Opinion ID: 63723
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Williams’s school records

Text: During middle school and at the beginning of high school, Williams was in a regular classroom. In April 1992, in Williams’s tenth grade year, he was expelled from high school after he was blamed for a series of locker thefts, setting a trash can on fire, and truancy. He then was admitted to West Oaks psychiatric hospital, where he received counseling and attended group therapy sessions. Doctors at West Oaks diagnosed Williams with a conduct disorder and hyperactivity and prescribed medication for short attention span and impulsivity. Williams completed the second semester of his tenth-grade coursework at a community service campus of West Oaks. He passed all of his classes except Algebra. He returned to his high school in the fall. In November 1992, a committee at Williams’s high school decided that he qualified for special education accommodations because of emotional disturbance. He took some classes in the regular classroom and others in a special education environment. All classes were taught at the tenth-grade level. Required modifications included frequent breaks, defined physical space, cooling-off periods, positive reinforcers, and a discipline management plan. The following April, the school modified Williams’s education plan to mainstream him into some regular education classes at the eleventh-grade level in the fall. In the 1992-1993 academic year, Williams passed all his classes and earned several A’s. The following year, Williams took coursework at the twelfth-grade level, earning passing scores but with a deterioration in his behavior in the spring term. He earned grades in the 70 to 71 range for his regular English and government classes and scores in the 80s for his special education classes. Williams’s high-school grades were generally low but passing. At the times he received his lowest grades, he also had a large 10 No. 07-70006 number of recorded absences. Williams graduated from high school with a grade point average of 2.19 and a class rank of 326 out of 480. James Claypool, the principal at one of Williams’s high schools, recounted Williams’s self-destructive behavior (as summarized by the magistrate judge): Claypool described Williams as soft-spoken and respectful, but prone to getting into trouble when not supervised by an authority figure. Claypool described Williams as being fascinated by crime and criminals and gravitated toward those peers who engaged in criminal activities. Claypool stated that Williams often informed school officials of his friends’ illegal activities and then returned to his friends and told them what he had just done. As a result, Williams was frequently beaten up by his friends. Claypool often counseled Williams about this attention-getting/self-destructive behavior, but Williams was unable to stop the cycle of informing on his friends and then informing on himself. This behavior continued until Williams was moved to a different classroom. (footnotes omitted).