Disciplinary Actions

CNN has run some more articles lately about goings on in schools.

This article discusses a US govt. GAO report (Government Accountability Office) which concluded that there is "widespread abuse of techniques use to restrain or discipline special-education students in U.S. schools, with some deaths linked to the practices."

Apparently it is not rare that special needs children with autism or Down syndrome are treated in ways not dissimilar to those forced upon prison inmates. One of the more common disciplinary techniques is to lock children as young as six years old in a small room completely alone for up to hours at a time.

Here's another article about these seclusion rooms (which are also, my wife tells me, called "responsibility rooms"). This article discusses the particular case of a 13 year old boy in Georgia who killed himself in one of these rooms. The teachers locked him in and gave him a rope to help keep his pants up. He used the rope to hang himself. This picture is of the door to that exact room (front and back of the door, I assume).

Thank God in Michigan, where we live, state law prohibits using these rooms for more than 15 minutes at a time and the child must be "supervised" during that time. Good thing my state is especially enlightened.

Since this has been publicized it is unlikely that this particular sort of discipline will continue to be used (at least for a while). But apparently when it was used the parents were seldom if ever notified. And, if parents did become aware of a child being forced into solitary confinement, the parents were not allowed to see these rooms if they requested to do so.

Taken from the second article, here are some examples of other specific instances of disciplinary actions used against American students:

• A Tennessee mother alleged in a federal suit against the Learn Center in Clinton that her 51-pound 9-year-old autistic son was bruised when school instructors used their body weight on his legs and torso to hold him down before putting him in a "quiet room" for four hours. Principal Gary Houck of the Learn Center, which serves disabled children, said lawyers have advised him not to discuss the case.

• Eight-year-old Isabel Loeffler, who has autism, was held down by her teachers and confined in a storage closet where she pulled out her hair and wet her pants at her Dallas County, Iowa, elementary school. Last year, a judge found that the school had violated the girl's rights. "What we're talking about is trauma," said her father, Doug Loeffler. "She spent hours in wet clothes, crying to be let out." Waukee school district attorney Matt Novak told CNN that the school has denied any wrongdoing.

• A mentally retarded 14-year-old in Killeen, Texas, died from his teachers pressing on his chest in an effort to restrain him in 2001. Texas passed a law to limit both restraint and seclusion in schools because the two methods are often used together.

This also reminds me of a case in the news a few weeks ago in which a 13 year old girl was strip searched by staff at an Arizona school because another student had ratted her out for having contraband Ibuprofen. Here's another CNN article on that case. Apparently the school staff didn't find the drugs when they searched the girl's purse and school bag so they assumed that she must have hidden it in her bra or panties. So they searched there also.

The girl was an honor student. The drug was a headache medicine. No "drugs" were found in her underwear either.

The US supreme court agreed to hear the case, but a decision has not yet been made. If history is any guide they will probably rule in the school's favor.

Over all these and other cases over the past few decades have pretty much established that students in US public schools shed their constitutional rights when they walk onto school property. Specifically, they no longer have their 1st, 4th or 8th amendment rights (to free speech, to privacy or against cruel and unusual punishment).

But, I guess we can all take comfort that these shedding of rights is done in the name of safety. After all, we can't keep kids safe unless we strip search them and lock them in "responsibility rooms" can we?