When I read that three former employees from Greensburg Salem School District’s Nicely Elementary School pleaded guilty and received only probation for abusing disabled students, my heart sank. This wasn’t just another news story. One of those employees had been my daughter’s preschool teacher, and another had been her Therapeutic Staff Support (TSS).

In this case, the special education teacher and her classroom aide at Nicely Elementary School in Greensburg, Pa were charged with and accused of using “unauthorized and inappropriate restraint procedures on three children in their care.”

Initially, only the teacher and her class aide were charged in the case. But later, additional charges would be filed against 4 other people who worked in the classroom. One of those people happened to be a TSS who had worked with my daughter for over 7 years. However, I can confidently say that I do not believe that TSS ever harmed my daughter since all of those services were rendered in our home while I was present. It saddens me that she was a part of this, as she was always patient and kind to my child.

My daughter Elizabeth went to preschool through our county’s early intervention program. She was in an autistic support classroom, and she attended this school from ages 3 to 5. The teacher charged with abuse in the Nicely Elementary case was the teacher. When my daughter began to attend preschool, the reports of aggressive behaviors started. She was also having medical issues causing her pain that we were not aware of yet, and it likely contributed to the stress behaviors that were occurring.

My daughter is non-speaking, and she cannot tell me if someone ignored her cries, restrained her unnecessarily, humiliated her, or treated her with compassion.

Like so many parents of children with disabilities, I entrusted other people with my child and had to believe they would protect her when I couldn’t be there.

Now I carry questions that may never have answers.

• Did this happen when my daughter was there?
• Did she experience something she couldn’t tell me?
• Did I miss signs because I believed the adults around her were acting in her best interest?

That uncertainty is something no parent should have to live with.

According to investigators, students in the classroom were allegedly restrained using room dividers, sprayed in the mouth with lemon juice and soapy water, and subjected to other abusive treatment. Multiple staff members were also charged with failing to report what was happening.

Those facts are horrific enough, but what haunts me even more is that this didn’t happen because one person suddenly became abusive one day. Abuse like this almost never appears out of nowhere. It grows in environments where controlling behavior is normalized, where compliance is valued over communication, and where adults are taught to manage behavior instead of understanding it.

That is why this story extends far beyond one classroom. It forces us to ask difficult questions about the systems we have built around the special education system. While several individuals have now pleaded guilty and received probation, the criminal case leaves a much larger question unanswered:

How does something like this happen in the first place?

Too often, we answer that question by blaming a few “bad apples.” But focusing only on the individuals allows us to ignore the system that shaped the environment in which this abuse occurred. A system that is failing our most vulnerable children.

Through my work with Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint (AASR), I hear from families across the country whose children have experienced restraint, seclusion, and other forms of punitive discipline in school. While every story is different, they often have one thing in common: The adults believed they were managing behavior. That phrase, managing behavior, has become so commonplace in education that we rarely stop to question what it actually means.

For decades, special education has been heavily influenced by behaviorism, the belief that behavior can be shaped through external consequences, reinforcement, extinction, and other techniques designed to increase or decrease observable behaviors.

Whether those practices are implemented through Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), school-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), behavior charts, token economies, level systems, or countless other compliance-based interventions, the focus frequently becomes changing what adults can observe rather than understanding what the child is experiencing. The system is made to be reactive to behavior, rather than proactive. The goal becomes reducing behaviors adults find challenging and increasing behaviors adults want to see.

Modern neuroscience tells us something behaviorism largely ignores: Behavior is not simply a choice to be rewarded or manipulated. Behavior is communication and a reflection of the state of a child’s nervous system. All children want to do well. When they cannot, there is almost always an unmet need, a lagging skill, overwhelming stress, fear, sensory overload, pain, trauma, anxiety, or dysregulation beneath what adults see on the surface.

When a child screams, runs away, hits, cries, spits, refuses, or shuts down, they are telling us something. They may be overwhelmed, frightened, confused, in pain, unable to communicate, or desperately trying to escape an environment that feels unsafe.

If our first question is, “How do we stop this behavior?” instead of “What is this child trying to tell us?” we have already begun moving away from the child’s humanity.

When we focus on trying to eliminate the behavior instead of looking deeper to figure out why it is happening, we begin solving the wrong problem.

This is where compliance-based approaches become dangerous. Not because every teacher or therapist who uses them is abusive. Most are not; many are compassionate people doing the best they can with the training they have received. But good intentions do not erase the risks created by systems that prioritize compliance over connection. The danger lies in the underlying mindset.

When compliance becomes success, resistance becomes a problem. When obedience becomes the goal, autonomy becomes inconvenient. When quiet classrooms become the measure of effectiveness, distressed children become behaviors to extinguish rather than human beings to understand.

Language changes.

Children become “noncompliant.”

They are seen as “manipulative” or “escaping demands.”

A child who won’t sit becomes “noncompliant.”

A child trying to leave is said to be “eloping.”

A child crying becomes “attention seeking.”

A child defending themselves becomes “aggressive.”

Once those dehumanizing labels take hold, punishment can begin to feel like a reasonable response. Eventually, it becomes easier to justify increasingly restrictive interventions because the focus has shifted away from the child’s experience and toward adult control. That is how restraint and seclusion become normalized. That is how humiliation can be reframed as “behavior management.” And that is how acts that should immediately horrify us begin to look like just another strategy in a behavior plan. When children are viewed primarily through the lens of behavior management, adults become conditioned to ask how to make the behavior stop. The child’s internal experience becomes secondary. That mindset creates fertile ground for abuse.

The alleged abuse at Nicely Elementary may seem like an extreme example, but the practice of spraying noxious substances in a child’s face was once a common practice used in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). Although the alleged use of lemon juice and soapy water in this case was not said to be an ABA intervention, the broader history of behaviorism includes the use of aversive stimuli, including noxious tastes and other punishments to suppress behavior. While these practices have largely been abandoned by mainstream ABA, their historical acceptance illustrates how a compliance-focused philosophy can make punitive responses to distress seem acceptable.”

This is precisely why we need a fundamentally different approach. Rather than asking how to reduce behavior, we ask what the behavior is communicating. Rather than asking how to increase compliance, we ask how to reduce the stressors overwhelming the child’s nervous system. Rather than assuming the child is the problem, we examine the environment, the expectations, and the supports surrounding the child. It requires educators to understand neuroscience, trauma, sensory processing, child development, disability, emotional regulation, and the profound impact of relationships on learning.

I spend a lot of time talking with families whose children have been restrained, secluded, isolated, or otherwise traumatized at school. I hear the same stories over and over. Parents are told the interventions were necessary because their child was “unsafe.” Records describe behaviors but rarely describe the unmet needs that caused them. Schools celebrate reductions in behaviors while overlooking the emotional cost of achieving that compliance. This is why the work at the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint (AASR) is so important.

My daughter deserved adults who wondered what she was trying to communicate. Every child does. Until our schools truly embrace that belief, stories like this will continue to happen. And parents like me will continue to wonder what our children still cannot tell us.

It has been 10 years since my daughter attended that preschool, and I am still having to fight for her to receive even the bare minimum in our education system. My daughter is still dealing with the trauma of being excessively restrained in an Approved Private School (APS). We are still fighting for her to receive an education at our current APS. All of the Approved Private Schools (APS) in our area are ABA-based, and there aren’t any non-ABA options.

Approved Private Schools (APS) in Pennsylvania are not subject to the same laws as public schools, so there is no way to hold them accountable when they decide they do not want to deal with a child’s behavior. Parents are often made to choose to agree to their terms, or their child will be kicked out of that school. The only real option is to file a complaint against the local public school district that placed your child there, and often they offer a choice of another APS. When most of the APS options are not good options or have long waiting lists, parents often have to settle for less than what their child deserves. We should not have to choose between our child being safe and receiving an education.

For many families, the fears increase when a child leaves a neighborhood school and is placed in an APS. In some ways, they become even more profound when children are placed in Approved Private Schools or other segregated special education settings. These schools often serve only students with disabilities, children who may be nonspeaking, have complex communication needs, or require a high level of supports. While many dedicated, caring professionals work in these settings, the very nature of these placements can increase vulnerability. Students are separated from their nondisabled peers, educated in smaller and often more isolated environments, and have fewer opportunities for the natural oversight that comes with being part of a larger, inclusive school community. Parents are frequently required to place enormous trust in the adults caring for their children because the children themselves may be unable to describe what happens during the school day.

History has shown that abuse is more likely to flourish in environments where there is less transparency, fewer outside observers, and a culture that prioritizes institutional practices over the voices of students and their families. When classrooms are physically isolated, when restraint and other restrictive practices become normalized, or when concerns raised by families are dismissed because professionals are presumed to know best, the risk of harm increases. This is not an indictment of every Approved Private School or every educator working within them. Rather, it is a reminder that systems caring for our most vulnerable children must be held to the highest standards of transparency, accountability, and independent oversight. Children who cannot easily tell us when something is wrong deserve more protection, not less.

Time and again, the cases that make national headlines share common characteristics. The victims are often disabled children. Many are nonspeaking or have limited communication. The abuse frequently occurs in segregated classrooms, special education programs, or private placements where relatively few people witness what happens behind closed doors. These are not isolated incidents; they are warning signs that we must rethink how we educate and protect our most vulnerable students.

For me, though, this story will always be personal.

Every time I see another article, another court hearing, another plea agreement, I find myself looking back at old photographs of my daughter during those preschool years. I desperately want to believe she was safe. But because she cannot tell me, I may never know.

That is the unique vulnerability faced by families of nonspeaking children and many other children with disabilities. We trust schools not simply to educate our children, but to protect them. When that trust is broken, even years later, the grief is indescribable.

This case should not simply end with probation, headlines, or public outrage. It should force us to examine the philosophies that continue to prioritize behavior over humanity. If we truly want to prevent future abuse, we cannot stop at prosecuting individuals. We must also change the systems that taught generations of educators that controlling behavior is more important than understanding children.

Children are not behaviors to manage; they are human beings with nervous systems, emotions, sensory experiences, relationships, and voices even when those voices are not spoken words.

The Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint (AASR) needs your support so stories like this do not simply become another headline. Every child deserves an education built on safety, connection, understanding, and respect. Through advocacy, education, resources, and support for families and professionals, AASR is working to transform the way schools understand behavior and support students.

Creating meaningful change requires all of us. Your support helps AASR continue providing education, advocating for policy change, supporting families, and advancing trauma-informed, neuroscience-aligned, and neurodiversity-affirming approaches in schools.

Please consider donating to help us continue this work. Together, we can build a future where every child is valued, every voice is heard, and no parent has to wonder whether their child was safe behind a classroom door. https://endseclusion.org/donate/