Children forced into cell-like
school seclusion rooms
December 17, 2008
By Ashley Fantz - CNN
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"He was a hugger, liked to
go fishing
with me,' Don King said of son Jonathan,
who had ADHD and depression |
The room where Jonathan
King hanged
himself is shown after his death. It is no
longer used, a school official said. |
In November 2004, Jonathan
hanged
himself in the room with a cord a teacher
gave him to hold up his pants. |
MURRAYVILLE, Georgia (CNN) -- A few
weeks before 13-year-old Jonathan King killed himself, he told his
parents that his teachers had put him in "time-out."
"We thought that meant go sit in
the corner and be quiet for a few minutes," Tina King said, tears
washing her face as she remembered the child she called "our baby
... a good kid."
But time-out in the boy's north
Georgia special education school was spent in something akin to a
prison cell -- a concrete room latched from the outside, its tiny
window obscured by a piece of paper.
Called a seclusion room, it's where
in November 2004, Jonathan hanged himself with a cord a teacher gave
him to hold up his pants. Watch Jonathan's parents on their son's
death.
An attorney representing the school
has denied any wrongdoing.
Seclusion rooms, sometimes called
time-out rooms, are used across the nation, generally for special
needs children. Critics say that along with the death of Jonathan,
many mentally disabled and autistic children have been injured or
traumatized.
Few states have laws on using
seclusion rooms, though 24 states have written guidelines, according
to a 2007 study conducted by a Clemson University researcher.
Texas, which was included in that
study, has stopped using seclusion and restraint. Georgia has just
begun to draft guidelines, four years after Jonathan's death.
Based on conversations with
officials in 22 states with written guidelines, seclusion is
intended as a last resort when other attempts to calm a child have
failed or when a student is hurting himself or others.
Michigan requires that a child held
in seclusion have constant supervision from an instructor trained
specifically in special education, and that confinement not exceed
15 minutes.
Connecticut education spokesman Tom
Murphy said "time-out rooms" were used sparingly and were "usually
small rooms with padding on the walls."
Only Vermont tracks how many
children are kept in seclusion from year to year, though two other
states, Minnesota and New Mexico, say they have been using the rooms
less frequently in recent years.
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Veronica Garcia, New Mexico's education secretary, said her state
had found more sophisticated and better ways to solve behavior
problems. Garcia, whose brother is autistic, said, "The idea of
confining a child in a room repeatedly and as punishment, that's an
ethics violation I would never tolerate."
But researchers say that the rooms,
in some cases, are being misused and that children are suffering.
Public schools in the United States
are now educating more than half a million more students with
disabilities than they did a decade ago, according to the National
Education Association.
"Teachers aren't trained to handle
that," said Dr. Roger Pierangelo, executive director of the National
Association of Special Education Teachers.
"When you have an out-of-control
student threatening your class -- it's not right and it can be very
damaging -- but seclusion is used as a 'quick fix' in many cases."
Former Rhode Island special
education superintendent Leslie Ryan told CNN that she thought she
was helping a disabled fifth-grader by keeping him in a "chill room"
in the basement of a public elementary school that was later deemed
a fire hazard.
"All I know is I tried to help this
boy, and I had very few options," Ryan said. After the public
learned of the room, she resigned from her post with the department
but remains with the school.
School records do not indicate why
Jonathan King was repeatedly confined to the concrete room or what,
if any, positive outcome was expected.
His parents say they don't
recognize the boy described in records as one who liked to kick and
punch his classmates. They have launched a wrongful death lawsuit
against the school -- the Alpine Program in Gainesville -- which has
denied any wrongdoing. A Georgia judge is expected to rule soon on
whether the case can be brought before a jury.
Jonathan's parents say the boy had
been diagnosed since kindergarten with severe depression and
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But his father remembers
him as a boy who was happy when he sang in the church choir.
"He was a hugger, liked to go
fishing with me and run after me saying, 'Daddy, when are we going
to the lake?' " Don King said.
King said that he wanted to know if
there were similar situations in other schools and that critics of
seclusion rooms fear there could be.
"Jonathan's case is the worst of
the worst, but it should be a warning. It's reasonable to think that
it could happen in all the other schools that use seclusion on
disabled children -- largely because the use of seclusion goes so
unchecked," said Jane Hudson, an attorney with the National
Disability Rights Network.
"This is one of those most
unregulated, unresearched areas I've come across," said Joseph Ryan,
a Clemson University special education researcher who has worked in
schools for disabled kids and co-authored a study on the use of
seclusion.
"You have very little oversight in
schools of these rooms -- first because the general public doesn't
really even know they exist," he said.
There is no national database
tracking seclusion incidents in schools, though many have been
described in media reports, lawsuits, disability advocacy groups'
investigations and on blogs catering to parents who say their child
had been held in seclusion.
Disability Rights California, a
federally funded watchdog group, found that teachers dragged
children into seclusion rooms they could not leave. In one case,
they found a retarded 8-year-old had been locked alone in a
seclusion room in a northeast California elementary school for at
least 31 days in a year.
"What we found outrageous was that
we went to the schools and asked to see the rooms and were denied,"
said Leslie Morrison, a psychiatric nurse and attorney who led the
2007 investigation that substantiated at least six cases of abuse
involving seclusion in public schools.
"It took a lot of fighting to
eventually get in to see where these children were held."
CNN asked every school official
interviewed if a reporter could visit a seclusion room and was
denied every time.
In other instances of alleged
abuse:
• 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.
Federal law requires that schools
develop behavioral plans for students with disabilities. These plans
are supposed to explicitly explain behavior problems and methods the
teacher is allowed to use to stop it, including using music to calm
a child or allowing a student to take a break from schoolwork.
A behavioral plan for Jonathan
King, provided to CNN by the Kings' attorney, shows that Jonathan
was confined in the seclusion room on 15 separate days for
infractions ranging from cursing and threatening other students to
physically striking classmates.
Howard "Sandy" Addis, the director
of the Pioneer education agency which oversees Alpine, said that the
room where Jonathan died is no longer in use. Citing the ongoing
litigation, he declined to answer questions about the King case but
defended the use of seclusion for "an emergency safety situation."
The Alpine Program's attorney, Phil
Hartley, said Jonathan's actions leading up to his suicide did not
suggest the boy was "serious" about killing himself. Jonathan's
actions were an "effort to get attention," Hartley said.
"This is a program designed for
students with severe emotional disabilities and problems," he said.
"It is a program which frequently deals with students who use
various methods of getting attention, avoiding work."
A substitute employee placed in
charge of watching the room on the day Jonathan died said in an
affidavit that he had no training in the use of seclusion, and
didn't know Jonathan had threatened suicide weeks earlier.
The Kings say they would have
removed their son from the school if they knew he was being held in
seclusion, or that he had expressed a desire to hurt himself.
"We would have home schooled him or
taken him to another psychologist," said Don King. "If we would have
known, our boy would have never been in that room. He would still be
alive."
Link to original story from CNN
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