A Time for Change

A GAO report prepared for the House Education and Labor Committee concludes that there is widespread abuse in restraining children with special needs in US schools.  Some deaths have been linked to the practices used in the schools.  According to CNN, the report documented serious problems with the way children with disabilities are being treated in public schools, including cases of children being held face-down on the ground.”  The report may result in laws specifying what actions teachers can take to attempt to gain control of special needs students.

“I think what we’re going to hear from the GAO is that very often, special-need children are subjected to the policies of seclusion and policies of restraint that have turned out to be lethal in a number of circumstances,” said Rep. George Miller, D-California, the committee’s chairman.

In other cases, children as young as 6 have been locked away “for hours at a time,” Miller said.

“What the GAO is telling us is that that policy is fairly widespread,” he said. “The state regulations about how to handle these incidents don’t exist in about half the states, and in other states you have kind of a patchwork of regulations.”

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found that state laws governing the treatment of the more than 6 million children classified as having “special needs” — conditions including autism and Down syndrome– are patchy at best. Teachers and school staff frequently lack training in correct restraint methods, and in some cases, where improper restraints led to injuries, teachers often kept their jobs.

Only five states keep track of incidents where special-needs students are separated or restrained. Parents contacted by CNN commonly said they were not told their child was being disciplined until he or she began to behave badly at home — a sign of trouble at school.

Sadly, some of these children are not capable of reporting the abuse dished out by their teachers, who have no business teaching special needs children.  Even when confronted with the abuse, school systems sometimes sought to minimize or deny the allegations, even after public investigations found the charges to be true. And parents told CNN that when they got into a dispute with the teacher, their child was made to suffer as retribution.”  The methods used by the teachers can be blatantly abusive.

Some of the most disturbing reports concerned the use of seclusion rooms. Experts have long recommended that children should only be isolated when they posed an immediate threat to themselves or others. But CNN found that isolation was often used as a punishment by teachers to compel the students to follow instructions.

State investigators in Utah found a teacher left 7-year-old Garrett Peck in an isolation cubicle for at least two and a half hours after the teacher said he told her to “shut up.”

While the boy was in the cubicle, the teacher taunted him by playing his favorite video and telling him what he was missing. His parents, Joshua and Becca Peck, said the child has an attention span of about 10 minutes, and they believe that after the first few minutes, he had no idea why he was in the cubicle.

“It was so sad. We felt it was a form of torture for him but he, being autistic, he had no way to express it,” Joshua Peck said. “He couldn’t tell.”

And Becca Peck said her son had been left in the cubicle with nothing but a magic marker — which he used to scrawl all over himself. When she came to school to pick him up, “He was covered in marker — on his eyelids, on his hair, face, clothes, arms, eyelids — everywhere.”

“I started thinking, ‘What was he thinking?’ Was he thinking, ‘Why is my mom letting this person do this to me? Why am I here? I trust no one now.’”

In Garrett’s case, like others cited by the GAO, the teacher remains on the job. And what frustrates experts is that efforts to force unruly children to comply don’t actually work.

A new law is needed to prevent this sort of abuse, particularly where the children are incapable of reporting it and where there have been instances when parents do discover it and try to report it, but the school chooses to ignore the problem.  Teachers in my opinion are under paid for the work that they do and children can be challenging.  Tis is especially true for children with special needs, but if teachers do not have the temperament or skills to be teaching special needs children, they should not take the job.  There is absolutely no excuse for this sort of abuse.  

Shame on the school districts for attempting to simply sweep it under the rug no doubt because they are concerned about the legal liability for the conduct.  However, by simply hoping that the problem will go away without a lawsuit, the school districts become abuse enablers and implicitly condone the conduct.

 That has to stop. 

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