He was 6 years old, and he stood up on his desk with a pair of scissors, threatening to stab his classmates and teachers.
Then, suddenly, he was on the ground, with two teachers restraining him.
Corina Gomez, witnessed the scene as it unfolded.
“It looked barbaric to me. I know they weren’t doing it to hurt him. They were following school policy and protocol, and they were warranted in doing it, but the process looks very barbaric,” she said of her experience. “I don’t know what the other alternative would be. They do nothing, and then a teacher or kid gets stabbed. If I was his mom … I cried when I was watching it.”
Gomez, from Lompoc, is the mother of two children with special needs. She spends a lot of time in the classroom with them. Her 6-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son have both been diagnosed with classic autism. Her daughter has been mainstreamed and is no longer in a special education classroom, reading and comprehending two grade levels above her own. Still, the 6-year-old can go from placid to tantrum at the flip of a switch, and that’s not a figure of speech.
“We couldn’t deviate from our regular routine,” Gomez said. “If we deviated, it would be a complete meltdown.”
Outbursts from children who have trouble expressing themselves can be mild, and the aggression turns inward. In the case of Gomez’s daughter, she becomes frustrated with herself and retreats into repetitive behaviors such as pinching herself to the point of leaving bruises. For students diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder, the aggression flows outward, and they lash out at people around them. In these cases, teachers face having to make split-second decisions about how to handle the situation. At times, that means physically restraining a child.
The subject of employing such restraints on children is a much-debated one, spawning multiple attempts at legislation to tighten up the laws surrounding its use in schools—the most recent attempt was brought to Congress in February.
New data released earlier this year shows that it’s a more common practice than previously understood, happening at least 267,000 times in a recent school year, according to a story by NPR and Propublica.
The news agencies worked with the U.S. Department of Education to come up with the number.
• • •
Student restraints are legal in California. Fortunately, the event Gomez witnessed ended without any injuries to students or teachers, but they don’t always end well. Nor is the decision
always so clear-cut.
A quick YouTube search for “child restraint” yields a video in which a child is held face down on the ground for supposedly tossing a paper on the ground. In 2012, the national media reported on the death of a teenager in New York who allegedly died while being restrained by teachers using protocols intended for emergency situations as actions of convenience.
Media attention on such incidents has mainly highlighted instances in which things have gone horribly wrong. For instance, a June 19, 2014, Propublica story focused on Carson Duke, a young boy with autism who allegedly had his hand crushed while teachers restrained him and attempted to transfer him to a quiet room.
There’s also the Dec. 28, 2011, story by Adam Whalser of WHAS 11, in which an autistic student was allegedly zipped up in a duffle bag and left in the hall, only to be discovered—alive—by his mother when she came to pick him up from school.
It’s in response to such incidents that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee began investigating the use of restraints and seclusion—isolating children—at public schools. Daniel Crimmins, director of the Center for Leadership in Disability at Georgia State University, testified in a 2012 Senate committee hearing that nationwide there were nearly “40,000 incidents of restraint with children during the 2009-2010 school year, with nearly 70 percent of those incidents involving students with disabilities.”
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the enrollment in elementary and secondary schools in the United States for 2009 was 54.9 million. That means seven out of every 10,000 students was restrained at one time during the entire year.
Fortunately, the vast majority of restraint incidents don’t end in tragedy. Many schools contract with organizations to train their staff on how to properly handle students in aggressive situations.
The Santa Maria-Bonita School District employs CPI, a crisis intervention training organization, to train teachers and staff how to properly deal with violent students. CPI training stipulates that restraint is not to be used to punish children who will not cooperate. The training also stresses is just how dangerous some restraints can be.
According to CPI’s “Risks of Restraint” publication, prone restrained positions—face down on the ground—carry a high risk for restraint-related positional asphyxia, which is when someone suffocates because of the way they’re being held.
“[I]t’s also important to note that restrained individuals have gone from a state of no distress to death in a matter of moments. Monitoring the person’s status is not a substitute for avoiding high-risk positions that interfere with breathing,” the publication states.
• • •
Educators must make the decision to restrain a student while carrying the weight of the potential legal repercussions from parents, who could be angry if teachers do act to restrain a student or angry if they don’t. Teachers frequently find themselves in a precarious legal position: In Loco Parentis, which literally means in the place of the parents. This demands they fulfill the duty “to anticipate foreseeable dangers to the students and take steps to minimize those dangers.”
So if a student climbs up on his or her desk, with or without scissors, with or without threats to classmates, the teacher still has a mandated duty to prevent that student from injuring anyone. If the child falls, the teacher could be found guilty of negligence for not preventing the tumble. If the teacher takes hold of the student—even lightly by the arm—to prevent a fall, the teacher could be charged with assault and battery.
“She’s never had to be restrained. I would never allow that,” Gomez said of her daughter.
She explained that a therapist once grabbed her daughter’s hand during an evaluation. The therapist had given her daughter a book to evaluate her reading, but when it came time to move on to another activity, Gomez’s daughter wanted to continue reading the book. When the therapist took the child’s hand, Gomez pulled her daughter away.
“I immediately told her: ‘You never put your hands on my daughter again or I’ll put my hands on you,’” Gomez recalled.
Perhaps it’s this rock and a hard place that keeps teachers from talking about restraint incidents. Of the 14 or so teachers approached by the Sun, only a small handful returned the call, only to decline to speak on the record, citing a fear that they could jeopardize their jobs. Perhaps they’re afraid of being lumped in with the few teachers who’ve either employed questionable restraint tactics or used methods that no training program condones.
Gomez, though witness to one instance of restraint, said she’s never had anything like that happen to her children.
“I think that’s why I don’t have any horror stories—because I’m so involved,” she said. “I’m in the classroom all the time.”
• • •
Anne Rigali is coordinator for special education at the Santa Maria-Bonita School District. When asked about the district and teacher’s responses to incidents that might require some sort of restraint, she responded with with a blanket statement: “We would follow the law.”
What does that mean for students and parents in the district?
The state code reads: “Emergency interventions shall not include:
“Employment of a device, material, or objects that simultaneously immobilize all four extremities, except that techniques such as prone containment may be used as an emergency intervention by staff trained in those procedures.”
Proponents and opponents of previous and current legislation agree that restraint should only be used as a last resort. What isn’t as concrete is what constitutes an emergency. And teachers aren’t getting much help in that area from the district.
According to Rigali, the district has no standards of its own beyond what’s outlined in the California educational code regarding these practices.
• • •
U.S. Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Concord) have each spearheaded campaigns to pass bills into law that attempt to eliminate planned restraint for a student’s individualized education plan, but don’t really add any clarity to what could be considered an acceptable restraint situation.
At least five separate times, restraint bills have been introduced and failed to pass in both the Senate and House of Representatives. According to Chris Meagher, U.S. Rep. Lois Capps’ (D-Santa Barbara) press secretary, Capps voted in favor of these bills whenever there was an opportunity.
Bruce Chapman, founder of Handle With Care, a company that, like CPI, trains people in how to handle crisis situations in the classroom, was opposed to the Keeping All Students Safe Act introduced to Congress in 2009 by Miller. In an email to the Sun, Chapman said, “We really have nothing to add beyond what we have already stated in our submission to Congress.”
The submission to Congress stated the bill was, among other things, “at odds with … the United States Constitution,” due to its attempt to ban restraint being written into a student’s individualized educational plan (IEP).
“This is a highly personal decision that should be left to those with the personal and emotional interest, and clinical or professional expertise to make this determination. Leaving restraint and seclusion as optional interventions in a child’s IEP or BP would allow those that [for example] do not want adults to stand by when their child destroys property and goes into an uncontrollable rage to treat the behavior,” he said in his statement to Congress.
He’s referring to a section in the previous bills that would prohibit parents who foresee their child’s behavior as being disruptive and/or dangerous from giving teachers and staff permission to
restrain their child.
While those bills never passed both House and Senate, the current form of the Keeping All Students Safe Act, proposed in February 2014, carries with it the same kind of limitation on what a parent can prescribe for their own child.
The bill has currently been referred to a Senate committee.
These are muddy waters for everybody involved. Without having the solid ground of a parent’s permission to restrain a child, teachers are faced with difficult judgment calls about exactly when a situation becomes an emergency.
“I’m going to have to go with the not restraining because I’ve seen it done. I guess it’s [up] to each [parent’s] discretion. To me, what may be a threat to a child may be different for other parents,” Gomez said.
Tiffany Bar, the Santa Maria parent of a child with Asperger’s, is thankful for just that kind of judgment call. She recounted an instance in which her son made a break toward a busy street; a teacher grabbed him well before he got into traffic.
“I was grateful they did it,” she said. “He would have gotten hit by a car.”
If the currently proposed bill were to pass, however, the line governing this kind of intervention could move much closer to the street.
One reason is that the California Educational Code doesn’t clearly define what an emergency situation is.
The term, as described in the portion of the code dealing with suspension and expulsion, means a situation “determined by the principal, the principal’s designee, or the district superintendent to constitute a clear and present danger to the life, safety, or health of pupils or school personnel.” The code leaves it up to principals and superintendents to define things like safety and emergency. Were these situations to become more federally regulated, teachers and administrators could find themselves with a lot less control over those definitions.
In 2012, the American Association of School Administrators released a report dealing with court definitions that would have a huge impact should the bill pass.
“Courts have concluded that a broken nose does not constitute ‘serious bodily injury,’ nor does pain, discomfort, disorientation, and pain that is rated at ‘7’ on a scale of 1 to 10,” the report states.
If the law were to change, teachers intervening before one student had wounded another to the point of “protracted and obvious disfigurement” would be risking intervening before the situation was technically an emergency that warranted restraint.
While no one disagrees that students and teachers need to be protected, there’s currently no clear consensus on how to do so. And until a consensus is reached, school instructors and staff are faced with not only the task of engaging young minds, but also the burden of deciding when to step into an escalating situation and potentially risk their careers to protect those young minds.
Contact Staff Writer Michael McCone at mmccone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 9-16, 2014.
