The “Keeping All Students Safe Act,” which was introduced in the U.S. Senate last December, would limit the use of physical restraint and seclusion of students who are out of control or may pose harm to themselves or others. According to Senator Harkin, the Democratic sponsor of the bill, “Every child should be educated in a supportive, caring, stimulating environment in which they are treated as an individual and provided with the tools they need to succeed. They should never be subjected to abusive or violent disciplinary strategies or left alone and unsupervised. This bill will set long-overdue standards to protect children from physical and psychological harm and ensure a safe learning environment for teachers and students alike.”
In response to these reports, Representatives Miller and McMorris-Rodgers introduced the “Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act (H.R. 4247) in December 2009. The bill, which was renamed as “The Keeping All Students Safe Act,” passed the House in March of 2010. Similar legislation had been introduced in the Senate by Senators Dodd and Burr later that year. The Senate bill, S3895, was a piece of compromise legislation. Although the bill limited the use of seclusion and restraint, it did permit their use to be written into IEPs or behavioral intervention plans. The problem with this compromise was that by allowing a “planned” use of seclusion and restraint in student behavioral plans, school districts could work their way around the spirit of the legislation; namely, to not use seclusion or restraint at all. The Senate failed to act on the legislation, and the bills died when the 111th Congress ended. The “Keeping All Students Safe Act” was once again re-introduced by Representatives Miller and Harper in April of 2011 as H.R. 1381.
The reintroduced House bill, which is sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats, mirrors the legislation passed by Congress in March 2010. The bill introduced in the Senate by Senator Harkin offers additional safeguards to the House legislation, including the outright prohibition of the use of seclusion, along with mechanical restraint, chemical restraint and “aversive behavioral interventions that compromise health and safety,” thereby making it impossible to include the use of seclusion in an IEP or behavioral plan. Restraint may only be used in emergencies when there is an immediate threat of serious bodily harm occurring. Additional provisions of the Harkin bill include notification of parents within 24 hours should a student have been restrained followed by a debriefing with parents and staff and the performance of a functional behavioral analysis; a no retaliation position to protect any parent, teacher, staff member or other person who reports an incident where restraint was used; collection and dissemination of data by schools to document when restraints were used; and additional staff training to ensure that staff can safely and appropriately use restraints when necessary. And for many disability groups, one of the most important aspects of the Harkin bill is the inclusion of numerous provisions to develop effective intervention and positive prevention practices to help de-escalate potential crisis situations, thereby obviating the need for any form of restraint.
Whereas last year Representative Miller, as chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, had successfully obtained support from 24 Republicans to pass the House legislation, the political climate has changed, which may make passage of the Harkin bill, which lacks a Republican co-sponsor, tough. The new Republican chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee, Representative John Kline, has stated through a spokesperson, “State and local leaders are taking steps to ensure school practices are safe for students and have made great progress in achieving this shared goal. Chairman Kline remains concerned that federal intervention could obstruct these efforts, ultimately doing more harm than good to students and educators.”
And finally, opposition to the legislation is also coming from the American Association of School Administrators (AASA). The AASA is objecting to the requirement that restraint can only be used to avoid serious bodily injury. The AASA finds the standard problematic because it would be impossible for school staff to determine whether the risk of injury in a crisis situation could or could not lead to serious bodily injury, leaving school districts open to legal action should their use of physical restraint be deemed inappropriate after the fact. The AASA is also arguing that the data collection provisions of the act as well the demands on staff training will be both burdensome and costly for school districts.
To help ensure the passage of this legislation, advocacy groups are rallying to encourage parents and other interested parties to lobby their Senators and Representatives. APRAIS, The Alliance to Prevent Restraint, Aversive Interventions and Seclusion, has prepared a packet with history on the legislation, internet resources, and suggested telephone scripts and drafts for the submission of letters or emails to Representatives and Senators. Barring the passage of this particular legislation, advocates can also urge their Senators to support any amendments introduced during the reauthorization of the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind) to restrict use of seclusion and restraint in schools. The Senate should be debating the ESEA early in 2012, although movement on this legislation is stalled.
Thank you for posting about this very important topic! I hope more people learn about and support the Act!
Posted by: Julie Foxx | January 18, 2012 at 07:08 AM
Great piece, Charlie! We at Our Children Left Behind (http://www.ourchildrenleftbehind.com) are collecting stories of abuse in schools and are actively working toward federal legislation in this area. We distribute action alerts through our yahoo list (you can sign up through the website). Another group very active in this area is COPAA (http://www.copaa.org). Many COPAA and OCLB members are part of APRAIS, the group dedicated to banning restraint and seclusion in school. Individuals can do SO much by simply receiving our action alerts and taking quick action (mostly just emailing your legislators with a sample script we provide). It takes a village to protect our kids - so please step up to help! Thanks, Charlie, for helping spread the word, and all you do for our kids!
Posted by: Sandy Alperstein | January 18, 2012 at 09:49 AM
My Son was Restrained and Put in Seclusion, Yours Could be Next....
http://www.change.org/petitions/my-son-was-restrained-and-put-in-seclusion-yours-could-be-next
Dear Parents and Advocates, Please ask your Florida Senator and Florida House Representative to Co-sponsor restraint and seclusion bills - Senate Bill S144 and House Bill H1467.
S144 and HB1467 will set long-overdue standards to protect children in Florida schools from physical and psychological harm and ensure a safe learning environment for teachers and students alike.
Some of the very important highlights of the bills are the following"
Prohibit the very dangerous prone restraint
Prohibit supine restraint
Prohibit mechanical restraint
Prohibit seclusion
Regards,
Phyllis Musumeci
Anna Moore
Families Against Restraint and Seclusion
http://familiesagainstrestraintandseclusion.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Jamoore1 | January 21, 2012 at 11:13 PM
I am so glad this legislation is being revived! Thank you for this post!
My daughter and I went to Washington D.C. in May, 2009, to describe my daughter's abuse and neglect within Cupertino Union School District to the congressional committee that originally framed this legislation.
I sincerely hope that the new legislation, if passed, will be enforceable and will not be neutralized by the usual issues involved in prosecuting public entities, viz. their unshakeable (and well founded) belief that they have access to unlimited public funds to spend on legal fees. Many of them appear to believe that they're untouchable because they think they can outspend and exhaust any potential plaintiff.
Our case was very clear. Several laws had been violated, there were clear damages to our child and to several other children, there had been a four year history of clamorous complaints about this particular teacher from parents and staff, my many letters to the school board and superintendent were ignored (with one exception -- one board member advised me to sue,) a teacher's aide who made frequent complaints and eventually tipped off a couple of parents was subjected to severe on-the-job harassment and eventually forced to resign, etc., etc. Pre-trial, we offered to settle for only our legal fees up to that point if some changes were made to keep students safe, but this plan was obviously very threatening to the more culpable administrators within the district.
Cupertino Union School District perpetuated the same slovenly, dishonest, and malicious patterns of behavior -- behaviors that had caused widespread child abuse -- at the trial. They stretched out what should have been a three-day trial into a three-week ordeal that wasted everybody's time. They were quite ruthless and unscrupulous in attempting to misrepresent the situation and to lie about the children they had hurt. Their story about how my daughter was hurt changed on the fly as each "latest edition" was easily disproved. None of the many stories they told accounted for the nature or location of my daughter's injuries.
The final story, after several other tortuous and contradictory versions had been refuted, was completely different from the previous 10 or 11 (didn't they think the jury might notice?). This one (perhaps the 11th or 12th version) was that my daughter had injured herself running into a window when I came to collect her (they had to find a way to place me there to get around the lack of any reporting whatsoever.) A severely mentally ill parent (Colleen N.) from the classroom was brought in at the 11th hour to "corroborate" this and to claim she, the teacher, and I had all seen it happen. In spite of the fact that both the teacher and I had made clear in deposition who was present when I collected my daughter, and neither of us mentioned Colleen N., she was suddenly injected into the incident. Colleen's paranoia had obviously been manipulated, and she and the teacher had been encouraged to work out a coordinated version. Fortunately, there was some, ahem, discussion about the "office security video" (I had collected my daughter from the office the day she was hurt) in Colleen N.'s presence shortly before she was due to testify. Now I don't know if such a video existed, but thankfully neither did Colleen. At that point, Colleen looked very furtive. I wondered at the time if she was genuinely delusional, in which case she would probably have placed herself in the classroom with the teacher watching events unfold as the teacher had just testified, or whether she would knowingly lie. As it happened, she knowingly lied. She had to flat out contradict the teacher's testimony that they stood together and watched my daughter run into a window. She had to claim that she was "in the hallway or another room" (not really an option in that particular setting) -- somewhere where she would not have been in the "video." She was also unable to answer simple questions for fear of what the "video" would actually show. When asked if my daughter had cried when she supposedly ran into a window, she had to resort to yelling "Real tears or crocodile tears! Real tears or crocodile tears!" because, not having been there, she simply did not know what had happened that afternoon. And then, ooops, she claimed she had come in to the office after the school day had ended and spent some time chatting to the principal. Now the principal had previously testified that she had not seen Colleen at all that afternoon and had applied an ice pack to my daughter's head much earlier in the day -- before I picked up my daughter. Thankfully the jurors were very offended by Colleen and dismissed her as crazy and malicious. They were in vociferous agreement that the district's key witnesses had flat our lied on the stand.
Other lies included claiming that all intervention reports had been faithfully completed and filed. In fact, there were NO intervention reports. The principal herself said in deposition that she had never received or filed one. By the trial, however, everyone -- including the principal -- was claiming that intervention reports were all filed according to the law, which requires that they be filed at the district, county, and state level. Well, they were not to be found at any of those places. The district's lame claim was they had all, um, "got lost."
Parents who sue to protect children and whistle blowers who have the courage to speak out should never have to endure the malice and dishonesty that was spewed our way by an increasingly desperate group of administrators. It should not be this easy for lawyers like Mark E. Davis of San Jose, who defended the Cupertino Union School District, to drag out a lost cause for as long as he did and to profit from doing so, especially when his efforts were directed toward endangering children. It should not have been possible for the district's witnesses and it's lawyer to lie so very blatantly and obviously without any sort of consequence.
I hope the new legislation not only creates new laws but ensures that they are enforced. School administrators, witnesses who perjure themselves, and school district lawyers who shamelessly and dishonestly leech off the public dime while working toward hurting children, all need to be held accountable.
Our children deserve to be safe while at school. Kudos to anyone supporting this legislation and this cause.
Sincerely,
Ann Gaydos
Posted by: Ann Gaydos | April 20, 2012 at 08:14 PM
Students are the backbone of our society. Their safety is very important, so this act will definitely play a very crucial part in their safety and well being. Thanks for sharing this information.
Posted by: Workplace Accident | June 11, 2012 at 11:31 PM