They're the students who need extra care and protection.
But instead, parents, district employees, government workers and lawmakers all tell us they're being abused and the school district has done little to stop it.
Our story begins with a 7-year-old autistic boy named Gus Lapin.
"Why do you eat?" Gus' home aide asks him
He looks into space for a moment to think.
"I eat because I'm hungry!" he says excitedly, figuring out the expected answer.
That simple fact... a child eating, or in this case, not wanting to eat, is at the heart of an abuse lawsuit against the Clark County School District and special education teacher Lindsay Schoener.
"She said could you come inside because I think Gus is sick. He's been vomiting. So I went inside and indeed there was vomit in various places throughout the classroom and I asked her what happened and she said I don't know, I think he just probably doesn't feel well," remembers Courtney Lapin, Gus' mother.
Because young kids often get sick, so Courtney wasn't too worried.
That is until she got a call from the Staton Elementary school principal the next day.
"According to the principal, the police were at the school and that I should come to the school to get Gus."
At that point, Courtney knew something bad had happened, but no one was telling her anything.
"I was terrified. Terrified! When you send a child to school who can't come home and tell you what happened to him that day, it adds another level to your fear. It was devastating."
Months went by and no one at the school told Courtney and her husband what happened to Gus.
In fact, details only came after the family hired a lawyer to force the District to release the police report documenting the incident.
According to the report, Gus, who was five years old at the time, didn't want to eat the turkey in his lunch.
So the teacher intervened.
She reportedly told her aides, "Bear with me. This is not going to be pleasant."
She then sat behind Gus, pulled his head backwards against her chest and ordered him to open his mouth.
"And the whole time he was protesting. He was saying no turkey, no turkey!" Courtney learned from the police report.
The crime report goes on to say Mrs. Schoener clamped on his head, pinched off his nose, and when Gus opened his mouth to breathe, she dropped the turkey in and covered his mouth so he couldn't spit it out.
"His hands and his legs were flailing about. He was gagging and choking," Courtney read in the report.
The report shows that teacher force-fed Gus until he vomited repeatedly in front of all the other children.
"It just exceeds all bounds of decency and is outrageous conduct, particularly for a School District employee," says the family's attorney, Robert Kilby.
"And in a classroom where these kids need extra care and patience and understanding, to know that there's someone in the classroom who would do this over something so small, it's shocking," Courtney says.
The classroom aides reportedly tried to stop Mrs. Schoener, to no avail.
The aides reported the incident to the principal and school police, saying they were "mortified" by the teacher's conduct, and suggesting the school "place a hidden camera in Mrs. Schoener's classroom and then people would be shocked over her behavior."
Nevada law says physical restraint may not be used on a pupil with a disability unless there's an immediate threat of physical injury to students or staff, or to protect against severe property damage.
All instances must be documented and reported to the school district and the parents.
Courtney believes that "unless someone had come forward, we wouldn't have known what happened. We never would have known."
School police submitted their report to the District Attorney for the crime of child abuse.
"The Clark County School District Police Department did request for a warrant to be issued for Ms. Schoener's arrest," Kilby explains.
But that didn't happen.
Lindsey Schoener was never prosecuted and she's still teaching special needs students at Staton Elementary.
Contact 13 has been told that her disciplinary action consisted of watching a training video.
"If that's all that was done, I probably would not think that was reasonable," says Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, who works for Southern Nevada Legal Aid Center.
She often represents children with special needs and feels that any school teacher who did what Schoener is accused of should be terminated.
"Child won't eat... special needs... never take it upon yourself to force food down the child's mouth! Ever!" Buckley says.
She's puzzled by the fact that it took the Lapin family so long to learn what happened to their son.
"What message is that sending to these vulnerable families?" Darcy Spears asked.
"I think it's a really bad approach. I think that what it does is it infuriates the parents and it gets them angrier and angrier and what they will do is look toward litigation," Buckley answered.
The School District wouldn't talk about the incident with Gus and how they handled it.
They say pending litigation, unresolved personnel issues and confidential student information are not appropriate interview topics for district personnel.
For now, Gus Lapin is being home-schooled... the only place his parents feel he can learn and be safe.
Abuse allegations involving special needs students have been levied at the School District for more than a decade.
Contact 13 found a previous case involving a 10-year-old special needs student where a teacher and assistant held the boy's hands behind his back and force fed him oatmeal--which they knew he was allergic to--mixed with his own vomit.
He was also strangled so he would run faster despite a physical deformity in his feet and legs, pinned to the ground, and squirted with water if he couldn't stay on task.
The District fought that case starting in 1998 and eventually settled out of court.
But to this day, dozens of violations involving special needs students are still recorded every year.
