From the Wall Street Journal:

The growing presence of students with disabilities in mainstream school settings has attracted greater attention to educators’ use of restraint holds and isolation as methods for controlling students.

Now advocacy groups are pushing for a federal ban on such tactics, and a report by the Government Accountability Office has documented hundreds of allegations of school-related death and abuse since 1990. The majority of the allegations involved students with disabilities.

In testimony before Congress in May, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called such findings “disturbing” and said he is instructing chief school officers in all 50 states to detail their plans for keeping students safe. Several dozen advocacy groups subsequently discussed the issue in a meeting with White House staff.

Among the cases documented by the GAO were a 14-year-old Texas boy who refused to stay seated in class and died after a 230-pound teacher tried to restrain him by lying on top of him, and a Florida teacher’s aide who gagged and duct-taped children as young as six for misbehaving.

Educators say it is sometimes their duty to restrain students. “You can’t sit and call the cops and watch,” said Bruce Hunter, associate executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

Although some situations have been the result of threatening behavior by such students in classrooms or hallways, researchers say many incidents don’t appear to have involved children who were aggressive.

Related posts here.

From the Arizona Republic:

An Arizona couple whose 7-year-old son has been held down and sat on by school employees twice over the past year has asked their local school district to notify parents promptly when children are restrained in school.

Kim and Robert Eacott say they were not told that their son Anthony, who has autism, was restrained, but instead found out indirectly. The couple said officials at the Sonoma Ranch Elementary School in Gilbert initially denied the incidents had occurred, but that they found evidence in their son’s file. Robert Eacott said that in one incident a staff member sat on his son because his “letter board was too messy.”

Superintendent Dave Allison said he is asking his staff to work on crafting a policy and board member Helen Hollands said that’s something the board is willing to weigh.

In the past few years, about a dozen families have filed complaints alleging their special needs children have been subjected to physical and unnecessary restraint or their school has failed to ensure their children meet the goals outlined in their Individual Education Plan.

From WJBK-FoxNews [Detroit], WXYZ News [Detroit], AP/Chicago Tribune:

A member of the Detroit board of education says she’s been told by school staff that an elementary school special education student was handcuffed to a door at the direction of his school’s principal after he was involved in a fight.

The district is investigating the claim involving Antonio Hunt, 11. The boy’s mother, Charmaine Hunt, said her son was left handcuffed without a break for four hours at Sampson-Webber Elementary School.

“It’s called child abuse, and the board has an obligation to investigate and to report it to the appropriate authorities because it is a state law,” said school board member Marie Thornton.

The routine restraint of an Arizona student with disabilities “highlights a chasm in state and federal law and regulations” on restraints, says an editorial in the Arizona Daily Star.  Arizona is among 19 states with no regulations or statutes governing restraining or secluding a child in school, according to a recent federal report.

An excerpt:

That Arizona is one of the states that offers no official guidance on restraining students is pitiful. As much as we’d like to rely on school employees to do the right thing by students, it’s clear that’s not a safeguard. The onus is on local and state leaders to work with parents, students and educators to put in writing what, evidently, cannot go without saying: every Arizona student must be safe at school.

We also have no doubt that if this student were not disabled and in need of assistance getting from the bus to his classroom, no one would, for even a moment, think it appropriate to tie him to a fence because a school employee wasn’t doing his or her job.

The fact that this particular student has some level of disability makes this even more of an outrage and the blame more potent. All parents entrust school officials to take good care of their children, but a child who may not be able to advocate on his or her own behalf requires extra vigilence from everyone.

Five employees of the Tucson Unified School District have received warnings after an investigation found that a high school student with disabilities was routinely left tethered to a fence, according to a report in the Arizona Daily Star. The student’s name was not disclosed.

Bus monitor Thomas Giacoma said he regularly attached the student to the fence by his backpack when dropping him off at school so that he wouldn’t fall over or wander away before someone came to get him. The practice came to light earlier this month, when an assistant principal obtained a photo that teachers had taken of the student restrained on the fence.

Giacoma said he had tethered the student throughout the year without hearing any disapproval, and that the student had not seemed distressed. He said he had stopped the restraint in March after a teacher complained that he was humiliating the student.

Sue Kroeger, director of the Disability Resources center at the University of Arizona and who teaches disability studies in the College of Education, said the restraint described in the investigation is “disrespectful, undignified and totally unacceptable.”

Kroeger said she was less inclined to shake her finger than to see the incident as symptomatic of a larger problem — the stigmatizing of people with disabilities.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Cherokee [GA] Ledger-News,  and Fox 5 Atlanta (with video):

Police have arrested a special education teacher and a teacher’s aide from Woodstock High School in suburban Atlanta for allegedly abusing students with disabilities. The women, charged with false imprisonment and child cruelty, are free on bond.

Police say Laurie Peavy, 44, and Nancy Cheek, 49, duct-taped a boy with autism to a chair as a disciplinary action, and confined a blind girl under a desk for “talking and being chatty.”

Police said it appears the educators restrained the teens on more than one occasion.

Both educators have been removed from their posts and reassigned to non-teaching positions pending an internal investigation.

Related posts here.

(Photos, l-r: Laurie Peavy and Nancy Cheek, from the Atlanta Journal Constitution)

AP/New York Times:

Saying that he was “deeply disturbed” by recent testimony about the abuse of restraints and confinement of children in the nation’s schools, education secretary Arne Duncan called on state school chiefs around the country to develop plans to assure student safety.

”Children’s safety has to be our number one concern before we begin to think about educating them and doing other things,” Duncan told the House Education and Labor Committee.

The committee received a report from federal investigators yesterday about hundreds of cases of alleged abuse of children, particularly those with disabilities, arising from school practices of restraint and seclusion. At least 20 deaths were reported.

Duncan praised the use of positive behavioral intervention and support in his home state of Illinois, and directed legislators to www.pbis.org. Illinois also prohibits the use of seclusion and restraint for punishment, provides teacher training in the use of positive behavior supports, and requires documentation of all uses of seclusion and restraints.

Video of Duncan’s remarks is here.

UPDATE: Report prompts call for rules for restraining students — Washington Post