Category: Story
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“It hurts, please let go” stories of restraint and seclusion in North Dakota
enforcement or SROs in the school setting that may not be credentialed to work with kids. I am concerned that there is zero representation of tracking circumstances for these children charged by SROs or School Districts that address specifically the lack of fidelity to the legal binding contract of the child’s IEP (Individual Educational Plan)…
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Nonspeaking Student Restrained 33 Times Without Report To Parents
Remember that feeling you had the first day you left your helpless, months-old baby at daycare? That anguished, groveling, fear? How you needed to believe, so desperately, in the goodness of people, in their ability to be gentle, patient, and honest? Imagine feeling that every day for 13 years, and then imagine someone, or maybe…
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My Child Can’t Talk. How Will I Know if Someone’s Hurting Him at School?
My son is autistic and has a significant intellectual disability. He attends middle school in a self-contained classroom. Recently, we learned that one of his classmates was physically restrained by staff 33 times in a period of 8 weeks — at least once to the point of unconsciousness — without report to the child’s parents.…
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The Places That Stole Me
have a unique way of leaving reality behind them. A child playing dress-up puts on a cardboard crown holds their plastic staff, does a royal wave, and becomes a queen or king. A child opens a box of crayons, colors the green of jungle leaves, the blue of a running river, the yellow of a…
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“Hit him if he does that.”
It was hard to bring my son to school again. He had dutifully gone to school each day, unable to tell me about what he was being subjected to, never resisting or complaining. But the day he was to start at the new school the effect the experience had had on him was plain: he…
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“Do that again and I’ll lock you in the bathroom…”
One day in August 2013, I walked into the cafeteria of my son’s school, looking to speak with his teacher. The room was crowded and noisy, filled with disabled kids, their teachers, and aides, assembling before the start of a day of Extended School Year (ESY) services or summer school. I couldn’t get very close…
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This is Paige’s story
Restraints and seclusions are gateways to physical and emotional abuse, especially in the absence of adequate oversight. Unfortunately, our former school district failed to provide a safe classroom environment for my seven-year-old autistic daughter, Paige, when she joined a multi-grade special day class at Eisenhower Elementary, a school within the Cupertino Union School District (CUSD)…
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Attention Ticket: A strategy to reduce attention scatter in remote and hybrid learning environments
This article aims to offer a tool to avoid losing students online when hybrid learning is the operative mode. To achieve that, first I’ll set the stage – or context – for the current need for this novel tool. Second, I’ll state the reasons why this tool might prevent losing what is fundamental for learning…
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Restraint and regression
Many folks don’t know that seclusion and restraint techniques are used as interventions when students aren’t able to comply with the task at hand during the school day. Unfortunately, these methods cause trauma and sometimes irreparable damage, developmental regression, injury, and even death.
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Exclusionary discipline in the virtual classroom
My son is, Stryder, is in 5th grade. Stryder has autism, learning disabilities, auditory processing disorder, sensory processing disorder, and ADHD. This school year has been difficult for him to say the least. Stryder is in a hybrid model where he receives in-person instruction at school 4 days a week and on Wednesdays, he does…