by while another employee copied the footage of Morrison berating, hitting and directing other students to assault the 13-year-old boy. Horrified, she excused herself, hustled down the stairs of the house, out to the gravel parking area, and vomited.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Williams had filed a detailed report with welfare authorities based on what some students had told her about Morrison’s “circle time.” She had written, “This is not the first time abuse like this has happened.” Months earlier, she continued, Morrison had taped two children together by their arms.

More came out in Bailey’s interviews with parents and current and former employees and in interviews that child advocates conducted with the students, documents show: allegations of “waterboarding” a child and cutting another’s hair as punishment. Slapping a student. A wooden paddle named Fred.

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

Morrison worked to keep parents on her side. She texted a large group of staff members, some whose children attended the school, to say she had made a mistake during the “group discussion” but blamed the violence on the students.

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

“My mug shot will have me with a middle finger,” she wrote.

Flimsy Investigations

Within days of the April 2025 incident that the prosecutor called a “makeshift ‘Fight Club,’” Morrison was charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. Three other employees were charged with permitting child abuse and failure to report child maltreatment.

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

There are no records 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 answer. Instead, a spokesperson said that complaints or suspicious activity triggers a review and “often results in a site visit,” though they declined to say how often that has happened.

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

At Delta, public money flowed again two days after it was stopped. An assistant education commissioner who oversees the EFA program told a colleague he was convinced that the school had implemented “appropriate safeguards,” according to an email. He wrote that Morrison had resigned as the head of the school and a new school board had been formed.

In the three school years of the EFA program, records show, state education officials have temporarily suspended funding to one other school, a Christian-based microschool called Homestead Academy that focuses on outdoor and individualized education. It rents space from a church near Hot Springs. Outside, there’s a playground and hammocks, as well as a red-and-white striped shed painted with “In God we trust” where fireworks are sold in the summer.

Over a month last fall, the state got a series of concerning 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 instruction. One caller said Homestead felt more like a daycare than an organized school. In the first few months of the school year, 13 of the 46 students withdrew, state records show.

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

Oliva, the state education secretary, heard directly from a Homestead parent who said the school did not follow a curriculum and had not adhered to the education plan for her daughter.

“Why are there not stronger 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 wrote back to her. “We will review immediately.”

A state education employee reached out to Homestead’s owner in late October and told her that the department would be stopping by the next day for a “brief visit.”

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

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

Afterward, the state suspended EFA funding to the school. Oliva told McCollum in a letter: “Your actions have jeopardized the welfare of students and the responsible use of public funds.”

It took 10 weeks for EFA funds to flow again. The state required that McCollum provide certain documentation and was satisfied by her response: a financial review of the school, policies on student supervision, curriculum plans and student worksheets. Several parents also sent letters in support of the school, describing it as a nurturing environment where their students enjoyed learning.

“We were compliant and transparent,” McCollum said in an interview. She noted that both she and the other teacher at the school are certified educators and stressed that “student safety is of utmost importance and our school has procedures in place.”

The school, she said, is almost entirely funded through the EFA program, with about 30 students from kindergarten to ninth grade. She said almost all students have returned year after year. “Families have the option to choose and still are choosing us,” she said.

“We have families who know that their kids who hated learning are now loving to read and write and loving to learn,” McCollum said. “That is our heartbeat.”

The state Education Department said it “wastes no time” in suspending private schools from receiving public money, and that both Homestead and Delta convinced the state that they were worthy of being reinstated. “In both instances, we worked vigorously to ensure operations were flipped in the right direction before families were allowed to spend taxpayer dollars on either school,” according to the department’s statement to ProPublica.

The parent who emailed Oliva said that she had enrolled her 10-year-old daughter at Homestead hoping for something different than the public school. But she said her daughter fell behind academically. Last fall, she pulled her from the school and reenrolled her in public school.

She didn’t know that the state had restored funding to Homestead until told by a reporter.

“No way,” she said. “This has to be happening with other microschools. That upsets me for the children of Arkansas.”

Still Open for Business

Enrollment at the Delta school dropped to about 60 students for last school year, about half the size it was the year before.

“There was a lot of loss because of the negative media,” Adrian Sportsman, who has worked closely with Morrison at the school, said when a ProPublica reporter visited this spring. “I feel like it was blown way out of proportion.”

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

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

The criminal cases were set to go to trial in May and June. None did. Charges were dismissed for two employees who authorities felt were less culpable as they’d been in the classroom only briefly. The two employees did not respond to a reporter’s outreach.

A third staffer, Kathrine Lipscomb, who is an Arkansas-licensed teacher, interjected at times to direct the 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 off behind the teachers desk planning for another class and not paying attention to the circle.”

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

She is now director of education at the school.

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

Nobody seemed happy with Morrison’s punishment. But the prosecutor said the state decided the plea deal was the best option to make sure Morrison was held accountable. Under Arkansas law, the state would have to prove substantial physical harm to the victim in order to convict on a charge of permitting abuse to a minor, and juries can judge that differently, said Sonia Hagood, who prosecuted the case for the state. For instance, she said, a recent jury decided not to convict a defendant because the victim did not suffer serious physical injury.

As part of her deal, Morrison got to pick where she served her time — the Greene County Detention Center, which is newer than Craighead County’s jail and gave her a private cell. And she’s serving house arrest on her boyfriend’s Missouri ranch, where she can ride horses.

She passed the time while incarcerated on the phone and on video calls from a personal tablet. It’s standard for all communication from jail to be recorded, and ProPublica obtained more than 500 recordings. They show she was still involved with the administration of the school while jailed.

She spoke frequently to Sportsman about school finances, including telling her to make sure the EFA money still was coming in. Sportsman, who owns Delta Therapy Group, the occupational therapy practice that works with Delta Institute students, said that the jail conversations were “informal conversations between friends” and disputed the idea that Morrison was running the school while incarcerated.

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

She also spoke with a documentary filmmaker who is interested in the school’s story and plans to pitch a project to a big streamer, like Netflix or HBO. In one call with the documentarian, Morrison described the abuse she’d been jailed for as a “restorative” technique to try to help the children treat one another more respectfully.

“It was never about, like, ‘Go hit him,’ right?’’ she said. “And the concept is so sophisticated that it’s like, if the prosecuting attorney wanted to know my story, if the detective — they would’ve interviewed me. They would have couched it like, ‘Oh, this is an intervention of individuals who are high risk, who will end up in prison themselves if they behave this way.’ They didn’t do that.”

Both the prosecutor and detective tried to interview Morrison during the investigation but she refused to speak with them.

Morrison was released from jail June 1.

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

The Latest Complaint

There’s nothing in state law that prevents Morrison from still owning Delta or another private school and benefiting from public funding.

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

Lipscomb said the school’s board changed the name “as part of the process of healing for our community of families and students that are here and still trying to make sense of the world as we know it now.” Lipscomb said Morrison has “zero involvement” with the school right now.

She said she expects as many as 35 students to attend this upcoming school year.

Renee Johns said Jacob has never recovered from his traumatic time at the Delta school. He has grown increasingly aggressive. He’s used martial arts moves that the school taught children in lieu of P.E. to punch holes in the wall of her home and lash out at her.

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

Johns said parents who chose Morrison’s school and went along with her methods were sold lies. “We honestly thought we were doing the best for our children.”

The public keeps filing complaints about private and microschools with the Education Department. In late March it received a new request to investigate The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain. It came from a woman who had heard concerning reports from a family with a child at the school.

“Given the population served by this program, ensuring a safe, structured, and educationally appropriate environment is especially important. I would greatly appreciate your office’s attention to reviewing these concerns,” the woman wrote to the state’s hotline.

Lipscomb said she’s not aware of any active complaints. The state won’t comment on whether it’s investigating.