Pro Publica is on a jihad against restraint / isolation of special education students. They’ve thus far managed to brow-beat Virginia into severely restricting the practice. Now their eyes are set on the state of Connecticut.
So who are the students being restrained or enclosed in timeout rooms? They aren’t regular students. They are, by and large, severely mentally handicapped students. Many are autistic or low-functioning mentally retarded. Many have mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to control their own behavior, and while medication helps children with mental illnesses, there are limits to how much you can medicate children without impairing their growth, and when they have growth spurts their meds need to be recalibrated all over again.
Most of these children, in most countries, would be institutionalized. The United States is one of the few countries where these children are placed into regular classrooms as a matter of course. There are good reasons for doing so — research shows that children mainstreamed into regular classrooms perform better both socially and educationally than children in an institutional setting, no matter how well staffed the institution is or how well intended its administrators. There’s one huge, glaring problem however: The Federal Government mandates this massive special education program, one that sucks up 25% of the average school district’s budget, but has never — ever — provided the federal funding specified by that law. The law specifies that 40% of special education funding will be provided by the federal government. The amount currently provides is approximately 17%.
In short, schools simply do not have the resources — the facilities, the personnel, the equipment, the training, nada — to deal properly with these children when they behave in a disruptive or dangerous manner. Normal school disciplinary measures simply don’t work when you’re dealing with children who have no conscious control over their behavior due to their handicap. Over the years special education teachers and administrators have devised work-arounds to try to maintain a safe school environment despite lack of the proper training, equipment, and facilities, one of which is to restrain children who are acting out and remove them to a place where they cannot harm others, but they’ve done that in a situation where there are no good answers with the resources available to them.
So, Pro Publica shines a light on special education, and finds that mentally ill students act, well, mentally ill. The result is state laws that restrict how schools can use restraint and enclosure. There’s just one problem with that well intended law: the schools still don’t have the resources to properly deal with mentally ill students. Yet they cannot allow those students to destroy the school and injure other students. So… what are they going to do? Well… what can they do? Other than call the police?
And so the police gain yet *another* group of mentally ill people to taser, handcuff, manhandle, and wrestle — and maybe even shoot, if the kid has a knife. And once again, we end up using the police as a substitute for the treatment facilities for the mentally ill that we now refuse to fund. As for Pro Publica, they will stick a feather in their cap over how they’ve dealt with the issue of children being restrained by school personnel… and be aghast, aghast I say, when over the next decade there is yet *another* plague of violence against those very same children on the part of police officers called to remove them from classrooms when they turn violent or disruptive. And will never, ever, draw a line between those two issues — the line that’s called unintended consequences from good intentions.
– Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
* yes, I taught special education.
Badtux the Snarky Penguin 
Tux, I hear ya, brother! Only, my situation is in psych wads, not schools. Similar situation with autistic young people who are out of control, but misguided do-goodism makes it difficult to put them in seclusion (the medicalese word for “enclosure.) As a former teacher, you know what I’m talking about here, but other readers do not.
In Vancouver, there was one young autistic fellow, late teens, built like an ox, with a mental age of 3 or 4 years old. He was unstoppable. When he saw something he wanted, which was usually food, he just went and took it. He was not intending to do anything wrong; his autism just meant that other people didn’t register in his consciousness. The only thing that mattered was what was on the plate, so he’d grab it. Didn’t matter if it was in some other patient’s hands. He was strong and solid and moved like a tank. It took two of us to lock our arms in his and redirect him when he wanted to go in one direction and we wanted him to go elsewhere. While he wasn’t intentionally aggressive, when he was thwarted, he’d get frustrated and lash out spasmodically, as toddlers do. Only, toddlers are not almost 100 kg and nearly as tall as grown men. He was a frequent guest on our ward because he’d wear out his carers at the group home where he stayed. They’d bring him in when his behaviour got out of control. Unfortunately, he spent 90% of his time (when the 1-on-1 carer he had at his residence was not on our ward) locked inside a jail-like cell. Meds barely fazed him. He didn’t seem to mind the isolation room much. His brain was kind of blank when there was no stimulus.
When I departed Canada, our unit had been taken over by a new manager who wanted to eliminate seclusion as much as possible. Including for patients like that young guy. She was a twit. Even though she had experience on psych wards, ideology meant more to her than practicality. She had sociopathic tendencies and enjoyed aggravating underlings, too. Almost half the staff quit in the year after I split. I don’t know what happened the next time that sad young man was admitted, but imagine a bull in a china shop where the owner was saying “Don’t fence him in.”
In Australia, the legal restrictions against seclusion are HUGE. I think it’s a residual cultural reaction to the prison colony system that this continent was built on. (After the whitefellas stole it from the original inhabitants.) Medical approval is needed ASAP for every confinement. Reviews by doctors within one hour, then every four hours, emphasis on letting the patient out as quickly as can be. As a result, the management culture in many units is “don’t lock someone up until AFTER they’ve punched a nurse.” In one hospital where I refuse to work any more, a simple punch or ripping a door off its hinges isn’t enough to justify seclusion. It’s got to be a severe assault or sustained property destruction. The most out-of-control patient gets to set the tone on the locked part of the ward, terrorising the staff and the other patients, who are already so unwell they need to be in a part of the unit where they have less freedom than the open-door section.
This is bad enough when it’s an enraged, psychotic drug addict doing this. They eventually become manageable when the illegal drugs work out of their system and the prescribed ones titrate in. When it’s someone with autism, though, disruptive is often their baseline. Most nurses don’t isolate patients irresponsibly. But when unrealistic ninnies in management or outside groups say “It’s AWFUL to lock these people down!” everyone suffers except the fools who make the decisions without having to manage the consequences.
When I was teaching special ed I didn’t make regular use of restraint because I came up with a behavior mod plan that actually (mostly) worked (I based it on a military merit/demerit plan and tied it to privileges, the district-provided plan was utterly useless because it require higher-functioning children than what we had). But if restraint had not been available, that would not have worked at all. Sometimes a kid is just having a bad day and the only thing you can do is restrain him until he calms down then remove him from the classroom. The administrator for our unit had a very large office and kids weren’t in seclusion as such there, but if necessary he (or she) would sit there as the administrator quietly worked until judged ready to rejoin civilization or sent home.
Seclusion/restraint are definitely overused by poorly trained teachers and aides, but the solution is to fix their training and provide the resources they need to be successful, not to outlaw the only method they have of dealing with the situation they’re faced with. All that’ll do is end up with the cops being called for behaviors that, in my classroom, would have been a brief restraint to stop the destructive behavior then a timeout in a cubicle for sufficient time to calm down. I fail to see how calling the cops to taser a kid is more humane than basically a kid being held in a corner for thirty seconds until ready to quietly go to timeout…