Special Ed in the US: Restraints & the Police

by Kristina Chew

categories: Education, Legal

Published July 08, 2009 @ 12:34AM PT

In May, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report entitled "Seclusion and Restraint: Selected Cases of Death and Abuse at Public and Private Schools and Treatment Centers." The GAO's investigation was the first conducted by the government concerning such practices in schools and was done at the request of U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Not only did the investigation find "hundreds of allegations that schoolchildren have been abused, and some even died, as a result of inappropriate uses of seclusion and restraint in classrooms"; it was emphasized that "these abusive practices were used disproportionately on children with disabilities."

In other words, "abusive practices" such as prone restraint were "disproportionately" used on children who are disabled---on children whose needs and challenges, whose communicative and cognitive disabilities, are far greater than that of most.

A July 7th article on the GAO report in US News & World Report opens with the story of Christy Kilmer, who has cerebral palsy and autism. At the age of 4, Christy was strapped to what sounds like a Rifton chair (pictured in this earlier post on restraints):

Christy attended preschool for only nine days before Kilmer learned of the restraint and removed her daughter from school more than 10 years ago, but the effects of the alleged abuse are still evident today. Doctors diagnosed Christy with post-traumatic stress disorder that causes her to experience extreme bouts of anxiety and anger, GAO investigators found. Though she was fully potty-trained before her teachers restrained her, Kilmer says Christy, at age 15, will wet her pants if she hears her name and the word teacher spoken in the same sentence. Christy becomes agitated when she is driven past her old school, and Kilmer need not look farther than her own home—the broken furniture and the fist-size holes dotting the walls—to see the costly manifestations of her daughter's anger. "We can deal with the beatings and the broken walls," Kilmer says. "But how can we heal her brain? I can't take the abuse out of her."

A July 6th article in the Wall Street Journal notes that, while there are federal regulations concerning the use of restraints and seclusion in hospitals and government-funded facilities---"in psychiatric hospitals, for instance, only licensed medical personnel can order that a patient be restrained or put into a locked room"---there are no such regulations in place regarding the use of these in the public schools.

There has been speculation that the use of restraints in public schools has increased in the US in part because there are more students with disabilities being educated in public school settings. Such an argument misses a basic point, that restraints and seclusion are overused and, in too too many cases, used too quickly.

I can say, based on our experience with my son Charlie in various public school districts, that restraints are indeed used too quickly and often without school districts first obtaining parental consent; other families we know have had similar, troubling experiences.

The US News & World Report notes that there are (as there indeed are) "alternatives teachers can use to handle classroom confrontations with students" in the form of "the encouragement of positive student behaviors" of positive behavior supports. Michael George, director of Lehigh University's Centennial School,

....expected policies that promote positive student behavior to work at Centennial because the system had been successful at his old school, but when he told teachers of his goal to eliminate the use of restraint and seclusion altogether, they laughed. "Some teachers thought I was turning the institution over to the inmates, so to speak," George says. "My detractors placed bets on how long I would last."

By the end of his second school year at Centennial, George had achieved his goal of decreasing the number of restraints to zero and getting all of Centennial's teachers to take the positive reinforcement method seriously, an accomplishment detailed in [a 2005 Psychology in the Schools] article.

Certainly pro-active teaching strategies that take into account why a student might get upset---communication difficulties and sensory overload, for instance----can be highly effective. (It should also be noted, that positive behaviors supports have come under criticism of their own.) I was puzzled by some statements by University of Albany psychology professor David Miller, though:

Today, teachers say, "I really like how you did that" when a student behaves properly, and teachers make sure students feel valued by telling them, "We care about you and your future," Miller says. If students behave aggressively, teachers do not restrain them. Instead, they call the police and tell students, "I'm very sorry your behavior forced us to call the police. We will miss you while you are gone and look forward to your return," Miller says.

There've been a few cases of autistic students being handcuffed at school, tased at school, and arrested at school. Perhaps Miller's references to the police are hypothetical, but I don't think calling in the police is a "positive," and certainly not a pro-active, strategy for addressing the needs and challenges of students with disabilities.

My own son has numerous challenges with his "behaviors" and I've thought long about these concerns. Again and again my husband and I try to see this issue from our son's perspective; try to understand why he does the things he does, and how he feels when being restrained. And I think, if everyone---teachers, educators, behaviorists, ABA consultants, administrators, therapists---thought about restraints and seclusion from the perspective of students with disabilities, we all could be thinking very differently about such practices, and end the use of aversives, restraints, and seclusion.

Go here for a PDF file of the GAO report.