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What My Students Taught Me About Disability
When people find out that I am an autistic ADHD special education teacher, one of the first assumptions I hear is that I must automatically understand all my autistic ADHD students. I understand why people think that. I have lived the experience of being autistic and ADHD. I know what it is like to be…
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The Child Welfare Economy: How Group Homes, Behavioral Management, and the Medical Model Can Perpetuate Intergenerational Trauma
Across North America, child welfare systems have increasingly relied on group homes, residential treatment programs, and congregate care settings to manage children and youth who present with complex behavioral, emotional, and mental health challenges. These systems are often justified as necessary responses to trauma, mental illness, aggression, substance use, and placement instability. Yet a growing…
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What Happens After the Restraint? The Part We Rarely Talk About
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what happens before a restraint. What happened in the minutes leading up to it? What did the student signal? What changed in the environment? What demands were placed on them? What did the adults do? What warning signs did we miss? But the more I think…
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What Happens Before the Restraint? The 10 Minutes We Keep Ignoring
When a student is placed in a restraint or secluded, the incident report often begins at the moment the crisis becomes impossible for adults to ignore. The student “became aggressive.” The student “refused to comply.” The student “escalated.” The student “became a danger to self or others.” Then comes the intervention: staff responded, the student…
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New Federal Data Show More Than 400,000 Reported Incidents of Restraint and Seclusion in U.S. Schools
The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has released the latest available Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2023–24 school year. The data show that public schools reported 406,794 incidents of physical restraint, mechanical restraint, and seclusion. That number is alarming. But it is also important to understand what it represents…
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The Rules Are Changing in Massachusetts. But Are We?
Massachusetts changed its regulations governing seclusion, time-out, and physical restraint in schools on August 17, 2026. The changes matter: the new regulations place tighter limits on seclusion, establish a clearer distinction between time-out and seclusion, and reinforce that physical restraint is an emergency procedure of last resort. Massachusetts has also stated an explicit goal of…
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The Day My Son Came Home in a Police Car
I am the mother of two neurodivergent Latino boys. My youngest was diagnosed with autism around the age of two, and that diagnosis became a passport to supports and services. His older brother, however, went under the radar for far too long, masking his own neurodivergence. Both of my boys have always been described as…
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A Difficult Truth: I May Never Know What Happened to My Daughter
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…
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Behavior Is Not the Brain: Why My Childhood Made Me Question Behaviorism
When people hear me criticize behaviorism, they often assume I’ve never taken the time to understand it. They tell me to read B.F. Skinner. They recommend Israel Goldiamond’s Constructional Approach. They point me toward nonlinear contingency analysis and explain that ABA has changed. The implication is usually the same: If you understood modern behavior analysis,…
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Trends in Restraint and Seclusion Practices in U.S. Schools: A Civil Rights Data Analysis (2015–2021)
The current study investigates the prevalence of restraint and seclusion within U.S. public school systems at both the national and state levels, using CRDC data collected during the school years 2015-2016, 2017-2018, and 2020-2021. A descriptive analysis with a repeated cross-sectional study design was used to investigate changes in physical restraints, mechanical restraints, and seclusion…
