Managing students with severe behavioral challenges requires special knowledge, including techniques involving physical restraint of a student or seclusion in a separate room.
However, these procedures can put a child in harm’s way if improperly applied.
Rep. Jim Davnie (DFL-Mpls) sponsors HF1621, which would require schools to have a plan that defines the emergency situations when such procedures could be used and how they fit into students’ individual education plans. It would also limit their use to appropriately trained staff.
Davnie said the bill represents “community consensus on a difficult and troubling issue,” and would bring about consistency between the schools and day treatment facilities where some children and teenagers are served alternately.
The House K-12 Education Policy and Oversight Committee laid the bill over March 20 for possible omnibus bill inclusion. Its companion, SF1630, sponsored by Sen. Patricia Torres Ray (DFL-Mpls), awaits action by the Senate Education Committee.
What’s considered acceptable intervention has evolved significantly, said Sue Abderholden, executive director of National Alliance on Mental Illness-Minnesota. During the mid-1980s, common practices to enforce behavior included skin shock with cattle prods and putting Tabasco sauce on children’s tongues.
“Now we would think that would be barbaric,” Aberholden said. While restraint and seclusion are effective in certain emergency situations — when a student presents imminent danger to himself or herself, to another student or teacher, or threatens serious property damage — they are too widely used by improperly trained people in situations that don’t merit such a response.
Deaths attributed to the misuse of restraint include that of a 7-year-old Wisconsin girl in 2006. A child in Willmar ate paint chips while in seclusion unsupervised. Others have been left in a “time-out” room for hours without lunch or a bathroom break.
Restraint and seclusion are being used less frequently in favor of more effective positive behavioral support strategies, said Antoinette Johns, Northeast Metro Intermediate District 916 director of special education, even with the most challenging students with serious emotional and behavioral disturbances along with criminal histories or mental illness.
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