The Death of an Autistic Child in School

New: Restraint in schools and the death of #MaxBenson.

"It shouldn't take the death of a teenage boy to stop overuse of restraint in schools. But, given how ingrained such practices are in our educational systems, and the 120,000 kids experiencing restraint or seclusion each year, I'm worried this one death won't be enough."

Ban Disciplinary Restraint: Oakland

Here's a new case out of Oakland illustrating the ways that restraint and seclusion practices in schools quickly move from "safety" to compliance.

The U.S. Department of Education ruled the Oakland school district discriminated against a 9-year-old autistic boy who was restrained 92 times during one school year, sometimes for up to 90 minutes at a time, according to an announcement Tuesday.

Stuart Candell attended Anova Center for Education in Concord from April 2013 to February 2014. Two to three adults held him face down for a total of 2,200 minutes, or more than 36 hours, during his tenure at the school for high-functioning autistic kids. He was also secluded in a 12-foot-by-10-foot windowless room, according to the federal Office for Civil Rights decision in June.

And here are some of the reasons for these abusive acts:

Incident reports documenting the school's response to Stuart's behavior revealed situations that did not appear to be imminent health and safety emergencies:

• Restrained for 45 minutes after Stuart ran into his classroom screaming after stepping in dog poop.
• Restrained for 45 minutes for throwing a chair; later restrained twice for 15 minutes after expressing frustration over Uno card game.
• Restrained twice for 15 minutes and three minutes for bouncing a ball inappropriately in the occupational therapy room.

Stuart expressed suicidal thoughts twice following prone restraints, according to the report.

In at least one instance, Stuart urinated on himself while restrained, and he was not released for food or drink unless he was calm.

"In contrast, after 10 minutes of restraining (Stuart), staff members would rotate in order to take a break," the report found.

The key thing to remember is that this is NOT unusual. It's an extreme case of the kind of practice used around the country.

 

Restraint for Safety vs Restraint for Punishment (And Freddie DeBoer)

I wrote a piece for Pacific Standard that many people seem to have read (it was their most popular story on the site for 5 days or so. I gather that must mean something) on the systematic abuse of disabled children by teachers and other staff in schools and institutions across America. In the piece, I took three reports by three separate groups - Pro Public, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Disability Law Center of Massachusetts - and discussed the common pattern: restraint and seclusion being used to punish students for basic non-compliance.

For regular readers of this blog, you'll know this is the kind of thing I coordinate under the phrase the "cult of compliance" (search the tags for many more posts).

A few days ago, the well-known writer Freddie DeBoer responded on Twitter by asking me to read a piece he wrote that criticized the Pro Publica essay as "sensationalist and damaging." He calls it "Difficult Problems After the Death of Nuance." In the essay, DeBoer describes his experience as a caregiver in an public school with a segregated section for children with emotional disabilities, experiences that included restraint. With children who are likely to harm themselves or others, he asked, what are you supposed to do?

This is an entirely reasonable question. There are many situations in which restraint is a reasonable and appropriate response to specific behaviors. For example - if a child is about to run into the street, you should hold them. If a child, as DeBoer describes, is trying to throw a chair at your head or another student's head, you should stop them. These things happen.

But what the experts (for example Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports or Trauma Informed Practices) tell us is that such behavior have an instigating point, a cause, and that the correct response to such behaviors is to investigate those causes and try to work at the root issues, rather than try and solve the problem by treating the symptoms, the acting out in some way, with force. There is no amount of force that can make someone less disabled. All you end up doing is intensifying trauma.

Many IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) and similar documents contain provisions about the use of restraint. They are ideally crafted in collaboration with parents, other caregivers, as especially as possible the disabled person themselves. Restraint and seclusion may be necessary, but only as a holding action while you work on root issues.

In the cases I discuss, however, restraint and seclusion are being used to punish and to force compliance. Again and again, we see staff and teachers - who are surely under great pressure themselves, and drastically under-resourced - resort to fear, pain, and isolation to teach disabled students that if they act as themselves, in non-typical ways, they will suffer for it. People strapped to beds for throwing food, thrown into a closet with the lights off for not following orders, given electric shocks. That's the abuse. That's the practice we need to stop. That's the cult of compliance.

So overall, my response to DeBoer's entirely reasonable question is this: Restraint may be part of a safety plan, but it's not a teaching tool. It doesn't really change behaviors. Moreover, there are usually positive ways to change behaviors, but they take time, resources, and creativity. I think the restraint as safety vs restraint as punishment is a useful dialectic along which to assess a given situation.

Now a brief aside: I'm a little nervous about responding to Freddie DeBoer because my introduction to him was really through his back and forth with Angus Johnston (@studentactivism), who once wrote: "It’s become clear that Freddie is the kind of person who says “Give me an answer!” when he means “Admit that there are no answers!”

He has asked me for an answer, and I've given him one above, and my brief interaction on Twitter suggests he's open to the dialectic I propose. Again, I think he asks a useful question, and I'm pleased he sought me out.

The problem with his essay is this "death of nuance" framing. DeBoer believes that reactions to this type of outrage journalism, "Demonstrate the ways in which the world of sharing and likes and shallow understanding destroys nuance and creates a bogus conception of a black-and-white world."

He is furthermore:

Reminded of a few sad realities: that American liberalism culture is now synonymous with a juvenile Manicheanism that imagines some perfect world we could achieve if people just weren’t so selfish and evil; that getting showily, publicly angry about problems is more popular than actually attempting to solve them; that there is no issue of such emotional and moral complexity that many people can’t reduce it to a black-and-white caricature; and that we have created a media which has made its financial best interest inextricable from destroying depth, nuance, and complexity. I genuinely don’t know if people believe in difficult choices and intractable problems anymore.

I hope DeBoer doesn't really believe this. I suspect it's rhetorical rather than, as he says, "genuine." It's a way for him to continue his long-running diatribes against PC culture and kids these days, which is fine. I'm not going to get into it, except for these two points:

First, it's ahistorical. Getting outraged about outrageous things is normal. The press has always published outraged journalism intended to evoke sympathy, rage, donations, voting, direct action, and, most of all, more sales of media products. Before there were media products to sell, the sharing of outrage traveled through different kinds of information culture, but travel they did. Speed, scale, and means have changed. Local outrages can become national or international in ways never before likely (consider police abuses). Outrage can feed on itself in new ways too, because we can communicate our upset more effectively and quickly. But getting outraged about outrageous things is an appropriate and rational response.

Second, DeBoer here draws his meta conclusion about the "death of nuance" based on lack of knowledge of both disability and disability-related pedagogy. His lived experiences matter, but he confesses that these were confusing times for him in his life. When he writes, "Mental illness is powerful and terrible and that’s the world we live in," he places himself in a casually ableist epistemology that informs everything else he writes (I fear he rejects the concept of ableism, but that's a bigger conversation).

What's powerful and terrible is when people with psychiatric disabilities are denied the resources they need, and when stigma and fear make it harder for people with such conditions to come out as disabled, to ask for help, and so self-treat and self-medicate.

What's powerful and terrible are the intersections of mental-illness-stigma with racism and poverty. Marginalizing forces multiply dangerously. It's not a coincidence that the people in these institutions of the sort DeBoer describes tend to be poor and non-white. The nuanced liberal response to such conditions is not to decry outrage, but to identify root cultural, social, economic, and political causes and get to work.

With that said, I'm going to get back to work.

Minneapolis Hires Superintendent Who Oversaw Systematic Abuse of Disabled Children

Explosive new report of abuse from the Massachusetts Disability Law Center. UPDATE: You can see the whole report here.

1. The Cult of Compliance (from Boston Globe):

The investigation uncovered a school culture in which aggressive discipline of students had become ingrained, Eichner said. Many students suffered injuries, including scratches and bruises, and one student was given a hospital exam for a bump on the head...

One 67-pound student was restrained 50 times, including about a dozen times when the pupil was held prone on the floor, according to Eichner and the report. The child complained to a parent of being unable to breathe, and that some of the restraints had been painful, the center said.

“Prone restraints can lead to serious injuries or even death,” Eichner said. Some restraints lasted for longer than 20 minutes, the investigation found.

Children were thrown to the floor for not moving, pulled out of chairs for refusing to get up, tackled to the ground, and restrained for refusing to change into a uniform, investigators were told.

2. Accountability

It's unclear to me what's happened to the people who did these terrible things. The Superintendent has been fired. More on him in a second.

Update: The people at the DLC tell me that the principal was fired and some staff were reassigned. That's about it.

3. Intersectionality - Race and Disability

Eichner, of the Disability Law Center, said a combination of factors appears to have led to the abuse.
“Holyoke is an underserved district, obviously,” he said. “We think there wasn’t enough resources and not enough training, and this population is predominantly students of color. You combine that with students with emotional issues, and without adequate resources and training it becomes a power fight between the teachers and students.”

4. Welcome to Minneapolis!

The allegations surfaced during the tenure of former Holyoke superintendent Sergio Paez, who lost his job after Massachusetts education officials voted in April to place the district under state control.
On Monday, the Minneapolis school board voted to appoint Paez as that city’s next school superintendent. Members of the board did not respond to requests from the Globe to comment on whether the allegations would affect his hiring.

You can contact the Minneapolis School Board here.

UPDATE: Sergio Paez has denied all allegations. The School Board is investigating. Get involved!

More details from the full report (updated 3:30 CST 12/10)

5. A child locked in a closet!!

The most egregious seclusion reported was that on at least three occasions, a teacher put children in a locked closet and turned out the lights.When we interviewed the teacher in question about these incidents, she denied it, stating that another student had locked the door. However, her version is not supported by the record. When discussing this practice with the administration, we were told that the teacher is still employed at the school, but her job responsibilities have changed and she no longer has any direct contact with students.

Note - the teacher wasn't fired.

6. School to Prison Pipeline starts here

One teacher stated that "[a] lack of training and tools to address behaviors is hurting students." In Ms. Hirsch's letter she describes this negative culture and provides an example of public shaming of a student when a teacher asked the whole class to write down another students "bad behavior." We also heard that the school will routinely call the police to resolve issues when children are in crisis and in need of mental health supports. One teacher stated that he wanted to call the local mental health crisis
team but the administration called the police instead. This pattern perpetuates the cycle of children transitioning from a schoolhouse to jailhouse instead of receiving appropriate disability related services.

Disability Journalism Award - 2015 Winner is ProPublica on School Restraint

Arizona State University hosts the National Center for Disability Journalism, an excellent group doing important work. The NCDJ offers the only annual journalism award for Disability issues - the   Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability - and have announced the 2015 winners.

A ProPublica story that uncovered the shocking ways children with intellectual disabilities are physically disciplined in schools across the country has won top honors in the 2015 Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability...

ProPublica reporter Heather Vogell’s first-place story, “Violent and Legal: The Shocking Ways School Kids are Being Pinned Down, Isolated Against Their Will,” profiled Carson Luke, a young boy with autism, who sustained broken bones after educators grabbed him and tried to force him into a “scream room.” The story underscored the common practice of educators secluding and physically restraining uncooperative school children, sometimes with straps, handcuffs, bungee cords or even duct tape, documenting hundreds of thousands of cases a year.

The ProPublica story is, in my opinion, the most important piece of disability journalism of the year. It's the kind of detailed, data-driven, investigative work that we so need, and it's important that it be recognized by awards like this. I read it when it came out and will obviously be referring to its findings in my book, as it's a terrible invocation of the cult of compliance.

I'm also very pleased with the Honorable Mention - on the legacy of Eugenics in North Carolina. This history isn't known well enough and isn't really in the past. Stories of forced sterilizations in prisons and other contexts keep emerging.

I am less thrilled with the second place winner on "Saving Evan." It's typical mom-vs-autism stuff. Moreover, the format - as you scroll pictures scroll up into your view and then away again - is extremely hard on my not-entirely-neurotypical visual processing centers of my brain. Maybe someone with better eye-brain connections can read it more closely and let me know what you think.

(Note: Of course I apply for this award. I don't expect to get it. Properly, they have always given it to full-time journalists rather than people doing commentary like me. I'd vote for full-time journalists too!).