How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School — ProPublica

The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain was set back off a country road in a white colonial house — such an atypical location that I first drove right by it, unsure that it was a school. I turned around, went to the door, introduced myself as a reporter and asked for a tour.

I knew a student had been assaulted in this Arkansas school a year earlier because of some news reports based on a detective’s description. Once inside, I noted the preteens tucked into hammock chairs or sitting on the floor. I noted the cameras mounted in the foyer and classrooms, a reminder that, in order to fully understand what had happened, I’d need to see the video that had captured the assault. 

But since this happened at the Delta Institute, a private school, I didn’t have access to the types of public records — incident reports, emails and video — that might have existed at a public school. The only reason we knew that something awful had happened here was that law enforcement got involved. I would have to keep reporting for weeks until the criminal case was closed. Then I could start pursuing the video evidence.

I had come to Northeast Arkansas, just outside of Jonesboro, to report on private schools that have been opening in response to state legislatures increasingly setting aside public money for parents to spend on private education. Our reporting shows that more public money doesn’t necessarily translate to more transparency. In most of the states that ProPublica studied, private schools operate with little oversight. Unlike public schools, where everything from test scores to school lunches and staff credentials is regulated, most of what happens in private schools is not open to public scrutiny.

In Arkansas, the focus of my recent story with Jodi S. Cohen, there are no rules about who can open a private school, and they can operate just about anywhere. 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.

There are no records showing that the Arkansas Department of Education investigated the Delta Institute or visited the school, even after police arrested its founder. When asked if the department had gone to the school, officials did not answer, but said when the department is made aware of issues, that “often results in a site visit.”

Eventually, I was able to obtain video evidence recorded from inside the school. With the help of Arkansas Times reporter Milo Strain, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for video footage to the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office and to the prosecutor who brought the charges on behalf of the state. 

Now I want to share some of that footage with you. It’s sourced mostly from my open records requests, plus one video that was shared with me by a parent who consented to its publication. While the videos are difficult to watch, they are important in that they show not only the mistreatment of students at one particular private school but also the systemic lack of oversight that allows private schools to operate with few regulations and little monitoring.

Early in my reporting about the Delta Institute, a parent showed me a video of her son’s experience at the school. It was taken by the school’s owner, Mary “Tracy” Morrison. She had texted the video to Renee Johns, whose 10-year-old son with autism was a student, as an explanation for why he was being kept after school that day.

That video shows three boys scrubbing the floor and walls of a room in the school with rags as Morrison shouts commands and admonishments. You can see the boys startle and react as she raises her voice to them. It’s clear they’re being punished.

Morrison was an occupational therapist and had never run a school before. But she sold herself to parents as an expert on autism and neurodivergence.

Johns filed a report about the floor-scrubbing video with the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office. She saw it as child abuse. About three weeks later, in April 2025, a second parent came to the sheriff’s office to report another incident at the Delta Institute — this one also captured on video.

A detective went to the school in April 2025 with a warrant and retrieved a roughly 40-minute clip of footage recorded by a camera in the classroom. I obtained that through a Freedom of Information Act request, and it’s really the only unfiltered view we have into the methods Morrison was using at her school.

The video shows Morrison directing a boy to sit in the middle of a circle of 12- and 13-year-old students on the floor. Morrison then told the students to put their hands on the boy in the center however they wanted.

One boy loops his arm around the student’s neck and chokes him. Afterward, Morrison gives the boy a high-five.

Other students join in by hitting, punching and pinching the boy. Morrison encourages one, who strikes the boy hard enough that you can hear another student say, “That had to hurt!”

A few moments later, Morrison thwacks the boy in the center with a footlong plastic cylinder. She’s trying to get him to admit to being unkind to another student.

Morrison was charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. She took a deal pleading guilty to one count of permitting child abuse and four counts of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. The deal allowed her to avoid a trial, which means the video was never played in open court. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

I’ve been writing about schools for the better part of 25 years, often extensively about discipline and how schools react to student behavior.

But what I saw in the video looked nothing like anything I’d seen before. I’d never seen a school administrator — the owner of the school, no less — shout at a child that he’s a liar or invite other students to put their hands on him.

Morrison declined to speak to the detective who investigated the case or to the prosecutor. She didn’t respond to our requests for interviews and comments. Our only real insight into her perspective came in other videos we obtained: recordings of calls with her family, friends and school employees made while she was in jail.

We got recordings of more than 500 phone and video calls that Morrison made or received while she was incarcerated in May. In a call with a filmmaker who has produced true crime documentaries and who spoke with Morrison about telling her story, we hear her explanation of what happened.

Morrison describes leading a “sophisticated” intervention method in which she guides students at risk of becoming criminals in a “restorative” group discussion. “It was never about, like, ‘Go hit him,’ right?” she said to the filmmaker, referring to the 13-year-old boy she’d had sit in the center of the circle. 

Morrison was released from jail June 1. The school’s new administrator said Morrison has “zero involvement” with the school right now.

“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,” David Bailey, the detective on the case, said. “If we can’t protect our kids, who can we protect?”

The incidents at the Delta Institute show how one publicly funded private school has operated with little scrutiny, even after a criminal investigation into student abuse. But our reporting has uncovered several other such schools, and I encourage you to sign up for updates as we publish more about what we’ve discovered across the country. 

The school is still operating and is still eligible to get public funding from the state. This spring, though, it changed its name. It’s now called North Star Academy.