Secluding children in wooden boxes is not a horrific practice limited to one New York school district; it is part of a long‑standing, harmful practice that traumatizes tens of thousands of children across the United States every year.
In Salmon River, New York, horrific photos of wooden “timeout” boxes circulated on social media and quickly drew outrage from families, tribal leaders, and state officials. The district has acknowledged using windowless wooden boxes as a “timeout” technique for children, including a nonspeaking autistic eight‑year‑old, and multiple administrators have been placed on leave while state officials and tribal leaders call the boxes “inhumane” and demand investigations.
This is happening in a district where most students are Native American, on or near Mohawk land, in a community still living with the intergenerational trauma of residential schools that separated Indigenous children from their families. The visual horror of the boxes has drawn national media attention, but the underlying practice, secluding children in small rooms or cells when they are most distressed, is disturbingly common.
The U.S. Department of Justice defines seclusion as “the involuntary confinement of a student alone in any room or area,” including any space where the student is alone and not free to leave or believes they are not free to leave. In practice, that can mean a plywood box, a repurposed storage closet, a cinderblock room, or a padded “calming” space.
Federal Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) guidance similarly defines seclusion as the involuntary confinement of a student in a room or area, with or without adult supervision, from which the student is not permitted to leave. According to CRDC guidance, students who believe or are told by a school staff member that they are not able to leave a room or area should be considered secluded. This definition is the one used for mandatory data reporting, which all public schools in the United States are required to complete. The key here is to clarify, with or without adult supervision, that seclusion is about forced isolation. Even if you are in the room or area, if you are not permitting the child to leave, it is seclusion.
What does seclusion look like in practice? Children are often forcefully put into seclusion spaces when they have become emotionally dysregulated. The child might be having a big behavior, perhaps related to their disability, individual differences, or past trauma. Seclusion is involuntary, meaning that children who are secluded are generally physically restrained prior to being put into a seclusion space. The child is forced into the space (most often alone), and an adult might hold the door shut.
Once inside, children scream, cry, pound on walls, and beg to be released. Some bang their heads or hurt themselves; others urinate or defecate in the room, not as a strategy to get out, but as an involuntary response to extreme fear and loss of control. Adults may peer through a window and insist the child “calm down,” even though telling someone in a survival state to calm down is futile. Eventually, the screams give way to silence. From the outside, this can look like the child is calm. It is not calm; it is shut down. In situations where the human body is stressed and all seems hopeless, we may shift into an autonomic shutdown response. In shutdown, the nervous system moves beyond fight/flight into a collapse state where everything slows or goes “offline” to survive an overwhelming threat. Many children enter states of dissociation in response to the overwhelming stress and trauma.
According to the federal Civil Rights Data Collection, tens of thousands of students are secluded in schools each year, most often in special education classrooms and disproportionately students with disabilities and Black and brown children. Children with trauma histories are more likely to be placed in seclusion, compounding their vulnerability instead of offering the support they need. Due to known underreporting issues, the number of children secluded is likely significantly higher.
Seclusion crept into American classrooms in the mid‑20th century as children with disabilities were finally admitted to public schools and systems searched for ways to “manage” behavior they did not understand. Over time, seclusion became embedded in some crisis‑management approaches, even as many leading training organizations and disability advocates have rejected it as unsafe, ineffective, and out of step with trauma‑informed care.
Despite the harm it can cause, most educators who use seclusion are generally not acting out of cruelty; they are responding based on their training and misguided belief that seclusion is necessary. A lack of resources and staffing contributes to the harmful use of seclusion. Often, educators are unaware of what state law says about the use of seclusion or don’t clearly understand the legal threshold for use.
Federal guidance states that seclusion should never be used unless there is a crisis, staff have exhausted all other options, and seclusion (or restraint) is necessary to prevent imminent serious physical harm to the student or others. Many states have laws with similar wording. The criteria of “imminent serious physical harm: does not simply mean an unsafe situation; it is, in fact, a very high standard. Imminent serious physical harm has the same legal definition as imminent serious physical injury; it is a potentially life-threatening situation.
However, in my experience working with families, educators, and advocates across the nation, children are routinely secluded for noncompliance, failure to complete tasks or assignments, and minor behavioral issues. The irony is that the use of seclusion is likely to lead to an increase, not a decrease, in future behavior, as the trauma caused by seclusion leads to a hypervigilant nervous system and an increase in dysregulation.
I am speaking to you from experience. About seven years ago, my own neurodivergent son was repeatedly secluded in a public school, experiences that left him deeply traumatized and impacted our entire family. His experience led me to leave my established career to start the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint (AASR), which now works with families, educators, and advocates across the country who have lived through similar ordeals. AASR is on a mission to inform changes in policy and practice to reduce and eliminate the use of punitive discipline and outdated behavioral management approaches and end the school-to-prison pipeline.
Today, I work with families from across the nation whose children have been harmed by the use of seclusion. I know children who, at seven years old, were locked in seclusion rooms, who, a decade later, are afraid to sleep with their doors closed at night or step into an elevator. A young man in Georgia, Jonathan King, hung himself in a seclusion cell at school. The use of seclusion can lead to lifelong trauma.
Over the last year, the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint has been working on a research study with a team from the University of Texas at Austin related to the psychological harm caused by the use of seclusion and has found that those who have been subjected to seclusion are at a substantially greater risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In recent years, the Department of Justice has investigated school districts that relied on seclusion and restraints, particularly for students with disabilities, and has found that these practices can violate federal disability law. Under settlement agreements, school districts in Michigan, Maryland, Washington, Kansas, and Alaska have agreed to end seclusion, overhaul crisis practices, train staff in appropriate supports, and provide counseling and compensatory services to students who were harmed.
These enforcement actions reveal a pattern: seclusion is often used not in true life‑threatening emergencies, but in response to noncompliance, incomplete work, and minor behaviors. When districts replace seclusion with evidence‑based interventions and trauma-informed supports, they report fewer crises, less reliance on restraint and seclusion, and better outcomes.
On December 12th, the United States House and Senate reintroduced bipartisan legislation, the Keeping All Students Safe Act, to protect students from dangerous seclusion practices. This bill would prohibit seclusion, fund trauma-informed alternatives, and move schools away from locking children in seclusion toward evidence‑based supports to improve outcomes for students, teachers, staff, and families.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes, from Maya Angelou, who said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” When it comes to locking children in small boxes, we know better, and we can do better.
