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Restraining students Mass. dilemma
By neilv on Mon, 05/04/2009 - 4:58am
Massachusetts schools are physically restraining students, and there is controversy over when that is appropriate, the Globe reports.
During the 2007-2008 year, Mass. schools reported 114 incidents of restraining a student resulting in an injury or lasting for "an extended period of time."
The article mentions a "surge in the number of students with behavioral issues," but does not say anything about why the surge.
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Comments
I'm really curious about the cause of the surge
Growing up, I never saw or heard of any student being restrained or needing restraint.
Granted, I mostly went to Catholic schools, where the students came almost entirely from middle-class (leaning towards lower-middle) Catholic families who cared to send their kids to Parochial school, and there were very few "special needs" students.
Are families much worse on average nowadays? Is there something in the water?
Also, anyone who strapped my kid to a chair would need a darned good explanation...
There are probably more
There are probably more special needs children who are mainstreamed these days, and probably more resources offered by public schools so that parents don't feel as compelled to teach their children at home or find a private school for them.
The case of the restrained 3-year-old highlighted in the article was very sad. Teachers of special needs children need better training -- there is no reason a child should be physically restrained and left alone in a dark closet.
Back when I was young
And fresh out of college, one my first jobs was as a "Child Development Counselor" at a "Residential School." Most of the kids had criminal records, histories of violence, and chemical imbalances. "Meds time" was a pharmaceutical education. These were really dangerous kids. Some people would be likely to call them really bad kids. Several had killed or maimed people. The "school" was really more like a jail.
Part of my job was to restrain them in specific circumstances: when they were about to do physical harm to themselves, other children, or facilities, and they refused to stop when asked. With kids like those, it was sometimes necessary, or you would soon quite literally have blood on your hands.
Now, with these kids (for example, a 190 pound athlete with Tourette's and psychosis... and a baseball bat) we did not use any mechanical restraints. I'd bring them down and just use a nelson or wrist lock / arm bar to keep them on the floor until they cooled down. Meanwhile, I'd try to talk nice to them. Being angry or mean was not my job; hurting the kids was not my job. Preventing them from hurting themselves or others, and trying to teach them how to control themselves, that was my job. I tried to do it well, until it drove me nuts. I've got a lot of appreciation for people who can do it longer.
So I can see that sometimes there really is a need to physically restrain a child. But a need to strap a hysterical three-year old autistic kid into a chair and lock him in a closet? Hell no, there's never a need for that. That's child abuse. What's the school even doing with a
torture devicerestraint chair?The teacher who did that really deserves to spend some time in jail, learning how it feels to be restrained her own self. It looks like that might be her only chance at developing empathy. I mean, Jeebus, who's supposed to be the autistic one here? Nobody with a normal amount of empathy could possibly do that to a child. I hope she's moved on to a profession that doesn't involve children.
Giving an out-of-control kid a "time-out" is understandable,
but physically restraining him/her and putting the child in a darkened room are way over the top.
Some background
It sounds just based on the information here that a restraint/seclusion was probably done improperly, but there are times when the most effective assistance you can give a child is to immobilize her so she can't hurt anyone and give her some space away from other people. Many kids with autism and/or serious emotional/behavioral issues can't just be told not to hit or kick or throw or knock bookshelves over or run out into traffic. So it's the job of adults to keep them safe. A lot of them also don't have the foresight like a typical kid has to realize that taking a few minutes in a quiet room can calm them down. It's not inappropriate to use a safe and approved device to help them stay safe and calm.
I'd be curious to know what equipment they're using though. I've worked places where there are restraint chairs that resemble medieval torture devices (hard chair, seatbelt-type straps) and aren't going to calm anyone down. There are also devices like a safety coat (heavy canvas blanket with fuzzy fleece inside that wraps around with velcro so a kid can't kick/hit/run etc.) that isn't really unpleasant and is actually calming. We were required to try the stuff out before using it on kids, and we took the approach of "this will help calm you," not "you were bad so you aren't allowed to move freely."
I think the most important thing when restraint/seclusion is necessary is the attitude of the adult, much more than the actual equipment used. If a kid is in a safety coat in a room without other kids and a calm adult is on the floor reading to them or singing them a song or something (or calmly explaining that they're going to give the kid a couple minutes alone, but still watching to make sure the kid is safe), that's going to feel to the child and the observers like a helpful intervention. If the adult is yelling at the child that they were bad and have to go in the quiet room until they can behave, then it's inappropriate.
Oh, and to clarify what another commenter asked, yes, as of the the past five years or so, almost all kids are in typical public schools, even if they're in a self-contained classroom. When I was in elementary school in the '80s, there weren't any kids in my school who were nonverbal or needed to be supervised at all times, or really anyone who didn't work basically at grade level. These kids were institutionalized until the '70s/'80s and then after that were in separate schools until really recently. Now most of them are in public schools.
This may be a tad or two off topic here, but
back in the mid 1950's and all through the 1960's, when I was a kid going to school, in suburban public schools, whenever a kid acted up in class, the teacher would send him/her out of class and into the hallway, to the principle's office, and/or make the miscreant stay after school for detention. Occasionally, I'd see a teacher yell at, swat, cuff, or push a miscreant back into their seat, but that was relatively rare.
Fast forward to the 1970's; When my younger brother went through the same public school system, I recall hearing of two incidents involving the use of corporal punishment (hitting kids, etc.), which ultimately resulted in the ultimate firing of an excellent but bad-tempered teacher.
The first incident occurred when a kid walked all over this teacher's desk and squashed his lunch. The teacher hauled off and hit him. The teacher was then called into the school office and warned that he'd be fired if he failed to show restraint. The second incident came fairly shortly thereafter, when two kids were fighting in the classroom and this same teacher went up to the two miscreants and knocked their heads together. The teacher was promptly fired.
None of these kids had any learning/development problems that I knew of, but these kids were part of a certain bunch of kids in our schools that, unfortunately, had a well-deserved reputation for causing trouble and being disruptive.
When kids cause trouble, there are a number of reasons: Some do have biologically based emotional/development/behavioural problems that at least help explain their out of control behaviour. Some kids' parents just plain can't manage them, and neither can the school authorities. Still other kids come from families where "law and order" is the mode, and, stopped by threats at home, will often rebel and act out when and wherever they can, including when they're in school.
And when I was in junior high school back in the 1970s ...
A kid punched the dean of boys in the eye and he was taken away and never heard from again, but the dean wore sunglasses for a couple of weeks.
Not sure what that has to do with anything, but there you go.
For whatever reason(s),
the kid who punched the dean of boys in the eye definitely has anger (management) issues.
So long as we're on a tangent
Perhaps this is a good time to point out a general problem.
Here, we know (trusting Adam to have the correct info) that a student punched a "dean of boys."
Concluding from what little info we have that the boy "definitely has anger (management) issues," is not reasonable.
There are obvious alternative explanations for why a student might punch a dean of boys, including self-defense from various kinds of attacks (perceived or actual) that I won't go into, thinking himself to be defending someone else under violent attack, or an involuntary action such as flailing while having a seizure.
We could speculate on the likelihood of each of these scenarios, or we could even investigate, but jumping to a confident conclusion does a disservice to ourselves and others.
Here, I am assuming that we do not have information about this incident beyond what Adam has related here.