by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.

The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.

It’s been about eight months since the U.S. Department of Education directed Garrison to change the way it responded to the behavior of students with disabilities. The department said it would monitor the Four Rivers Special Education District, which operates Garrison, following a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation in 2022 that found the school frequently involved police and used controversial disciplinary methods.

But the department’s Office for Civil Rights regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.

The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the Education Department to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district, in........

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