Like many other harmful practices, restraint and seclusion in schools are not experienced equally by all students. Students with disabilities, Black and brown students, boys, and young children are disproportionately impacted by restraint and seclusion in schools. In this article, I will focus on the impacts on students with disabilities.
Data from the U.S. Office of Civil Rights (OCR) consistently indicate that as many as 80% of reported seclusion and restraint incidents involve students with disabilities who are served by an Individualized Education Program (IEP). When looking at the types of disabilities these students have, autistic students, especially nonspeaking autistic students, and those students labeled as having “emotional disabilities” are especially likely to be secluded or restrained. Seclusion and restraint incidents occur in general education classrooms, and they also occur in classrooms or schools where all students have disabilities, sometimes at even higher rates.
Students with disabilities are not inherently “violent” or “dangerous” to themselves and others. Rather, it is the societal attitudes toward people with disabilities and the mismatch between the school environment and many disabilities that set up students with disabilities to be in situations where escalations can occur. All too often, these escalations end in restraint or seclusion, causing lasting trauma to students and educators alike.
Our society is steeped in the belief that disability is undesirable and must be reduced or eliminated.
This belief spills over into disabled children’s early experiences. When children with disabilities enter “early intervention” in infancy or the school system in early childhood, they are subjected to a series of “therapies” such as occupational, physical, speech, feeding, or “behavioral” therapy. These therapies are ostensibly meant to improve the child’s quality of life, but they can often be biased toward making the child appear or act less disabled, even at the expense of the child’s well-being. For example, therapies may push children to speak orally instead of using sign or Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). “Behavioral” therapies, which originated out of an explicit belief that autistic children were not fully human, may involve up to 40 hours a week of repetitive interactions designed to “reinforce” behaviors that make the child act less disabled. In the classroom setting, educators and peers may not understand the accommodations disabled students need to succeed in the classroom, or they may misinterpret things like stimming, communication differences, or sensory dysregulation as “refusal” to learn. We live in a society that prioritizes “typical” ways of perceiving the world, communicating, learning, and working, and IEPs may include explicit goals requiring disabled students to act nondisabled—for example, goals about making eye contact or refraining from stimming. These pressures, combined with earlier medical or developmental trauma, can leave disabled students in a perpetually dysregulated state in the school setting.
Even without pressure to blend in, many school environments present significant barriers to students with disabilities. Classrooms can be rife with sensory processing triggers, both by causing sensory overload and by blocking opportunities to seek needed sensory input. School norms expecting students to sit still, perform tasks that are not always intrinsically interesting, and engage in complex verbal information processing can be incompatible with the processing needs of many neurodivergent students.
Further, Our society is full of ableism—prejudices against people with disabilities.
Sometimes, without even realizing it, educators may have ableist reactions to their disabled students, unconsciously viewing their disabled students as burdensome, undesirable, or dangerous. Although school personnel tend to expect compliance (“following directions”) from all students, compliance demands are especially strong toward disabled students, who are frequently the targets of detailed “behavior plans” tracking and responding to student behaviors that, in many cases, would not be noticed if the student did not have a disability. When disabled students are stuck in environments that make compliance difficult, and at the same time, their educators expect compliance, a perfect storm may result in mutual escalation between the student and the educator when the student is unable to comply. Students become dysregulated, school personnel overreact, and then students become more dysregulated until the school staff member imposes a seclusion or a restraint.
So, how do we fix this? Legislative efforts can be used to ban seclusion or specific types of restraints, but legislation is not the entire answer. We know that seclusion and restraint (and other types of abuse) occur in spite of legal restrictions. Just as addressing the root causes of children’s behavior is more effective than rewards and punishments, addressing the underlying causes of restraint and seclusion disparities will be more effective in changing educator behavior than legal sanctions alone.
We need to shift early childhood and school settings so they are affirming and inclusive to children with all types of bodies and brains.
This starts with making the school wheelchair accessible and providing braille, sign language, and AAC access, and goes so much further. It means setting developmentally appropriate expectations for student behavior (such as not expecting a young child to sit still for hours at a time), providing environmental flexibility so students can regulate their level of sensory input, and creating a culture of relational safety for all students. Instructional and therapeutic goals should focus on quality of life and self-determination rather than achievement of neuronormative “functional” goals (like eye contact, “social skills,” or exact grade-level reading) that favor nondisabled ways of being.
Additionally, all school personnel should be trained on the principles of inclusion and universal design, anti-ableism, and real crisis prevention strategies like the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS) model. Many situations that end in seclusion or restraint are predictable and preventable, especially when a student has repeated crises. Staff working in specialized classrooms or schools for disabled students especially require this comprehensive training or retraining. If a specialized classroom or school has high rates of seclusion or restraint, there is a need to overhaul the culture in that setting so collaboration is prioritized over compliance and problems are identified and solved before crises result.
It is true that our schools are heavily understaffed and under-resourced, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. High student-staff ratios can create challenges to implementing relationship-driven, proactive supports. However, crises that end in seclusion or restraint also take up huge amounts of resources while creating real safety risks for students and staff. Accommodating disabilities from the beginning and using proactive crisis prevention approaches will ultimately save time and resources while benefiting the classroom climate and the learning of all students.
Before 1975, disabled students in the United States did not even have a legal right to learn in public schools. Until 50 years ago, they attended specialized schools or lived in institutions. Disability justice has come a long way, and we still have a long way to go. These reforms will not happen overnight. But I am optimistic that, by working together and changing minds one at a time, we can implement reforms that will ensure safety and optimize learning for students with all types of bodies and brains. The result will be classrooms full of students who are able to reach their potential in school and beyond.
