07/30/2026
A Growing Rot in Washington’s Education System
What happens when a fundamental institution abandons its purpose?
It begins to rot.
The corruption starts deep inside, unnoticeable on the surface at first, but it spreads, creating a butterfly effect that harms an exponential number of lives before ultimately leading to its own collapse.
The Seattle Litigation Group and Cedar Law are Seattle-based law firms fighting tirelessly against one of the most egregious examples of institutional rot in Washington State history.
The Northwest School of Innovative Learning (“NW SOIL”) is an OSPI-certified "therapeutic day school" created to serve disabled and troubled students whose needs exceeded what traditional public schools could meet, owned and operated by BHC Fairfax Hospital. It was supposed to be a safe place, a school where vulnerable children could finally receive the specialized learning and attention they needed. That's what BHC Fairfax Hospital claimed, anyway.
As it turns out, BHC Fairfax is a subsidiary of Universal Health Services (UHS), a for-profit hospital corporation worth billions. On its face, a for-profit corporation funding schools for disabled students might sound like a good thing. It wasn't.
BHC Fairfax had zero interest in serving anyone but itself. It established three campuses across the greater Seattle area, in Tacoma, Redmond, and Tumwater, not to educate children, but to maximize the millions in public tax dollars it could collect. The more students it pulled in from around the state, the more money it made.
Unfortunately, those tax dollars never went to benefiting the students under Fairfax’s care.
For years, Fairfax mistreated troubled and disabled children, treating them not as students but as something more akin to convicted inmates. It did so with the certification of the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (“OSPI”), and with the cooperation of school districts throughout Washington that continued, despite mounting complaints, to send students they no longer wanted to deal with to NW SOIL campuses.
The consequences have been devastating. Many of the children who attended these schools can no longer function. They are traumatized and profoundly undereducated. Some never even learned to properly read or write.
If your child attended NW SOIL and you believe they were harmed, please contact our office at (206) 407-3300 or [email protected] to discuss your options. It's time to push back against this institutional rot before it destroys more lives.
