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Gaslighting: How School districts justify the use of restraint and seclusion
Today’s guest author is Robin Roscigno. Robin Roscigno is a scholar/practicioner specializing in education for Neurodivergent children. She is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education and consults with school districts and parents on a range of topics. Most recently, Robin was awarded the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholar in Disabiliy…
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How Seclusion and Restraint came to be Outlawed in New Zealand
Once upon a time a child was locked in a closet in a Miramar school in the Capital, Wellington, of a small realm, New Zealand at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The child said “I’ll be good, I’ll be good”, but, alas, to no avail. A group of 3,000 autistics, students, parents, educational professionals,…
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Finding your voice and finding your people
My experience with the special needs community started with volunteer work when I was sixteen. I started working for a company that helped special needs children and their families deal with the difficulties of navigating the school system. I left that work for a while, and as it turns out my path led me to…
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The Everyday Peace Initiative: Institutional Violence
When I was writing up my doctoral thesis in Peace and Conflict Studies, I became a mother for the first time. Parenting a very special neurodiverse child taught me more about peace and conflict than any book, and it led me to design the award-winning ‘The Everyday Peace Toolkit Project’, where ‘peace’ is not an…
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How Collaborative & Proactive Solutions has helped our family
I’ve considered our parenting style “middle of the road” since our two children were born. We read “What to Expect when you’re Expecting,” sleep books, toddler books, and so on. We never spanked. We sent kids to their rooms for timeouts, created behavior charts, and counted to three. We used “grandma’s rule” – you can…
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End Prone Restraint, Embrace Alternatives for Illinois Public School Students
From August 2017 to December 2018, Illinois public school districts documented over 15,000 physical restraints with a quarter of those beginning with no documented safety reason. In the 50,000 pages of documentation of seclusion and restraint incidents in Illinois public schools, there are records of many students saying they can’t breathe and are being hurt…
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Advocating for change in Pennsylvania
Being an advocate is not just my career. From the day we brought our daughter home, I have fought for her. You see, my daughter is on the Autism Spectrum with severe anxiety. This journey hasn’t been an easy one. Before she was diagnosed it was a constant battle getting doctors to hear me when…
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How is that legal?
I drove my 5th-grade son, Caleb, up to a historic brick building on a brisk, sunny March morning. I told Caleb that this was the first school built in the district, and promised to look up the year it was built after the tour if the school director didn’t know.
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Is Your Child “Violent?” Why the answer to this question may save your child’s life.
Schools are telling us year after year that children are becoming increasingly more violent. In fact, they use this to justify restraint, seclusion, mass suspensions, expulsions, and zero tolerance policies. Many children have the word ascribed to them in their IEP documents as early as Kindergarten. Yes, we are expected to believe armies of violent…
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Help! I’m trapped in the “safe room”
Kindergarten and First grade were challenging. My son, who is biracial and autistic, was suspended regularly and I took him out of school for the last two months of Kindergarten, as they were unable to support him. By the end of First Grade, he spent most of his days working one on one with an…
