At age 7, David was too much for his teachers to handle. So they decided to send him to a special program — unique to Georgia — called a psychoeducational school. He was like so many others already there: male, diagnosed with a behavioral disorder — and black.

Georgia’s public schools assign a vastly disproportionate number of African American students to psychoeducational programs, segregating them not just by disability but also by race, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found.

Black children form the majority at programs where teachers restrained children with dog leashes, where psychologists performed behavioral experiments on troubled students, and where chronically disruptive students spent time in solitary confinement, locked in rooms with bars over the windows. In one such room, euphemistically called a “time-out” area, a 14-year-old boy hanged himself.

Fifty-four percent of students in Georgia’s psychoeducational programs are African American, compared to 37 percent in all public schools statewide, the Journal-Constitution found. In half of the 24 programs, black enrollment exceeds 60 percent. In one, nine of every 10 students are African American.

The Journal-Constitution analyzed data on most of the 3,382 students assigned last fall to the psychoeducational programs, formally known as the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support, or GNETS. The analysis, along with interviews with parents, their lawyers, educators and others, depicts a system that provides little of the mental health treatment and other therapies for which it was created. Just 5 percent of the programs’ full-time employees are psychologists, social workers or behavior specialists. Nine programs employ more clerical workers than therapeutic professionals.

The newspaper’s findings add a new dimension to allegations that Georgia illegally segregates disabled students in GNETS programs. The U.S. Department of Justice says the Americans with Disabilities Act gives GNETS students the right to attend school in less-restrictive settings with children who are not disabled. Federal authorities may file a lawsuit to force the state to close the programs.

One afternoon this spring, David’s mother, Tonyi, took him to a public library branch near their home in Kennesaw. Soon he was rolling on the carpeted floor. Then he read aloud from a book, complaining when his mother’s conversation competed with his own voice. Finally, Tonyi handed him her phone so he could play Angry Birds. Eyes locked onto the screen, David played game after game, unconsciously flicking his fingers between turns to self-regulate his behavior.

Tonyi keeps a list of David’s quirks: When he sees an aquarium, he accuses the fish of staring at him. He says he wishes he were made of paper so he wouldn’t have to wash his hair. He recoils from the smells of baked chicken and skin lotion.

“He’s been this way since age 3,” Tonyi said.

Tonyi, a single parent who asked to keep her last name confidential to protect her son’s privacy, brought David to Cobb County in April 2015 when she started a new job. Educators at Baker Elementary agreed to give David the same special education services he received as a first-grader at his old school in Texas.

His first day, David hit two other children in the face with rocks. Two days later, he kicked and hit teachers and an administrator, then pushed a police officer who came to the classroom to subdue him. He was suspended for the first time barely a week later.

From the start, Tonyi said, teachers and aides suggested David’s problems were emotional – that he could control himself, if only he chose to do so.

A committee compiling a document called an individualized education program rejected Tonyi’s suggestion that David was autistic. The panel instead concluded that David had “emotional and behavioral disorder.”

Often called EBD, the disorder stirs debate among psychologists, some of whom complain its definition is ambiguous and its application arbitrary. Their profession’s guidebook, the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, doesn’t recognize EBD as a specific condition.

The U.S. Department of Education, however, allows schools to apply an EBD label to children who fail to maintain relationships, engage in “inappropriate” behavior, or display “a general or pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression.”

“It was very vague,” Tonyi said of the school’s diagnosis. “They did not give a solid reason. It was a bunch of crap, honestly – their way of putting him in a bucket to make it easier for them.”

After the difficult spring at Baker, Tonyi moved David to Hayes Elementary for second grade last fall. School started Aug. 3. By Aug. 18, a Cobb school official wrote later, David “had engaged in multiple behavior infractions.” The school district transferred him to a special behavioral class at Dowell Elementary.

On his second day at Dowell, David refused to complete a writing assignment, an activity he hates, so his teacher told him to stay inside during recess. When David tried to leave the classroom, his teacher physically restrained him for three minutes.

The next day, a teacher’s aide restrained David for “running around the classroom, yelling … falling out on the floor, making noises,” according to a report she completed. During the four minutes she held him down, the aide wrote, David twice kicked her in the head, tried to bite her left arm and spat on her clothes. She said she “sustained (a) headache that lasted several hours.”

State education rules prohibit physical restraint unless a student’s conduct is placing himself or others in immediate danger.

But over 19 days, teachers and aides restrained David 11 times for a total of 63 minutes. They reported each episode on a school form beneath the slogan, “Empowering Dreams for the Future.”

The longest restraint lasted 15 minutes, after David screamed, threw items at other students, toppled desks and slapped at teachers. To keep David from biting him, a school report said, a teacher pushed his fist into the child’s mouth and held it there for several minutes. David told Tonyi he gagged and almost vomited. The school district later said the teacher appropriately controlled David’s “disruptive and assaultive behavior.”

Tonyi didn’t know it at the time, but a school committee already had decided David should transfer to a place that offered “structure and behavior supports” — the GNETS program serving Cobb County, called HAVEN Academy.

The name is an acronym for the program’s slogan: hope, achievement, victory, encouragement and nobility.