Most states have done nothing to address seclusion, restraint of disabled students

From USA Today. Kareem Dale, Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Engagement and Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy, writes about the proposed federal law on seclusion and restraints here. In the picture, Toni Price testifies at a hearing in May to examine the use of seclusion and restraint in schools. Price's foster son, Cedric Napoleon, 14, in photo, died in Texas in 2002 after a teacher restrained him.

A handful of states have moved to restrict or regulate school staff members who restrain or seclude hard-to-handle children against their will in the wake of abuses exposed by congressional investigators seven months ago. But many more states have done little or nothing, advocates say.

"There has been a lot of attention, a lot of advocacy, a lot of family members involved, but it's slow going," says Jane Hudson, an attorney for the National Disability Rights Network, based in Washington, D.C.

Many states still have no rules in place to address how and when school staff can restrain and seclude children, says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. So he and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., also on the committee, are pushing legislation to set federal rules.

"Without a federal standard to set the bar, it's the Wild West," Miller says. "We believe the right approach is a balanced one that provides federal guidance to states but still allows states the flexibility to tailor their regulations to their specific needs."

In May, the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, told the committee that only seven states require training for educators before they're allowed to restrict children — and only five states ban "prone restraint," in which an adult lies atop a face-down child. That type of restraint caused the death of a Texas middle-schooler in 2002.

Unlike in hospitals or residential treatment centers, there's no federal system to regulate such practices in schools, the GAO said.

In one case, a New York school confined a 9-year-old with learning disabilities to a "small, dirty room" 75 times in six months for whistling, slouching and hand-waving. In another, a Florida teacher's aide gagged and duct-taped five misbehaving children.
In the Texas case, the 14-year-old boy died when a special-education teacher lay on top of him after he wouldn't stay seated, police say. Police ruled it a homicide, but a grand jury rejected criminal charges.

The findings stopped short of attaching a hard number to how many children are subjected to the practices, but investigators said they found "hundreds of allegations" of abuse at schools since 1990; in Texas and California, they said, public schools recorded a combined 33,095 instances in the past school year alone.

Nancy Reder, deputy executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, says seclusion and restraint "should be used only in emergency situations," though she adds there have been times when it was needed. The bills before Congress require more data, "which will help us get a better handle on how widespread this is."

State reporting varies: In several states, parents and state officials must be notified if a child is restrained or shut off from classmates; in others, only parents need to be notified.

Since release of the findings:

• Nevada and Tennessee passed new laws governing the practices, but while Tennessee's law bans prone restraint, Nevada's doesn't.

• Maine, Michigan, Vermont and Wisconsin all introduced legislation; it was defeated in Maine but is still being considered in the other three states.

• Maryland issued regulations outlining how the practices may be used.

"It's still a patchwork across the country," Hudson says. "When children move from one state to another, there are different laws applying to them."