The following excerpted article is from Inclusion Daily.
Use Of Student Restraints, Seclusions Tops 18,000
(New Haven Independent)
December 8, 2010
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT– [Excerpt] Six-year-old Anthony Wickham weighed about 48 pounds when five adults forcibly restrained him at Plainfield's Shepherd Elementary School. Anthony, a student in the school's Clinical Day Treatment program, was regularly locked in a windowless room that measured four by six feet, a court document says.The allegations sound highly unusual, but Connecticut schools reported using emergency restraint and seclusion more than 18,000 times last year.The state Department of Education cautions that these numbers are preliminary and unaudited. In only one other state, California, are schools required by law to report these incidents to the state. California schools reported about 21,000 "behavioral emergencies" in the same time period in public and non-public schools. California's K-12 public school population was 6,252,011 in 2009. Connecticut's was 563,869."We have a lot of information that they're harmful," Denise Stile Marshall said of restraints and seclusions. Marshall is executive director of The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. She added that there is no research that shows any educational or therapeutic benefit from these practices. Her group did a national report in 2009, Unsafe in the Schoolhouse, that solicited incident reports from parents.
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Planet of the Blind 
Freedom and inclusion is good. Restraint and seclusion is bad. That’s simple enough. All we need to do is ban restraint and seclusion outright, and the classroom would be an infinitely more humane place for everyone. Right? But, for the moment, let’s not think in terms of autism or other disabilities. Rather I want to think in terms of specific behaviors, and I want to imagine that we’ve banned all forms of restraint and seclusion in all school settings. The behaviors that I’m thinking about are self-injury and/or injury to others. The root cause of these injurious behaviors could be related to a variety of causes: Autism, PCP ingestion, extraordinatry issues with sibling/peer/authority rivaly, the list could go on-and-on. But suddenly, in a classroom situation, the prospect of injuy appears. Once we’ve banned restraint and seclusion, how is the imminent threat of injury resolved in the balanced and best interests of all involved persons?
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Thank you again for always speaking out about child abuse in schools, whenever and wherever it happens!
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