A recent news segment on CTV National News, aired October 7, 2015, focused on the outrage expressed by parents of a British Columbia boy with Down Syndrome upon discovering that their son, Deacon, age 7, had been repeatedly been confined to a so-called “quiet room” – a small, windowless space designed for disruptive students. “I think it’s awful,” said father Kirk Graham. “It breaks my heart for my son.” He and his wife Jackie were so upset that they pulled their son out of school in protest. “This needs to stop,” Mr. Graham added. “Nobody should be put in a lockdown room.”
The Salmon Arm, BC, case is not an isolated instance. A British Columbia report, Stop Hurting Kids, commissioned by Inclusion BC and the Family Support Institute in November 2013, identified 200 examples of children being left alone in everything from windowless offices to padded rooms to a gym equipment closet. Roughly half of the examples involved “seclusion” for periods as long as 3 hours; about one-in-three of the examples involved imposing physical restraints. An estimated 72 per cent of parents reported that their child suffered “emotional trauma.” Most concerning of all, somewhere between half and three-quarters of the parents only learned about the “isolation” through someone outside of the school.
Many Canadian schools now have “time-out” rooms to accommodate students engaging in repeated inappropriate or disruptive classroom or playground behaviour. Those segregated school spaces go by a variety of names ranging from “time-out” to “quiet corner” to “isolation” depending upon the province and particular school district. Most, if not all, education authorities now have “guidelines” for the use of “designated time-out” rooms. In the Atlantic provinces, for example, a set of formal guidelines, developed first in 2002 in New Brunswick, have essentially sanctioned such “behaviour-modification” actions.
Intervening in the classroom to curb misbehaviour or ‘acting-out’ by calling a “time-out” is commonly accepted professional teaching practice. In most instances, it is the appropriate strategy, and Special Education research (ABA) tends to show that it can be effective in reducing problem behaviours, including those exhibited by students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and behavioural disorders. Faced with students demonstrating aggressive or potentially dangerous behaviours, teachers need to have a range of means to assist in settling students down in school.
Having recognized that practical classroom reality, the “time-out” strategy can lead to more intrusive and potentially damaging measures involving “restraint” and “seclusion.” The Canadian Council for Exceptional Children recognizes restraint and seclusion as “an emergency response, not a treatment.” The Ontario Association for Behaviour Analysis (ONTABA) recommends carefully planned, monitored and limited time-out sanctions and restraint and seclusion as “a last resort” in an “emergency situation.”
American professional organizations such as the APBA, faced with far more lawsuits, are far more explicit in setting limits. “The misuse and abuse of restraint and seclusion procedures with vulnerable people is intolerable,” according to the APBA (2009), ” an represents a clear violation of ethical principles and accepted professional practice.”
Over the past decade, “isolation rooms” have come to light as a direct result of some well-publicized and disturbing cases. In March of 2009, the parent of 8-year-old Dylan Gale went public over the confinement of her son in a the “storage closet” of a Windsor, NS, public school. A Nova Scotia Education Department survey found that 42 such unregulated rooms existed in provincial schools and that revelation led to the implementation of an August 2009 set of guidelines.
Even with policies in place, alleged abuses continue to happen across Canada. Last school year, a 9-year-old autistic boy attending Ottawa’s St. Jerome Catholic School was handcuffed by police officers on school premises and Toronto-area parent Karen Thorndyke launched a $16 million law suit against the Peel District School Board for confining her autistic son to an “isolation room.”
Schools are not intended to be prisons or young offender’s centres, so time-outs, restraints and seclusion tend to arouse very strong feelings. In Britain, vocal critics of “isolation rooms” campaign for their abolition because they tend to be applied against Special Education students who find themselves “frightened and alone” in such enclosed spaces. Since the 2006 report, “The Costs of Inclusion,” the issue has been hotly-debated. That report’s findings demonstrated that the real purpose of seclusion was to “remove the disruption” so that “teachers can get on with teaching.”
Seclusions have only short-term impact and only solve an immediate problem for a teacher attempting to cope with a class of 27 to 30 other students. A 2010 U.K. Bernardo’s report, “Not present and not correct,“ concluded that isolating a student “usually neither addressed the issues leading to discipline problems, nor provided any guidance that would help the young person learn to control themselves.”
Isolation of students does not really address the root causes and merely hides it away from sight. It also raises fundamental policy questions: What is the impact of restraint and seclusion on our most challenged and vulnerable children and youth? How can we support teachers confronting significant behavioural problems without entrenching such potentially damaging practices? Is it right to remove one child from the room so that others can learn? Is this chronic issue one of the unintended consequences of imposing “fully inclusive classrooms” on everyone?
Integration of hard to teach children in regular classes is one of the most difficult questions in education.. The parents of the difficult child feel they have a right to integration. The parents of the rest of the children in the class don’t want their kids education disrupted.
Outsider don’t understand the disruptions can be an every day often every period situation.
Getting “to the root” of the problem is easy to say for outsiders. Much harder to do.
Frankly I believe the only way some students can be integrated in with an Educational Assistant on a 1 to 1 basis. Very expensive.
We need professionals in the area of mental health working with these children in a setting away from a school. EAs can only wait out disruptive behaviour, and can’t make a child learn.
Of course we need mental health professionals. Look at Dr Dan Offard stuff. Kids are years and years on waiting lists. The grow up on waiting lists.
What makes you think that there is anything wrong with these kids? That is quite an assumption the last writer Christina makes. The school staff are simply not trained enough, not naturally mature and not educated enough in understanding body language and using emotional intelligence to read these kids. Theses kids are communicating with their body language and behaviour. Every behaviour is communication. An SLP must and should train all stuff intensely and ongoing rather than leaving it up to teachers or a TA to decide how to simply “discipline. Most off all get the preteens involved and intensely to come up with a solution that is best for the child and not what is strictly convenient for the staff. Often these kids can’t self report to inform anyone what is wrong with them and it could be as simple as “hunger” or “boredom” or ” being “too hot”. YES, it is as simple as that!!
One does not have a genius to figure that our , only extremely dedicated and independent in thinking rather hating sticking to protocols. Often the precondition is not at all mental health, but rather a manifestation of even one time of being ill-treated, kicked out of class , locked out of class, punched in the face, locked in a gym or in isolation away from all theatre kids before gym class for no reason other than the convenience of the TA, and timed out in isolation from the rest of the student population. These ill=treatments will Most certainly bring about trauma and mental illness in the healthiest of neurotypical people, let alone one with SN who feels the same as others but sim only cannot express the same as others. It is NOT the other way around.
Most people totally confuse being intellectually disabled with being mentally ill. There is a gross and very significant distinction between the two. Please learn the difference once adn for all. Whereas becoming mentally ill has all and everything to do with simply having a chemically disturbed illness (that can be diagnosed through medical tests) OR by through being emotionally or mentally mistreated in an unsafe environment with unsafe people ( it inlay take one and sometimes one yell to cause that) for these very vulnerable precious children, who are emotionally often exceptionally sensitive.
Interesting stream of consciousness which takes us nowhere.
The majority of parents of ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder) children see schools as the problem and do not want to take ownership of their child’s serious emotional problems. Programs to deal with such disorders require parental involvement and commitment and qualified professionals. Sadly, the academic outlook for many of these children is pretty grim.
Yup. Almost all parents of hard to serve children blame the school but go from school to school getting the same results.
In their mind it has to be somebodies fault and since they rule out their own genetics and child rearing practices, only the school is left.
The school offers a great scape goat.
Solutions to these problems that are either overly complex or expensive simply will not happen, especially in this environment. If it is not cheap and easy the system is not really interested.
Weeding through Shinninsun’s stream of consciousness. he is right – intellectually challenged does not equal mentally ill. Why is that so hard for some people to understand?
But, Doug, seriously? Do you really want to stand behind this one?
“In their mind it has to be somebodies fault and since they rule out their own genetics and child rearing practices, only the school is left.”
Perhaps we should go back to “blaming” autism on refrigerator mothers (and fathers, just to be politically correct)? Are genetics and child rearing practices the only culprits? Can’t some things just happen, just because (aka idiopathic)? And suppose I do take responsibility for my own genetics (whatever the hell that even means) … does that actually get us anywhere? My genetics came from my parents, which came from their parents, which … get the point?
I wholeheartedly agree.that parents need to be committed and work with professionals … been there, done that for 17 years. Which, by the way, doing that, eventually a parent is going to hit burn out hard. Even if they’re lucky enough to survive the school system, these problems don’t just evaporate for our adult children.