A Las Vegas mother has taken the Clark County School District to court, alleging that a veteran special-education teacher physically abused her nonverbal, then-5-year-old autistic daughter while school officials looked the other way. Filed on Feb. 4, the lawsuit claims the instructor used harsh physical control techniques and even altered the classroom setup to keep students from leaving, and asks a judge to hold CCSD and several employees responsible, as reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the case was brought by Sirbrina Bell on behalf of her daughter and seeks more than $30,000 in damages. The family is represented by Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Team. The district declined to comment on the pending litigation, the outlet reported.
What the Complaint Says Happened
A federal court filing available on Justia lays out the core allegations in stark detail. On Aug. 10, 2022, a teacher’s assistant reportedly watched the instructor grab the child’s wrist, force her into a bathroom, turn off the lights and walk out. The filing says the teacher later told CCSD police she had locked the child in the bathroom because the girl would not stop singing a nursery rhyme.
The complaint also accuses the teacher of using a thumb-and-index-finger “squeeze” on students to force them to comply, and of teaching that technique to other classroom staff.
Internal Records and a Possible Cover-Up
The same court record says district employees documented incidents involving the teacher, but that some incident forms appeared to be created or back-dated after the investigation was underway. According to the federal filing on Justia, the CCSD police investigator later told reviewers that paperwork generated after the probe began looked like “an attempted cover-up of failings throughout [the school district].”
District Response and Staffing Fallout
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that CCSD said the teacher, identified in the complaint as Kathryn Fitzgerald, was removed from the classroom in October 2022 and ultimately terminated in March 2025, ending a 23-year career with the district. The lawsuit also targets a school principal and a regional administrator, accusing top campus leaders of either failing to properly investigate or giving incomplete accounts of earlier complaints. Requests for comment from those individuals were not successful, according to the Review-Journal…