It took more than two months for Laura Johnson to learn that school surveillance footage of her 8-year-old child, Emma Grace, was circulating among Vestavia Hills parents and educators.
In a video reviewed by AL.com, three staff members at Dolly Ridge Elementary School watch surveillance footage of Emma Grace running out of class, laugh and record the footage on their phones. One of the staff members was reportedly the principal of the school, Ty Arendall.
“They were laughing and making fun of her, basically for her trauma behaviors,” Johnson said. “That’s the part that gets me and makes me really upset when I think about it.”
Arendall did not respond to requests for comment from AL.com. A Vestavia Hills City Schools spokesperson said in a statement to AL.com, “Vestavia Hills City Schools will not comment on matters that involve confidential student information. This is an important protection of the rights afforded to them under federal law.”
On Feb. 7, 2023, Emma Grace ran out of her classroom and towards the school exit. A teacher stepped into the hallway and picked the student up. Emma Grace then pulled the teacher’s hair as staff members tried to get her to let go.
Emma Grace, then a first grader at Dolly Ridge, has a disability that sometimes causes her to run away or “elope,” an issue that affects some children with developmental disabilities.
Later that afternoon, Arendall shared footage of the incident on his laptop during a leadership meeting while teachers recorded it on their cellphones, according to a video obtained and reviewed by AL.com. A former Vestavia Hills special education teacher confirmed the video’s contents and the people who watched it.
The video shows the reflection of two female staff members holding their phones up to a Mac laptop while it plays the footage of Emma Grace’s elopement. They and a man laugh as one teacher asks, “Is this our school?” Another explains that it happened outside her class.
Johnson first heard about the video in April from a friend, another parent in the district, who’d seen it. “It had gone through Dolly Ridge into the community,” she said.
Three weeks after Emma Grace eloped, she ran out of class again, this time making it to the street. Johnson then requested an IEP meeting so her daughter could have one-on-one support at all times. Individualized education plans outline the supports and services for students with disabilities, and can be updated if parents and educators think changes are needed.
Arendall, who was at the meeting, made a comment that he saw footage of Emma Grace and that “she’d run a good 40 [yard dash],” according to Johnson and Annie Culverhouse, Emma Grace’s special education teacher at the time.
But Johnson said she still did not know what footage he was referring to. She was never told about the surveillance video of the previous incident or that it had been shared by school officials.
In April, Johnson was told by a friend that she had seen the video, so Johnson asked for a meeting with school officials.
AL.com reviewed audio from that April meeting between Johnson, her husband, advocate Susan Ellis, VHCS assistant superintendent Aimee Rainey, the director of personnel Meredith Hanson and the head of the district’s special education program, Sandy Ritchey.
Officials told Johnson the district had hired an independent investigator to look into how and why the video was shared, and apologized multiple times to the parents.
“We need to decide what kinds of consequences will prevent this from happening again and we need the family to know this isn’t acceptable…this is someone who has demonstrated such irresponsibility and unprofessionalism,” one official said about Arendall during the April meeting.
Johnson never saw a copy of the investigation because the investigator, Julius Shanks, was a lawyer hired by the school board. Any findings are protected under attorney-client privilege, Patrick Boone, the district’s lawyer told AL.com.
Instead, Johnson said Shanks told her no violations were found and officials gave her the option to enroll her daughter in any other school in the district. Shanks declined to comment for this story.
According to personnel records reviewed by AL.com, Arendall did not face any disciplinary action.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is a federal law that protects student privacy and dictates who can have access to a student’s education record. The Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program said the act provides circumstances that would allow for the video to be shared with staff, including for safety reasons and educational purposes, but sharing the video on personal devices would likely be a violation of the law.
Culverhouse, the former teacher, said she worked for months to get school officials to address the video, even meeting with Ritchey, the district’s head of special education, at a Panera in March 2023 to tell her it had been circulating through the school. She also met with the district’s investigator and told him Arendall had shown her the video on his cellphone while laughing, and shared notes about the incident.
“It just was really frustrating because I felt like I was trying to do the right thing and they just care about the school’s reputation,” she said.
Culverhouse has since left Vestavia Hills City Schools and no longer works as a special education teacher, partly, she said, because of the stress caused by this incident.
Johnson has since filed a federal complaint with the United States Department of Education, alleging Arendall violated her daughter’s right to privacy.
She’s kept Emma Grace at Dolly Ridge so she could keep her relationships with her friend group.
“My child thrives on relationships and it’s taken her quite a while to find kids that she’s really truly friends with, that like her and can play with her on the playground,” Johnson said.
But a year after the incident, she still hopes the school district will be transparent about why no one ever faced consequences for sharing the video of her daughter.
“All I want is for people to be accountable, just follow the law and be accountable,” Johnson said. “Emma Grace loves to go to school and she loves to learn but now as parents we don’t feel safe because we don’t know if she’ll become the butt of another joke.”