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.
The Trial Lawyer 61