Photos show blood splattered across a small bare-walled room in a North Carolina school where a second grader repeatedly punched himself in the face in the fall of 2019, according to the child’s mom.
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Federal law requires school districts like Wake County to tell the U.S. Department of Education every time they physically restrain or seclude a student.
But the district, one of the largest in the nation, with nearly 160,000 children and more than 190 schools, reported for nearly a decade, starting in 2011, that it had zero incidents of restraint or seclusion, according to federal data.
Staten said she was alarmed to learn about the district’s reporting practices, and in March 2022 she sent a complaint letter to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. When the district set up her son’s special education plan, she wrote, “they said things like ‘it’s for his safety and the safety of others.’”
Further, she wrote, in his district files, “nowhere in the record was there documentation of the restraints and seclusion.”
The practice is “used and is used at often very high rates in ways that are quite damaging to students,” said Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for the Office for Civil Rights.
The Department of Education says it is meeting with schools that underreport cases of restraint and seclusion, tactics used disproportionately on students with disabilities and children of color like Staten’s son.
Everyone involved in the cover up needs prison time
I feel like this is probably the case nationwide. I don’t think any school district wants to report any numbers that are going to trigger the state to “take a closer look”.
Having them self-report was always going to lead to this though. If you want regulations to have teeth, there has to be an agency enforcing them
Yeah, and then it’s one more group you have to pitch to tax payers, who just see a budget of say a million dollars. They don’t stop to math that out to be a few bucks at most to make it so things actually work for the better. You also have to keep those positions from being filled by people that are going to actively work against any positive like we have seen with school boards. And even having to think about people out to sabotage kids would have been crazy a decade ago, now it’s such a common occurrence.
Oh. This happened to me as a kid, like, 20 years ago during the ADHD “No child left behind” scare. All the teachers wanted every problematic student to be put on Ritalin. They even had the pills on hand, no doctor on premises, and would try to use this secluded secret room and other coercion tactics to try and get kids to try Ritalin.
No one was fired or arrested, it was suggested in an anonymous letter to the editor that the “bad teachers be let go” when they built and opened a new elementary school building.
