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Is a license to teach also a license to kill?
May 23, 2009
 On
Tuesday, May 19, the House Committee on Education and Labor held a
hearing to examine abusive and deadly uses of seclusion and
restraint in U.S. schools. Seclusion and restraint are physical
interventions used by teachers and other school staff to prevent
students from hurting themselves or others.
Ms. Toni Price gave heart wenching
testimony. Her foster son Cedric was the victim of a sadistic
special education teacher who deliberately refused to follow the
Individual Education Plan. When he was a young child, Cedric had
been the victim of repeated starvation. As a result, he would panic
if food was with held from him. Cedric's classroom teacher knew this
fact, yet she would deliberately withhold his lunch. As a result
Cedric's panic would escalate.
Toni Price, the mother of a
victim who died, testifies at a
hearing examining the abusive and deadly use of seclusion
and restraint on May 19, 2009.
Cedric's behavior gave the teacher
an excuse to restrain and sit on him. She killed him. She was never
convicted of any crime. Being "only" a foster mother, Toni Price was
not allowed to press charges. The teacher, who murdered Cedric is
still out there teaching children.
Here is Cedric's story in Toni
Price's own words:
Thank you, Chairman Miller and the
Committee, for holding this hearing today and inviting me to share
my story with you. My name is Toni Price. I am a foster mother, and
Cedric was my foster son.
By the time Cedric came to my home
at the age of 12, he’d been through a lot in his short life. His
parents neglected him and his siblings and abused them both
physically and emotionally. They were underfed and food was withheld
from them. Cedric, the oldest, used to go rummaging for food for
himself and his siblings. He'd scavenge through trash cans. Cedric
began stealing food, and was caught stealing from a grocery store.
Never knowing when he'd have his next meal, food was something
Cedric became very sensitive about.
At 9 years old, his parents lost
parental rights to Cedric and his siblings. His aunt and grandmother
had also lost their rights to guardianship. Cedric went to many
foster homes but struggled. After a number of unsuccessful
placements, Cedric was sent to a boot camp facility,north of
Killeen. Unfortunately, at this boot camp, he experienced more
abuse. He had a prominent scar on his face from being beaten with a
shovel by a boot camp supervisor.
It was after that facility that he
came to live with my family and me at the age of 12. Despite his
experiences, Cedric came to me with a smile. He was very jovial, and
truly loved to smile. He liked to bike, go bowling, and feed the
ducks in a pond near our house. When he had extra energy, he loved
to run to the end of our driveway and back. He got along well with
the other children in the house, particularly my son, because he'd
always wanted a big brother. They played a lot of basketball
together. I remember at church Cedric wanted to be in a play, but
there were no parts for him. He got this big smile on his face and
said: “I know a part!” and went and stood on the stage. The director
said “Okay, you can be an angel.”
I knew he was sensitive about food,
so I said he could have anything in the kitchen, he just had to tell
me. Cedric had behavioral problems, but they were never physical and
he was never aggressive. We were able to find solutions to his
misbehaving that worked. Once he stole a bag of chips from the
kitchen. I made him pay me back. It was a consequence that worked.
He didn’t like parting with his allowance, and learned his lesson
about stealing. But it was a consequence that didn’t bring any of
his previous abuse up to the surface. His therapist asked him once
to describe a safe place. His answer was in a cave with solid rock
walls, a steel door, and lots of food. Even though he was well fed
at my home, food was a trigger for Cedric from the trauma of his
childhood.
Cedric enrolled in a public middle
school. He was placed in a class for students with behavioral
problems. His first year in the school, in seventh grade, he had no
problems. I didn’t get phone calls, and he did well in school.
His eighth grade year, with a
different teacher, he had a number of problems. He did not get along
with the teacher, and would always say to me “I don’t think this
teacher likes me.” I’d reassure him that she did. I got frequent
calls from his teacher that year about verbal aggression,though I
never got calls about physical aggression. I would ask the teacher
to put Cedric on the phone and say: “Cedric, you know you have to do
your work.” He’d say: “yes ma’am.” Sometimes Cedric would get in
trouble at school for stealing food. But what I learned later was
that in his classroom he was being withheld food as punishment for
acting out. The morning of his death, Cedric was put on what the
teacher called a “delayed lunch” because he stopped working around
11am. This was, apparently, a common punishment for him.
At 1pm Cedric got in more trouble
when, still not having lunch, he was caught trying to steal candy.
After 2:30, he still hadn’t been allowed to eat his lunch, and got
up to leave the classroom. After Cedric attempted to leave the
classroom, he refused to sit back down in his chair so his teacher
forced him into his chair and restrained him. She is roughly six
feet tall and weighs over two hundred thirty pounds. Cedric was
short- he was a little boy. Cedric struggled as he was being held in
his chair, so the teacher put him in a face down, or in a prone
restraint, and sat on him. He struggled and said repeatedly: “I
can’t breathe.” “If you can speak, you can breathe,” she snapped at
him. Shortly after that, he stopped speaking and he stopped
struggling. He stopped moving at all. The teacher continued to
restrain him. Finally the teacher and aide put Cedric back in his
chair. The aide wiped drool off his mouth and they sat him up. But
he slumped over and slipped out of his chair. Precious minutes
passed by before a nurse was called.
I received a call at work that
Cedric was not breathing and that an ambulance had been called. I
rushed up to the school, not completely clear what was going on or
what had happened. When I got to the school, my son was lying on the
floor with a paramedic beside him. I knelt down and said: “Cedric,
get up. You’re not going to be in any trouble.” But Cedric didn’t
move, and instead, the paramedic stood me up. My son was dead. I
didn’t know the school was practicing restraint techniques on
Cedric. I didn’t know they were withholding food as a form of
punishment. In fact, when I initially enrolled him at the school, I
told administrators he’d been withheld food as a child and it was
traumatic. When this teacher was having trouble with Cedric, I told
her about my techniques with handling him at home. I tried to help
her because Cedric was not a bad kid. He had come so far, and had
such success in the seventh grade. I knew that he could be
successful in the eighth. The school never held meetings with me to
address any behavioral problems. Aside from calls from his teacher,
I didn’t know the extent to which Cedric was getting in trouble and
what they were doing to him.
After his death, nobody from the
school came for calling hours. The superintendent and the principal
of the school wrote a letter of condolence. Nobody offered any help
because I was just a foster mother. Days later, the teacher called,
and my husband answered the phone. But instead of a heartfelt
apology, she explained that she was just doing her job. She showed
no sympathy, no compassion, no guilt.This teacher took a child’s
life. But she also caused a lot of damage to his classmates, many of
who were victims of trauma already. Those kids who witnessed it
already had behavioral problems. His classmates and their parents
were forbidden to talk to me. But for many of the children,
witnessing the abuse of Cedric was so traumatic for them that they
spoke, and in turn, their parents spoke to me.
After I read the autopsy report, I
was taken aback at how much a school can get away with. Cedric’s
death was ruled a homicide. The school policy allows for
“therapeutic floor holds” when a child is endangering himself or
others. Here Cedric was not endangering himself or others. This
floor hold should not have been done.
The teacher’s previous treatment
was reviewed and no problems were found with her conduct. No legal
action was taken against this teacher, and as a foster mother, I
didn’t have the right to press charges. Eventually a judge found
this teacher’s actions to be reckless, and Cedric’s death not an
accident.But she never received a criminal record or any kind of
sentence. She was placed on a Texas registry for being abusive to
children. But that registry only applies to Texas, and I have been
told that this teacher now teaches at a public high school in
Northern Virginia. Her Virginia teaching license shows her
credentials to be K-12 special education. If that teacher was just
doing her job, then something is very wrong with the system.
If I’d treated Cedric that way at
home, I’d be in jail. I want to make sure this doesn’t happen to
anyone else’s child. It is awful the way Cedric died. He was a good
kid. This should have never happened. The morning Cedric died, as he
was boarding the bus, he turned around and got a beaming smile on
his face, and said to me “You know I love you, ma.” He was a good
kid.
For more info:
www.edlabor.house.gov/hearings/2009/05/examining-the-abusive-and-dead.shtml.
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