Emerging Monday afternoon from the double-doors of a Braintree middle school, Samantha Frechon, dressed in all black, cut a dispirited silhouette against the day’s crisp blue sky. Too nauseous from nerves, she hadn’t eaten all day. Her fingernails were peeled to the quick. She longed to be alone.
It had been her first day of school in nearly a year, and it had gone terribly. Yet what transpired on that first day back would soon be overshadowed by the events of the second — a gut-wrenching sequence that would involve the Braintree Police Department and end with the 14-year-old being transported to the hospital.
“Yesterday, we just give the best shot we can,” Samantha’s mother, Alicja Frechon, a native Polish speaker, said Tuesday evening from her home in Braintree. “Today, she didn’t trust no one. Not them, not me.”
Samantha’s enrollment at the 1,000-student East Middle School, which marked her first time in a regular public school in six years, came on the orders of a Norfolk County Superior Court judge following the eighth-grader’s months-long absence from any type of schooling. That absence, Judge Catherine Ham ruled last week, had caused Samantha “irreparable harm.”
Samantha’s fate had landed in Ham’s hands following a prolonged dispute between Frechon and Braintree Public Schools about the appropriate setting for the special education student. Samantha, who has autism and crippling anxiety, among other disabilities, had last year attended a private school that specialized in one-on-one instruction, an environment where she thrived, she and her mother said.
The cost of that school, Fusion Academy in Hingham, was paid for by the Braintree school district under a provision of federal special education law that requires districts to cover private tuition when they cannot provide an appropriate education in-house. Braintree, though, chose not to enroll Samantha at Fusion this school year.
The district, in the midst of a budget crisis, said it would not pay the tuition for the private school, saying the placement at the Hingham school, which does not employ special educators, was only temporary. Superintendent Jim Lee previously has said the district’s financial situation played no role in its educational decisions.
Frechon sought the court’s help, alleging in court documents that Braintree had violated the girl’s “stay put” rights, a key tenet of both federal and state special education law. Under the provision, special education students have the right to stay in their current placement while administrators, teachers, therapists, and their parents sort out a disagreement over a potential change.
But Ham, who at a previous court hearing said she was unfamiliar with the intricacies of special education law, instead ruled Samantha should return to a traditional public school setting, a learning environment the teen hadn’t been taught in since she was 8.
After being out of school all year, Samantha went with her mother to the middle school on Monday. The transition was grueling. Pulling behind an idling school bus, Alicja Frechon turned her head toward the passenger seat, and asked her daughter if she was OK.
“Mm-mm,” Samantha murmured, her face pale from fear, staring blankly ahead, as John Mellencamp crooned “Ain’t That America” on the car radio.
Shortly after entering the school, Samantha, overwhelmed by the number of adults there to assist her, nearly fainted and required attention from the school nurse, Frechon said. (A Globe reporter and photographer shadowed Samantha on her way to school, then waited with her mother at the house until the school day was done.)
Shortly after drop-off, while Frechon sat at her dining room table, the first call from the school came. Samantha, switching back and forth between English in their native Polish, begged her mom to come get her, her voice growing more insistent with each desperate plea: “Please come get me. I want to go. Please come get me. … I don’t feel safe here, and I want to leave. … Please come get me. I’ve already been here long enough. They know I tried.”
It was the first of eight calls in three hours. Frechon, dabbing tears from her eyes with a paper napkin, told the girl she couldn’t. “I cannot just go get you,” Frechon said. “You’re asking me something I can’t do.”
Frechon said she worried the district might portray her as not wanting Samantha in school or not complying with the judge’s order. Frechon questioned whether the school could provide her daughter what she needs. Samantha spent nearly the entire day in an empty conference room with two behavioral therapists. She did not interact with other students.
At times during the calls home, East Middle School Assistant Principal Andrew Curran spoke with Frechon. Curran, maintaining an upbeat tone to his voice, explained the school would be setting Samantha up with a Chromebook so she could start accessing schoolwork. Still, Samantha begged to go home.
“I did tell her, ‘Honey, I can’t. I can’t overrule, you know, your mom and the judges and the lawyers,’” he said. “We knew the first day, it was gonna be tough.”
But Tuesday was even worse. Samantha, panicked with nerves, again required the school nurse’s attention shortly after she entered the building. Unwilling to remain at the school as her mother sought to leave, Samantha then went to the parking lot, where she refused to move away from Frechon’s car.
Frechon questioned whether it’d be better for her to leave so the school officials could bring Samantha back into the school. Collins Fay-Martin, a special education attorney advising Frechon pro bono, soon arrived at the school, where, according to a video recorded by Fay-Martin and viewed by the Globe, a school official threatened to call the Department of Children and Families if Frechon were to leave the school while Samantha remained in the parking lot.
“Are you going to leave a child here who doesn’t want to come into the school?” the official said.
“You’re court-ordered to have her,” Fay-Martin responded.
Soon after, officers from the Braintree Police Department arrived, at the school’s request. At one point, a school official started recording the incident on her phone, riling Frechon, who began yelling at the school officials.
Samantha fell to the ground, vomiting, saying she couldn’t breathe. Her mom called 911, prompting an ambulance to arrive and take the teen to the hospital.
“You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Fay-Martin said, referring to Frechon’s position — take her daughter, but run afoul of the judge’s ruling, or leave her daughter, and let her suffer.
Superintendent Lee did not respond to an email requesting comment about Samantha’s return to school and Tuesday’s events. Mandy McLaren can be reached at mandy.mclaren@globe.com. Follow her @mandy_mclaren.
