Before a Poultney therapeutic school closed, state investigations made troubling discoveries

In March, the LiHigh School, a private, for-profit therapeutic school in Poultney, announced that it would be closing this summer.

LiHigh’s owners, Greg and Daniela Rosenthal, retired last year, LiHigh administrators announced in a blog post earlier this year. And a state moratorium on new private schools meant that LiHigh could not keep operating as before with a new owner.

“We cannot express the depth of our sorrow,” the administrators wrote in the post. “We wish we could continue to deliver the most holistic, trauma-informed, progressive, growth-oriented, deeply personalized, specialized education services to our students and their families.”

But according to former staff, students and dozens of pages of state documents, the full story of the school’s last two years is more complicated — and more troubling.

After a 2023 investigation by the state Agency of Education, Heather Bouchey, then the interim secretary of education, put the school on probation. Investigators had made note of some of LiHigh’s practices, including school days shorter than required by the state, incomplete background checks for staff, and paying to rent a cabin — built in part by students — on the owners’ property.

A year earlier, the Department for Children and Families had examined more serious concerns: allegations that a staff member had sexually abused a student.

Greg Rosenthal declined an interview request from VTDigger but sent several emails with responses.

The Agency of Education made “inaccurate” assumptions about the school, Rosenthal said.

“AOE only started raising questions about LiHigh School after a recent complaint, which was primarily the result of misconduct by a single staff member that shocked and appalled us,” Rosenthal said in an email, referring to the allegations of sexual abuse. “We had no idea such actions were taking place and promptly removed him from our school community.”

Overall, Rosenthal said, “Our students, who have severe disabilities including learning, emotional, and behavioral challenges, have gone on to lead productive, positive lives and have achieved stability and independence as adults, thanks to the care and education they received at LiHigh School.”

LiHigh is the second for-profit therapeutic school in two years to close amid scrutiny and concern from the state. Critics say such schools offer little transparency — and the possibility of making large amounts of money.

“You’re putting the most vulnerable kids in a setting with very little oversight and a profit motive,” said Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, D-Norwich, a former state education secretary who has long pushed for limits on public money in private schools.

‘Whatever you wanted’

According to a video posted by a LiHigh administrator to YouTube in February, the Poultney school opened in 2006 as a campus of the Essex Junction-based Bellcate School. In 2009, LiHigh split off to become its own entity, according to the video.

The school operated in two buildings off of Poultney’s Main Street, near the D&H Rail Trail. On a recent visit to the former campus, a reporter found one building shuttered and weedy, while workers were preparing space in the other building for new tenants.

The school had been able to serve up to 50 students aged 11 to 22 with autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disabilities, traumatic brain injuries and emotional disturbance, among other diagnoses, according to state documents . Some general education students also attended.

It was not clear how many students attended the school when it closed, but as of the fall of 2022, it served roughly two dozen.

The school’s philosophy was described in the video, which appears to no longer be available on YouTube.

“The name ‘LiHigh’ comes from the East Asian concept of li, which refers to the act of understanding the natural patterns that underlie reality and living in accordance with them,” according to the video’s unidentified narrator. The school developed a reputation as a “beacon of progressive education,” the narrator says.

But in emailed complaints to the state, as well as interviews with VTDigger, former staff members and students at LiHigh raised concerns about the school’s practices.

VTDigger spoke with seven former staff members and three former students in reporting this story. All former staff members spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns about retaliation or professional consequences in their current positions. But many of those concerns are spelled out in complaints sent to the state.

In an April 2023 email, a LiHigh staff member — whose name was redacted — wrote to the agency that they believed the school “is currently a negligent institution that is no longer capable of remotely fulfilling its obligations to its students, but continues to insist otherwise.”

Former staff and students described disorganized classes, sometimes taught by teachers with little expertise in the subjects they taught.

“I don’t even know if you really could call them classes,” one former student, Andrew Silber, who attended the school for four years and left last year, told VTDigger. “It was more of, like, babysitting.”

Attendance was not strictly enforced, students and staff said, and students were often left to their own devices.

“There was just no discipline there,” Zach Furman, who attended the school from 2021 to 2023, said in an interview. “You could do whatever you wanted. There were days where I played basketball all day and they didn’t do anything.”

Rosenthal, the school’s owner, said that the school’s methods were “at times unorthodox but effective,” in an email in response to questions posed by VTDigger.

“Because of severe emotionality, some students had real difficulty attending classes at times,” he said. “Forcing students to attend classes when they are in this state is counterproductive. Staff would redirect students to other activities when this occurred.”

Rosenthal also offered martial arts classes and would spar with LiHigh students, according to former students and staff members, some of whom expressed concern about the practice.

Silber, the former student, emailed a complaint to the Agency of Education last year saying that Rosenthal and another former staff member would sometimes painfully strike or kick him, even outside of martial arts class.

The Agency of Education reported that allegation to the Department for Children and Families, according to state documents. It’s not clear what became of that referral.

In an email, Rosenthal said, “I categorically deny that I ever hit a student,” and said that DCF never brought up that allegation. LiHigh’s martial arts classes, in a Russian martial art called Systema, were intended to “help students develop confidence, self-discipline, and resilience,” he said. “We understand that students from traumatic backgrounds may sometimes misinterpret interactions.”

The vast majority of staff and students, Rosenthal said, had positive experiences at LiHigh.

“Go to any school and you will find disgruntled staff and students,” he said in an email. “That is simply not newsworthy and not an authentic representation of how most felt.”

‘Recommended for substantiation’

In May 2022, the Department for Children and Families’ Residential Licensing and Special Investigations Unit opened an investigation into allegations that a staff member had sexually abused a student, according to letters obtained by VTDigger.

That staff member could not be reached for comment, and VTDigger is not naming him. A parent of the student in question declined to comment to VTDigger.

“Based on the information we gathered, we have determined that a reasonable person would conclude that (the staff member) did sexually abuse (the student),” a DCF letter, dated May 23, 2023, reads.

“Under current Vermont law, an individual recommended for substantiation has the right to appeal before their name can be entered into the Child Protection Registry,” the letter says. “A registry entry will be made if the person fails to request a review or if, after review, the substantiation determination is upheld.”

A person who is substantiated for abuse is added to the confidential Child Protection Registry. People can appeal those recommendations, and it’s not clear whether the former LiHigh employee was ultimately added to the registry.

A year later, staffers with the Agency of Education, who were investigating separate concerns about the school, wrote that “LiHigh’s Director said he was unaware that child/adult abuse registry checks needed to be conducted,” according to investigation records.

Though all but two staff members had been fingerprinted, meaning they had undergone a criminal record check, the school had not checked whether staff were listed on the state’s Adult Abuse Registry or Child Abuse Registry, in which people substantiated for abuse by DCF would be listed, according to the Agency of Education’s investigation records.

Rosenthal did not respond to questions asking whether a registry check had taken place for the staff member in question, who was, by the time of the agency’s investigation, no longer at the school. (It’s unclear whether a check would have turned up anything.)

Nya Pike, a spokesperson for the Department for Children and Families, said that the department “cannot comment on confidential cases.”

There are no pending criminal charges in Rutland County filed against Rosenthal or the staff member in question, Rutland County State’s Attorney Ian Sullivan told VTDigger.

Rosenthal did not respond to a question about whether the school had conducted an investigation to determine whether other students might have experienced abuse.

The Agency of Education investigates

After the abuse allegations came to light, former staff members said, many employees quit the school. One former staffer told state officials in an April 2023 email that more than 16 staffers out of a total of 22 had quit in the previous 11 months.

In the fall of 2022 and winter of 2023, officials at the Agency of Education began to receive at least five complaints, according to records obtained via a public records request.

One of those complaints, from Coral Stone, the director of student services at the Mill River Unified Union School District, and dated March 10, 2023, spurred the agency to open a preliminary investigation.

In a letter to then-Secretary of Education Dan French, Stone raised concerns about the school’s staffing and the number of days a year spent in session. She said she believed the school had operated without the necessary insurance for transportation for months.

At the time of the complaint, three Mill River students were attending LiHigh. But in an interview with VTDigger, Stone said that the school district eventually grew so worried about LiHigh that it stopped sending students there.

“We have an obligation to make sure that special services are provided in accordance with all the statutes that we have to work through,” Stone said. “And so when we became concerned that the school was struggling to fulfill those obligations, we did opt to work with the teams for each of the students to find other placements.”

During their investigation, state education officials corroborated some of Stone’s concerns — and identified more. It was not clear how many days of the school year LiHigh had spent closed, according to investigation records. And investigators wrote that the school was only providing four hours of instruction a day, or 20 hours a week. State rules require a minimum of 27 hours of instruction per week.

Agency investigators “could not determine if students are receiving (the) minimum number of required instructional hours in all core subjects,” staffers wrote.

As of April 2023, LiHigh had no fully licensed special educator on staff — only an educator with a provisional license, according to the agency. Also among investigators’ findings: It was unclear whether LiHigh carried proper insurance; the school was charging public school districts more than the tuition rate that state regulators had approved; and state investigators could not determine whether the school was following policies on student safety, mandatory reporting, hazing, harassment and bullying, immunization, or emergency drills.

But Rosenthal saw the situation differently. Mill River’s complaint and the agency’s investigation were ultimately sparked by the alleged sexual abuse, Rosenthal believes, although documents from the complaint and investigation do not appear to mention it.

During the Agency of Education’s investigation, “LiHigh School was completely transparent and fully cooperated with AOE,” Rosenthal told VTDigger in an email. “We provided all of our documentation and staff participated in interviews. AOE made certain assumptions based on a lack of documentation that were inaccurate. Nonetheless, at no time during or after this review did AOE ever revoke LiHigh School’s approval as an independent school.”

Rosenthal did not specify, in response to a follow-up question, which of the agency’s findings were inaccurate. But he told VTDigger that LiHigh had operated for years with no complaints and no scrutiny from the state.

“For 17 years, we were approved and accredited by the State of Vermont and the Agency of Education, running successfully with virtually no involvement from AOE,” Rosenthal said.

That appears to be true, according to state documents and officials. In 2018, the Vermont Board of Education agreed to extend the school’s approval for five years, after finding no significant issues, according to state Board of Education documents . Lindsey Hedges, a spokesperson for the Agency of Education, said the agency had received no complaints about the school prior to 2022.

Hedges, the agency spokesperson, declined multiple requests for an interview from VTDigger. It was unclear when the Agency of Education became aware of DCF’s investigation into the alleged sexual abuse a year prior, or whether they were aware of its result. In an email, Hedges did not respond to a question about how that investigation affected the agency’s actions relative to the school.

“AOE knew that the appropriate entities were involved and allowed those investigations to proceed,” Hedges said.

In August 2023, five months after the Agency of Education’s preliminary investigation, Bouchey, the interim secretary, opened a formal investigation into the school. She also placed it on probation pending the outcome of that investigation, according to documents.

But the Agency of Education never completed that formal investigation, after LiHigh’s administrators said they would shut down the school at the end of the academic year — in June 2024.

“After the Agency received confirmation that LiHigh was closing it was determined that we would conclude (an) investigation in accordance with the law and not issue a report,” Hedges told VTDigger in an email.

The agency opted not to close LiHigh before that because, Hedges said, “Closing mid year puts all students at educational risk or could deny them a placement they are entitled to under federal law.”

A valuation

Unlike public and nonprofit private schools, for-profits are not required to make financial information public, which makes it difficult to get a clear picture of their fiscal performance.

LiHigh was an approved independent school, which meant it was eligible to receive public tuition money from public school districts. According to state documents , LiHigh could charge up to $104,040 per student during the 2023-2024 school year, an amount set individually for each school.

It’s not clear how many students attended over the years on public tuition, or how much public tuition was paid per student. But redacted contracts between LiHigh and the Mill River Unified Union School District, viewed by VTDigger, showed that the supervisory union had sent three students to LiHigh in the 2022-2023 school year, at a cost of $69,505 per student for the year.

In the 2023-2024 school year, LiHigh told the Agency of Education that it had nine students attending on public tuition money, according to Ted Gates, an Agency of Education project manager and data analyst.

According to a 2022 business valuation report, a document prepared by an outside accountant on LiHigh’s behalf and obtained by VTDigger, the school was valued at roughly $2.6 million.

From 2018 through 2021, the school had average earnings of roughly $28,000 before taxes per year — after paying the Rosenthals a combined average of roughly $260,000 a year in “officers’ salaries,” according to the report.

Rosenthal was listed as the school’s director, while Daniela worked as a bookkeeper, according to the valuation report. Rosenthal did not respond to an email about those salaries.

By comparison, the average public school principal in Vermont makes about $111,000 a year, while the average superintendent makes roughly $156,000, according to state data .

According to a separate profit and loss statement provided by state officials, LiHigh had a net income — meaning, income after all taxes and expenses, including payroll — of $82,000 in 2022.

In 2020 and 2021, the school received nearly $400,000 in forgiven Covid-19 pandemic loans, according to government records.

Rosenthal did not respond to questions about the school’s financial records.

“Neither LiHigh School nor myself have ever received any report or citation suggesting that we did anything inconsistent with how independent schools operate under Vermont law or any claim of financial impropriety relating to use of public funds,” Rosenthal said.

Camp LiHigh

In 2016, Rosenthal bought seven acres in Wells for $225,000 — property that would “serve as Camp LiHigh!” according to a post on LiHigh’s website. (The Rosenthals also own one of LiHigh’s former buildings in Poultney.)

Camp LiHigh, according to the post, “served as a laboratory for the development of our students’ outdoor and leadership skills, but it also became a place of refuge, a peaceful camp where anxious students could meditate, relax in the pond, or kayak around the bend.”

The land also became a home for the school’s owners. Property records show that after buying the land, Rosenthal built a new, 3,800-square-foot house on the property, complete with a gym, jacuzzi and “Italian artistry,” according to a Zillow listing.

The property also includes an “adorable full season guest cabin,” the listing reads.

That cabin was in fact built, in part, by LiHigh students. The cabin was named “Kent’s Cabin,” after the late father of one of the students, “an incredibly talented woodworker,” according to LiHigh’s website.

In a 2017 social media post, the school described students’ work as a “woodworking internship.”

Rosenthal described the construction of the cabin as one of many ways the school helped students learn.

“We hired a professional builder to work with our staff and some students to build a cabin on our property,” he told VTDigger in an email. “These students couldn’t read a tape measure or do basic math. The skills, growth and confidence that was built by these students through this project was amazing. Two of these students were offered jobs as a result of their learning.”

According to financial documents obtained by VTDigger, the school was also paying the Rosenthals thousands of dollars in rent for that cabin — roughly $20,000 a year, according to financial and investigation records viewed by VTDigger. It was not clear whether LiHigh students were even using the cabin, agency staffers wrote in investigation documents.

Rosenthal did not respond to a question about whether the rent for the cabin was factored into the school’s tuition rate.

Late last year, according to property records, the Rosenthals sold the Wells property — along with the new house and the cabin — for $1,225,000, exactly $1 million more than what they paid for it in 2016.

In a photo on the Zillow page for the property, a sign over the door of the cabin is visible. “Kent’s Cabin,” it reads.

‘A situation may come up’

As an approved therapeutic school, LiHigh occupied a unique niche in the state’s educational ecosystem. Such schools are supposed to educate students with learning or therapy needs that exceed what public schools are able to offer.

Educators, advocates and parents say that there is a dire shortage of therapeutic schools in the state. The situation is not helped by a recent moratorium on new approved independent schools — the same law that prevented LiHigh from continuing to operate with a new owner, according to the Agency of Education.

Therapeutic schools fill a crucial need and are almost always responsible and collaborative, Mary Lundeen, the executive director of the Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators, said in an interview.

“We need those therapeutic independent schools,” she said. “We public schools definitely need them.”

But in October, as state education officials drafted edits to state rules, the Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators wrote a letter urging the state to improve its oversight of private schools serving students with disabilities.

“This is really trying to be proactive and say, okay, you know, if we are looking at the agency approving schools to accept public funds, then there are some expectations that go with that,” Lundeen said.

Because “every once in a while, a situation may come up,” she said.

State rules require that a private therapeutic school’s tuition rate be “reasonably related to the level of services provided by the school.” The total cost of services is divided by the school’s “approved operational capacity” — roughly, the number of students the school expects to educate.

That, critics say, allows for a great deal of freedom and a lack of transparency in determining what costs are incorporated into the tuition rate.

When she was at the Agency of Education, Holcombe, the state representative and former secretary, said staffers used to joke that “our retirement plan could be opening a therapeutic school, remodeling our house, putting in a swimming pool, serving one kid for one year, and then selling it.”

At therapeutic schools, she said, “there’s just a huge amount of money to be made.”

In fact, Vermont’s therapeutic schools include a disproportionate number of for-profit entities, compared to general education private schools. As of March, roughly a third of the state’s 29 therapeutic schools were for-profit, according to the state Agency of Education.

And nearly all of Vermont’s for-profit schools are therapeutic: as of March, Vermont had 11 approved for-profit private schools, including LiHigh. Ten of those were therapeutic schools.

Clare O’Shaugnessy, a former staff attorney at the Agency of Education, said that state officials are extremely reluctant to send students out of state, far away from their families — which, in her view, leads to some leniency for approved therapeutic schools.

“The question has always been, well, if so-and-so closes, or we put too much of a spotlight or we put pressure on these entities, then where will the kids go?” she said. “Well, they all end up going out of state. And that’s always the concern. So there is toleration for, you know, less-than-stellar places for these students.”

In 2022, as state education officials were updating rules governing private schools, O’Shaugnessy urged them to set a cap on profits at for-profit schools. No cap was ultimately established.

‘The Agency will continue to fulfill its duty’

LiHigh is the second for-profit private school in two years to close under state scrutiny over its finances and operations. In the earlier case, which VTDigger reported on , the owner of the for-profit Moretown school Stone Path Academy withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars from the institution, according to state records, before closing it. State officials ultimately took no action regarding Stone Path.

In both cases, state officials found that the schools were charging more than they should have. At Stone Path, tuition was “based on flawed financial information” and incorporated costs that were “specifically not allowed,” according to documents viewed by VTDigger. And at LiHigh, according to Agency of Education investigation documents, public school districts were being charged tuition above “the last official rate set by the Agency of Education.”

Asked whether the similarity between LiHigh and Stone Path was evidence of a larger pattern, Hedges, the agency spokesperson, did not answer directly.

“The Agency will continue to fulfill its duty to investigate these complaints in a timely manner, and support any schools that need assistance coming into compliance,” she said.

LiHigh officials shut its doors on June 14, according to its website . Much of the site appears to have been deactivated, except for a landing page that features a lengthy, wordless slideshow of photos from the school set to music.

“It was truly an honor to be a member of the community and to educate all of the children who passed through our doors,” the site reads.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Before a Poultney therapeutic school closed, state investigations made troubling discoveries .