girljanitor:

lessthanaman:

girljanitor:

divinehours:

serious trigger warning for child abuse, esp. of children with disabilities

girljanitor:

Ohio And Florida Public Schools Lock Mentally Disabled Children In Closets

To discipline misbehaving students, public schools in Ohio and Florida regularly send children to “seclusion” — isolation in a locked cell-like room, old office, or closet, NPR’s State Impact reports. Many of these children are special needs students and their parents are not always told of this disciplinary practice.

Ohio schools — where seclusion is almost completely unregulated — sent students to seclusion rooms 4,236 times in the 2009-2010 school year. Sixty percent of these students had disabilities.

Florida schools secluded students 4,637 times in 2010-2011 and 4,193 in 2011-2012. 42 percent of seclusions were for pre-K through 3rd graders. In the 2011-2012 school year, 300 seclusions lasted more than an hour. The state has just three stipulations for using seclusion rooms: teachers may not choke or suffocate students, the room must be approved by a fire marshal, and the lights must be left on.

A joint report by StateImpact and Columbus Dispatch report found rampant abuse and lack of training of the punishment, which is meant as a last resort to deal with violent children:

But last school year, one Pickerington special-education teacher sent children to a seclusion room more than 60 times, district records show. In nearly all of those incidents, the children were not violent. Often, they were sent to the seclusion room for being “mouthy,” or whining about their school work.

Pickerington Special Education Director Bob Blackburn said the teacher in that classroom was new and that someone in the district has now taught her the right way to use the seclusion room.

Other Pickerington teachers misused the rooms, too, though. In another classroom, children were secluded more than 30 times last school year. Two-thirds of those instances involved misbehavior and not violence, district records show.

Far from benefiting violent or rowdy students, seclusion has been found to be deeply traumatizing, sometimes leading children to hurt or kill themselves. In one special education school in Georgia, a 13-year-old boy hung himself in a seclusion room in November 2004.

“Unfortunately there have been some cases throughout Florida where mostly children with disabilities, autistic kids in particular, have been restrained,” Rep. Ari Porth told StateImpact Florida’s Sarah Gonzalez earlier this year. “I’ve heard on some occasions (students) put in storage closets because the administrator or teacher just doesn’t know how to appropriately handle them.”

Hialeah state Rep. Eddy Gonzalez, a Democrat, introduced a bill this year that would have prohibited schools from secluding students. The bill also limited schools to physically restraining students with disability only when there is “imminent risk of serious injury or death to student or others.”

Only school officials trained to restrain students would be allowed to do so, according to the bill.

The bill died in subcommittee in March.

There are no rules regulating restraint and seclusion in Ohio.

jesus christ. what the FUCK

thanks for adding the TW. I totally dropped the ball on that one.

When my little brother was in elementary school they used to do this to him. He has asperger’s disorder and he tends to just “do what he wants”. They used to put him in isolation rooms like this when he decided he wanted to read his book instead of doing the class work they gave him.

[TW: ABUSE, NEGLECT]

RECENT HAPPENINGS REGARDING ISOLATION ROOMS

Bill Lichtenstein discusses the increasing frequency with which public school are secluding students by telling what happened when he and his wife were called to pick up their daughter from kindergarten because she had taken off her clothes:

At school, her mother and I found Rose standing alone on the cement floor of a basement mop closet, illuminated by a single light bulb. There was nothing in the closet for a child — no chair, no books, no crayons, nothing but our daughter standing naked in a pool of urine, looking frightened as she tried to cover herself with her hands. On the floor lay her favorite purple-striped Hanna Andersson outfit and panties.

Rose got dressed and we removed her from the school. We later learned that Rose had been locked in the closet five times that morning. She said that during the last confinement, she needed to use the restroom but didn’t want to wet her outfit. So she disrobed. Rather than help her, the school called us and then covered the narrow door’s small window with a file folder, on which someone had written “Don’t touch!”

We were told that Rose had been in the closet almost daily for three months, for up to an hour at a time. At first, it was for behavior issues, but later for not following directions. Once in the closet, Rose would pound on the door, or scream for help, staff members said, and once her hand was slammed in the doorjamb while being locked inside.

(via scooterpiebanana)