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Populist Examiner

December 9, 2009

Legislation putting limits on the restraining of kids at school may miss the point

By Bruce Maiman

Legislation is being introduced that would put limits on the restraining of kids at school

Children in a special needs classroom. (idea504advocacy.com)

Tearful testimony from one witness about her foster son's death helped convince California Congressman George Miller to introduce the first federal rules on restraining children in school.

Miller's point: You cannot physically harm children in a school setting, you cannot physically abuse them.

A congressional investigation found hundreds of cases in which children, many of them disabled, were inappropriately restrained or secluded to control behavior.

The bill would require states to set standards within two years.

Question: No one disagrees with the spirit of such legislation but do we need legislation to carry out the spirit of such a proposal? We're basically saying we need a law that tells us we can't abuse children in school. This isn't just common sense; this is a front page story for the publication we like to call "Duh Magazine."

It's sort of like the murder of gays, or African Americans or some other minority and passing a law that deems it a hate crime. Seems to me that murder like that is already a crime of hatred; do we need a Department of Redundancy Department. 

Toni Price told Congress a teacher's disciplinary actions killed her 14-year-old foster child, Cedric.

But look deeper into the story and you learn that this legislation may be superfluous for a very different reason.   Consider the woman who testified about the tragic death of her foster child. Her name is Toni Price. Here was a boy so abused as a youngster that he was actually experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. Price had testified  that the boy, Cedric Napoleon, "was experiencing behavioral problems in school" and apparently had a breakdown that day and began acting out. He stopped working around 11am. The teacher withheld his lunch. By 2:30, still without having eaten, he tried to leave the classroom and the teacher forced him into a chair and restrained him. The boy struggled so the teacher put him face down and sat on him. He was small at age 14; the teacher was described at over 6 feet and 230 pounds. She wouldn't get up off the boy when he said he couldn't breathe. Reportedly, the teacher replied, "If you can speak, you can breathe." This is a special education teacher we're talking about here. The boy suffocated.

Cedric's death was ruled a homicide, Price said, but the teacher never faced trial. She was placed on a Texas registry of individuals found to have abused children but, despite the listing, she now teaches at a public high school in Virginia, Price told the committee.

Tuesday morning, the American Association of School Administrators told the committee that the teacher involved in Price's death had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. The school system acted after the GAO referred its findings to the state school board, the organization reported.

Price questioned why the crimes of pedophiles are public but teachers who torture children are free to continue working without disclosure of their past actions.

You can see how stark testimony like this would jar anyone, thus prompting the legislation. But one thing stuck out for me that may or may not simplify this matter beyond what appears to be a layered redundancy in the law being proposed. Are we putting special needs students in environments in which they don't belong because we have schools ill-equipped to deal with their needs?

I don't know the lay of the land in Texas, or in Killeen, TX, in particular, but if this is how a special ed teacher disciplines a special ed student suffering a breakdown, and this is how a state reacts to a special ed teacher who treated a special ed student so harshly that the student died, maybe the district or the state needs to revisit the manner in which it educates special needs children.

Now that's a question worth addressing that may need addressing at a federal level.

Government auditors examined hundreds of allegations of abuse, the GAO report said. In 20 of those cases, it said, children died after being put in restraints. In four of those, the restraints were found to have resulted in the children suffocating.

GAO investigator Greg Kutz told the House committee Tuesday that he lacked data to quantify the problem, but in the 2008 school year, investigators discovered 33,000 instances of seclusion, restraints or other punishments in Texas and California alone.

Despite the problem, Kutz said, no federal regulations exist on the treatment of the more than 6 million children classified as having "special needs," conditions including autism and Down syndrome.

At the state level, the laws are widely divergent -- 19 states have no laws at all.

Auditors found that eight states prohibit prone restraints or other techniques that hinder breathing, and 17 require teachers or staff to be trained in proper techniques before using them. Only six keep records of how frequently those techniques are used, and reports are required by law in only two of those states -- California and Connecticut.

Investigators in Utah say a teacher left Garrett Peck in an isolation cubicle for at least two and a half hours.

The question shouldn't be about the disciplining of special needs children but whether we are providing the best educational environment for them. Should they be integrated with the general student population? If a state chooses to do that, are we putting them at greater risk, exposing them perhaps to teachers ill-equipped to deal with their needs and to students who don't understand their shortcomings? But if we don't integrate them in the general educational system it's immediately pounded on by advocates for special education students as being demeaning. It creates a second class of citizenship, they'll say. And it fails to prepare those students for the realities of adulthood when they'll have to interact with society.

Is part of this problem our insistence to make these children the same as everyone else because we're unable to accept that they are different, they have shortcomings and they're not like everyone else? That doesn't mean we abuse them, or treat them negligently, either as children or adults, but are we fooling ourselves to tell these kids, "You're just like everyone else," when in fact, they're not?

   Is there a practical way to resolve this problem? Because the problem I see isn't an abusive teacher who, incidentally, should've been drummed out of the system and jailed. The problem I see is much larger: Are we doing the best we can to educate children with special needs?

Based on the GAO report, it appears not.

The pernicious nature of the issue before us here is that years and years ago, advocates for youngsters with special needs -- disabilities of one kind or another -- argued that teaching those students outside the mainstream of education, was unfair to them, denying them the experience of going to school in a setting with their peers. It's an argument that makes some sense, so we said, all right, let's mainstream these students, and we did. And it appears we're not getting our bang for the buck if there are that many abuses and the majority of those abuses involve special needs children.

But some students can't be mainstreamed. They just require so much attention and their skill set is so limited that to put them in that setting is hardly a positive for them; it's cruel, actually. Are we having difficulty in making that distinction and then devising a way to accommodate it?

This even becomes a larger problem with our education system as a whole, which functions on the supposition that all the kids are treated the same. We start them at age 5 in kindergarten, we graduate them at age 18 to go to college. That's egalitarianism. It's not realistic, let alone possible. Not all kids are the same. You can provide equality of opportunity but that does not guarantee equality of result.

Why do we continue to suggest that we can have a cookie cutter system which will turn out cookies that look all alike when the raw material does not allow for such a result? What is it about us that we cannot tell people when they don't fit a particular dynamic, whether it be a job description, a skill set, or a particular line of education.

Isn't that what's at the heart of the matter here?