DesMoinesRegister.com
By STACI HUPPshupp@dmreg.com
June 30, 2008
Iowa has joined a nationwide push to curb the use of physical force and "timeout" rooms in schools to discipline the most unruly students.
A proposal before the state Board of Education would limit how and when teachers can lock up children and would ban risky methods of restraint, including chokeholds.
Teachers also would be trained to use "positive" alternatives, such as talking through disputes with children.
"Teachers struggle with what's appropriate," said Judy Jeffrey, director of the Iowa Department of Education. "This really provides additional guidance."
State law allows school officials to hold down and confine children who are a threat to themselves or others, just as group homes do. But critics say educators overdo it sometimes.
In 2006, a Waukee couple complained that their 8-year-old daughter was alone in timeout for more than three hours because she refused to finish a reading assignment. Waukee school officials have said they did nothing wrong, but an administrative law judge disagreed. The district's discipline policy has not changed.
"The problem that some of my colleagues have noted is an educationally inappropriate use of seclusion and restraint - 'You were disrespectful; go into the timeout room,' versus 'You were disrespectful; how can we help you be more respectful?' " said Thomas Mayes, an attorney for the education department.
Dave Wilkerson, Waukee's superintendent of schools, said he's open to input from state officials but questions that such a specific policy will work. "To try to put a policy in place that's going to fit every situation, I think, is going to be impossible," he said.
Other states have reviewed timeout in the face of lawsuits against school districts, researchers say.At the same time, studies have shown teachers confine students for the wrong reasons.
A James Madison University survey of teachers at one Minnesota school found that teachers were more likely to lock up children for minor misbehavior.
"Without any guidance and policies, they make very poor choices, and kids suffer the consequences of it," said Joseph Ryan, a Clemson University professor who worked on the 2004 survey.
How often teachers lock up students in Iowa is difficult to track because the state lacks a clear reporting system. That would change under the state proposal, which calls on educators to keep records of every incident.
The proposal would be part of Iowa's corporal punishment law, which has been in place since 1991. The law covers public and private schools and area education agencies.The state proposal also says educators:
- Can't hold a child face down or otherwise use force that hampers a child's ability to breathe.
- Must provide "continuous" supervision of children in timeout rooms.
- Must get permission from an administrator to confine a child for longer than an hour.
- Can't lock up or restrain children for "minor infractions."
- Can lock the door of a timeout room only if they hold the lock in position, or the lock automatically releases when school alarms go off or power is cut off.
- Must use timeout rooms that are safe and suitable for children of varying sizes, ages and conditions.
"It's kind of frightening, frankly, to see that you have to be this specific," said Susan Myers, a mother who heads the Access for Special Kids Family Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group.
"I don't believe that teachers or building administrators set out to be unkind or cruel or harmful to children. In the rare occasion that that happens, it happens really because of ignorance as to what to do. This should help alleviate any instance of that."
Iowans can weigh in on the state proposal at a public hearing July 8. Members of the state education board are expected to vote on it this fall.
A spokeswoman at the state's largest teachers union said she wasn't familiar enough with the proposal to comment about it.
Doug and Eva Loeffler, the parents who complained about the Waukee school district timeout policy, could not be reached for comment last week.
Showing posts with label Proposed Legislation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Proposed Legislation. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Senate passed a bill to address the growing problem of Restraint and Seclusion in Tennessee Public Schools
State legislators take a something-is-better-than-nothing approach to protecting special education students from seclusion and restraint
by Elizabeth Ulrich
May 1, 2008
Disability advocates who have spent more than a year trying to convince Tennessee legislators about the troubling fact that special education students are being physically restrained, strapped to chairs and locked in janitor closets hit a small landmark last week as the state Senate passed a bill to address a growing problem in classrooms across the state.
Designed to limit the unchecked use of physical restraint and isolation, the bill offers only a few modest regulations. But disability advocates see the mere acknowledgment of the problem as “gargantuan,” considering their struggle to get lawmakers even to accept that teachers are using such methods on the most vulnerable of students.
Nearly 40 families across the state recently weighed in with horrific tales of the use of restraint and isolation in public schools in a survey commissioned by the state Disability Coalition on Education (DCE). Perhaps the most heart-wrenching tale was that of an 11-year-old autistic boy whose Williamson County teacher locked him in a dark janitor’s closet for up to three hours at a time on several occasions. The teacher even held him down in restraints for behavior she described as not “as much autistic as...ornery” (“Physical Education,” Jan. 24).
Teachers never told the boy’s family about the incidents. Once the otherwise happy boy began to dread school, and as his behavior escalated into unusual fits of screaming and acting out, the family knew something was up. Unlike many of his counterparts, the boy was eventually able to articulate what had transpired. Holly Lu Conant Rees, the director of DCE, says such stories, coupled with the well-publicized death of Omega Leach, made the danger of the ungoverned use of restraint impossible to ignore. A Philadelphia boy undergoing treatment at Chad Youth Enhancement Center, a Clarksville facility for troubled kids, Leach mysteriously died on the floor of his dorm room, away from the watchful eye of the facility’s surveillance cams. The state medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by strangulation after Chad counselors restrained and roughed him up.
Interestingly, the new Senate bill passed April 24 does little to protect kids such as Leach, perhaps because lawmakers see the children in these facilities as criminals. The bill, however, does establish guidelines for the use of restraint and isolation with special education students so long as they don’t have a rap sheet. Specifically, it prohibits schools from using chemical restraint via shots of sedatives to control violent behavior, noxious substances such as pepper spray, locked seclusion and prone restraint, a controversial hold method that can lead to asphyxia—none of which has been expressly outlawed by the state for disabled youth in private treatment facilities. It also requires schools, for the first time ever, to keep records of these incidents. But at this point, the bill gets a little hazy.
Though Sen. Diane Black, who sponsored the bill, says she and other members of the Senate Select Committee on Children and Youth were moved by testimony from special education parents, the original fiscal note for the bill, which Conant Rees put at a staggering $50 million, was too large to be viable. So training teachers on the proper use of restraint went out the window—along with many other provisions advocates had hoped for—in the quest to get the fiscal note down to $50,000, where it now remains.
But Black says the bill is a good starting point. “This at least brings consistency and does bring something that everybody is going to be using across the state, and that’s really important,” she says.
But is it enough to protect students? Conant Rees says the legislation does not completely ban the use of mechanical restraint. This is troublesome to the activist, who has seen students strapped to chairs with lap and shoulder belts or placed in stationary chairs as a means of classroom crowd control. Some of these contraptions look like a hybrid between a high-end toddler car seat and an electric chair, and at least one Tennessee family has told Conant Rees that their elementary-age child has spent hours on end in one of these chairs because teachers deemed the student “a runner.”
by Elizabeth Ulrich
May 1, 2008
Disability advocates who have spent more than a year trying to convince Tennessee legislators about the troubling fact that special education students are being physically restrained, strapped to chairs and locked in janitor closets hit a small landmark last week as the state Senate passed a bill to address a growing problem in classrooms across the state.
Designed to limit the unchecked use of physical restraint and isolation, the bill offers only a few modest regulations. But disability advocates see the mere acknowledgment of the problem as “gargantuan,” considering their struggle to get lawmakers even to accept that teachers are using such methods on the most vulnerable of students.
Nearly 40 families across the state recently weighed in with horrific tales of the use of restraint and isolation in public schools in a survey commissioned by the state Disability Coalition on Education (DCE). Perhaps the most heart-wrenching tale was that of an 11-year-old autistic boy whose Williamson County teacher locked him in a dark janitor’s closet for up to three hours at a time on several occasions. The teacher even held him down in restraints for behavior she described as not “as much autistic as...ornery” (“Physical Education,” Jan. 24).
Teachers never told the boy’s family about the incidents. Once the otherwise happy boy began to dread school, and as his behavior escalated into unusual fits of screaming and acting out, the family knew something was up. Unlike many of his counterparts, the boy was eventually able to articulate what had transpired. Holly Lu Conant Rees, the director of DCE, says such stories, coupled with the well-publicized death of Omega Leach, made the danger of the ungoverned use of restraint impossible to ignore. A Philadelphia boy undergoing treatment at Chad Youth Enhancement Center, a Clarksville facility for troubled kids, Leach mysteriously died on the floor of his dorm room, away from the watchful eye of the facility’s surveillance cams. The state medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by strangulation after Chad counselors restrained and roughed him up.
Interestingly, the new Senate bill passed April 24 does little to protect kids such as Leach, perhaps because lawmakers see the children in these facilities as criminals. The bill, however, does establish guidelines for the use of restraint and isolation with special education students so long as they don’t have a rap sheet. Specifically, it prohibits schools from using chemical restraint via shots of sedatives to control violent behavior, noxious substances such as pepper spray, locked seclusion and prone restraint, a controversial hold method that can lead to asphyxia—none of which has been expressly outlawed by the state for disabled youth in private treatment facilities. It also requires schools, for the first time ever, to keep records of these incidents. But at this point, the bill gets a little hazy.
Though Sen. Diane Black, who sponsored the bill, says she and other members of the Senate Select Committee on Children and Youth were moved by testimony from special education parents, the original fiscal note for the bill, which Conant Rees put at a staggering $50 million, was too large to be viable. So training teachers on the proper use of restraint went out the window—along with many other provisions advocates had hoped for—in the quest to get the fiscal note down to $50,000, where it now remains.
But Black says the bill is a good starting point. “This at least brings consistency and does bring something that everybody is going to be using across the state, and that’s really important,” she says.
But is it enough to protect students? Conant Rees says the legislation does not completely ban the use of mechanical restraint. This is troublesome to the activist, who has seen students strapped to chairs with lap and shoulder belts or placed in stationary chairs as a means of classroom crowd control. Some of these contraptions look like a hybrid between a high-end toddler car seat and an electric chair, and at least one Tennessee family has told Conant Rees that their elementary-age child has spent hours on end in one of these chairs because teachers deemed the student “a runner.”
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