Rooms Don’t Calm Kids With Challenging Behaviors; Accommodations do.
At one of my son’s schools, they called it the “calming room.” The thing is, walls don’t calm people. Many neuro-divergent children like my son need to be taught how to self-calm. Or better yet, avoid the crisis altogether with appropriate accommodations.
At another of his schools who locked him up in solitary confinement for hundreds of hours, they called it a “quiet room.” Thing is, I look at the documentation of him screaming and crying and the room was anything BUT quiet.
At the third school my son was a victim of seclusion abuse, they called it a “resource room.” Like most seclusion cells, it was a 6X6 cement cell. Resources? He urinated in it just like all the others in fight or flight trauma, no restroom access. What resources are in an empty solitary confinement cell?
I have a lot of names for his hundreds of hours in seclusion cells. Trauma room, crying room, screaming room, terror room, torture room. The words calm, quiet, or resource never come to mind.
Schools can’t sanitize torture with innocuous names. Stop gas-lighting. Let’s call it all what it is. My son was treated like a prison inmate for 5 years for the crime of being autistic.
Jennifer’s story has been featured on WAMU and NPR.
#AutismIsntaCrime #BanSeclusion
