Wisconsin says "No" to school district that wanted to use stimulus money for seclusion rooms

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has rejected the Greenfield School District's plan to use federal stimulus dollars to construct seclusion areas for students with disabilities and informed districts statewide that federal special-education funds should not be used for such purposes.

The Greenfield School Board in December approved a plan that would have used $131,000 of the more than $1 million it received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to construct seclusion and segregation areas at its elementary and middle schools. Part of the money also would have gone to construct a life-skills classroom at the middle school to prepare cognitively disabled students for life after high school.

District administrators described the seclusion areas as isolation areas where teachers could work with disruptive students in a separate space from their special-education peers. The segregation areas would give students a place to calm down when they became agitated within their classrooms.

Todd Bugnacki, Greenfield's assistant superintendent of elementary and middle school services, said the district knew all along that the project was subject to DPI approval.

"We'll just continue to go down our list of priorities about how best to spend the money," said Bugnacki.

He noted that the use of seclusion areas is common in schools. "There are seclusion areas that are used, that are currently being used, I know, throughout the state," Bugnacki said.

But activists recently have spoken out against such practices. Legislators at both the state and federal levels have proposed curbing the use of seclusion for disruptive students.

Information sent out by the DPI on Thursday referenced "the federal discussion and possible legislation regarding the use of seclusion" as the reason why the state would not approve requests to use money from the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act or the recovery act to construct or remodel seclusion rooms. DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper said the agency also had informed Greenfield district officials it would not approve the use of the federal funds to construct the rooms they had requested.