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Report on Lack of Regs for Restraint of
Disabled Children
January 13, 2009
By Christina Jewett , ProPublica
 A
disturbing new report [1] (PDF) issued by the congressionally
mandated National Disability Rights Network [2] documents incidents
from across the country of a problem that fewer than half of states
address: the restraint and seclusion of disabled school children.
The Network's state chapters
compiled a list of cases that "should shock you," according to the
organization, which was created by federal law to advocate for
people with disabilities.
Disabled children in Sumner County,
Tenn., were locked in four-by-three foot plywood cells that had been
put together by maintenance staff at 12 district schools. An
Oklahoma student with autism was led around his school wearing a
harness and rope. Since 2002, three children -- including a
7-year-old girl -- have died as a result of being restrained in
public and private schools, the report says. Another boy locked in a
seclusion cell hanged himself with his makeshift belt.
Are the cases isolated incidents?
That’s what the Network's executive director Curtis Decker hopes to
find out. The organization is releasing the report during a Capitol
Hill press conference today and will be calling on the Obama
administration to push for national tracking of instances of
restraint and seclusion in schools.
"Our role is to identify this as a
serious, growing problem," Decker told ProPublica. "Now it has to be
turned over to administrators to get a handle on this."
Disability rights advocates say
that since children with disabilities were granted the right to full
inclusion in public schools 30 years ago -- a phenomenon often
referred to as "mainstreaming" -- disabled children have been the
frequent targets of coercive discipline.
While the disability advocacy
community succeeded in seeking meaningful legal changes in the use
of restraints in mental health facilities, schools are a new
frontier.
About 40 percent of states have no
law concerning restraint and seclusion in schools. Fewer than half
of states ask schools to notify parents when children are restrained
or placed in isolation, and 90 percent of states allow face-down
restraints.
Even in states where school
restraints have been connected to deaths, reform has been slow to
come.
In Wisconsin, the disability
community was shocked after 7-year-old Angellika Arndt died May 26,
2006, after being held face-down on the floor of the Rice Lake Day
Treatment Center. The girl, a foster child diagnosed with emotional
disturbance, was restrained after blowing bubbles in her milk and
defying time-out rules.
Kristin Kerschensteiner, managing
attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, authored a report [3]
(PDF) concluding the state failed to reduce the use of restraint and
seclusion following the girl's death.
"We've been working on this for
more than two years now and nothing is happening," Kerschensteiner
told [4] the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The state's Department of Health
Services, in response, issued a statement to the Sentinel noting
that it took strong actions leading to closure of the facility and
will continue on a statewide effort to "work with our partners to
issue additional guidance on the dangers of the use of seclusion and
restraint."
In California, Leslie Morrison,
Disability Rights California’s leading investigative attorney,
issued a June 2007 report [5] documenting multiple cases of misuse
of restraints, including that of a 10-year-old non-verbal boy who
was tied to his wheelchair for hours and left on the school van on
two separate occasions.
Morrison's group championed
legislation that would have mandated that only trained school
personnel could restrain children -- and only in instances in which
the child's behavior put others at risk of physical harm.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed
the bill in September, though, noting that it could inhibit school
staff from "intervening in an emergency situation and place more
students at risk of potential harm."
The national report, however, does
document some small victories. Advocates prevailed on behalf of
individual students, and the Tennessee school district agreed to
dismantle the plywood boxes.
Ultimately, Decker said he's hoping
to see more tracking and regulation of the problem and training in
"positive behavior supports," a research-based system believed to
reduce the need for extreme punishments.
At the very least, he said, he’d
like to see a change in the federal IDEA law [6], which outlines how
education should be funded for more than six million students with
disabilities.
Decker's organization included an
excerpt from a March 2008 government letter describing the program’s
philosophy: "While IDEA emphasizes the use of positive behavioral
interventions… IDEA does not flatly prohibit the use of mechanical
restraints or other aversive behavioral techniques for children with
disabilities," the letter says.
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