WILMINGTON — Despite concerns of top American education officials on the use of seclusion methods on schoolchildren, more than half of all elementary and middle schools in the New Hanover County School system use so-called seclusion rooms to forcibly isolate students with disabilities or those showing aggressive behavior.
More than 930 instances of seclusion were reported in the district in 2019, according to an NHCS spokesperson. Seclusion rooms are found in 18 of 25 elementary schools, three of eight middle schools, and one of the two alternative schools in the district (see a full list below).
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A spokesperson for the N.C. Department of Public Instruction (DPI) could not clarify how many of the six public charter schools in the county used the rooms. Questions sent last week to Baker Mitchell, president of the Roger Bacon Academy, were unanswered.
Legal in NC but discouraged by top education officials
Seclusion in North Carolina is legal through the Greenblatt Act, passed in 2005, which allows public school employees to use the method to maintain order, prevent or break up a fight, defend oneself, or during instances “when a student’s behavior poses a threat of imminent physical harm to self or others” or to property.
The Department of Education defines seclusion as “involuntarily confining a student alone in a room or area from which the student is physically prevented from leaving” for the purpose of calming the student.
Although they vary between schools and districts, many seclusion rooms are the shape and size of a closet, located within larger rooms and lined with padded walls. Often a handle can be held down to lock the door from the outside. Regardless of their setup, they are designed to provide a small, enclosed, bare space for students with behavioral issues.
A report published by the Department of Education in 2012 states that restraint or seclusion “should never be used except in situations where a child’s behavior poses imminent danger of serious physical harm to self or others.”
But the Greenblatt Act says the rooms can also be used as outlined in a student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP), designed for children with disabilities who are legally entitled to special education in a public school. The rooms cannot be used “solely as a disciplinary consequence,” according to the law.
In the report, then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said there was no evidence that seclusion was an effective method, and that it actually worsened bad behavior.
“As many reports have documented, the use of restraint and seclusion can have very serious consequences, including, most tragically, death,” Duncan said. “Furthermore, there continues to be no evidence that using restraint or seclusion is effective in reducing the occurrence of the problem behaviors that frequently precipitate the use of such techniques.”
More recently, in early 2019, current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced that her department was preparing an initiative “to address the possible inappropriate use of restraint and seclusion in our nation’s schools,” to be overseen by the OCR and the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS).
She said the initiative was designed to help schools and districts understand how federal law applies to the use of restraint and seclusion, conduct reviews of the “possible inappropriate use of restraint and seclusion” and how it affects a school’s obligation to provide free education for children with disabilities, and provide technical assistance to improve schools’ submission of accurate data.
Nationwide underreporting of seclusion
In 2009 the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) first began collecting data from schools and districts about the number of students subjected to seclusion.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, released a report last June after analyzing the number of districts that “left fields pertaining to restraint and seclusion blank, or that reported all zeros for those fields,” raising questions about the “completeness and accuracy” of seclusion data.
The report found the data collection from 2017-2018 was “at risk for reporting issues” and indicative of “a more pervasive pattern of underreporting of restraint and seclusion in U.S. public schools.” It further states that although district officials are required to report accurate and truthful data, the Department of Education had repeatedly published data without correcting known reporting errors.
Collected data also showed students with disabilities were secluded more frequently than those without disabilities. During the 2013-2014 school year, students with disabilities were subjected to seclusion rates “that far exceeded those of other students,” according to an OCR report published in 2016.
In terms of data collection in North Carolina public schools, N.C. Department of Public Instruction spokesperson Todd Silberman said the department’s Exceptional Children’s (EC) division “does not collect data on seclusion rooms by school or district and to their knowledge, that information isn’t gathered by other sections within the department.”
Editor’s Note: A U.S. Department of Education spokesman said the OCR was currently working on answering questions regarding the county’s reporting of seclusion incidents to the OCR.
Policies and lawsuits
The state has the jurisdiction to respond to a seclusion violation only if a student has a disability, according to Silberman. In such a case, a formal complaint can be made to the state and, if warranted, “a corrective action will be provided to the district.”
“If a district or districts are found to demonstrate a pattern of violations, a systemic complaint can be made and investigated,” Silberman said.
Each local school board of education is required to provide copies of its restraint and seclusion policies to school employees and parents at the beginning of the school year.
New Hanover County Schools’ policy on seclusion states that any student may be restrained or secluded, and that school personnel “may use ‘reasonable force’ to control behavior or remove a person from a scene in the circumstances specified” in the Greenblatt Act.
The policy states that seclusion is prohibited except for what is allowed by the Greenblatt Act, and defines seclusion as the law defines it, as the “confinement of a student alone in an enclosed space from which the student is physically prevented from leaving by locking hardware or other means, or not capable of leaving due to physical or intellectual capacity.”
Earlier this month in Raleigh, the family of a 19-year-old special education student received a $450,000 settlement after filing a lawsuit against the Wake County school system, alleging that a teacher at Southeast Raleigh High improperly isolated students with disabilities in a storage room and was physically aggressive toward those students.
NHCS spokesperson Caress Clegg said no lawsuits have been filed against the district concerning the use of seclusion rooms in the past decade. She said only one complaint has been filed to the OCR over that same period.
This was an apparent reference to early 2012 when the parents of a 5-year-old special education student filed a complaint with the OCR against the district for forcing the student inside a seclusion room. The complaint alleged that NHCS only placed students with disabilities inside seclusion rooms and thus violated their civil rights.
An OCR investigation was completed in August of 2012 and found no compliance issues with the Greenblatt Act.
The Department of Education’s 2012 report outlined 15 principles as the framework for state and local education policies to ensure that any use of restraint and seclusion in schools does not occur unless there is “a threat of imminent danger of serious physical harm to the student or others.”
The first principle reads, “Every effort should be made to prevent the need for the use of restraint and for the use of seclusion.”
Other principles state that seclusion should be applied to all children, not just those with disabilities; any intervention should respect the child’s rights to be treated with dignity; seclusion should never be used as punishment or discipline; repeated uses of seclusion for a child, or multiple uses by a teacher, should trigger a review; every instance of seclusion should be carefully monitored; and parents should be informed of seclusion policies and notified “as soon as possible” after seclusion is used on their child.
New Hanover County schools with seclusion rooms
Elementary Schools
- Snipes Elementary
- Bradley Creek Elementary
- Carolina Beach Elementary
- Castle Hayne Elementary
- College Park Elementary
- Alderman Elementary
- Anderson Elementary
- Forest Hills Elementary
- Bellamy Elementary
- Blair Elementary
- Mary C Williams Elementary
- Murrayville Elementary
- Pine Valley Elementary
- Freeman Elementary
- Sunset Park Elementary
- International School of Gregory
- Winter Park Elementary
- Wrightsboro Elementary
Middle Schools
- Murray Middle School
- Myrtle Grove Middle
- Williston Middle
Alternative Schools
- Lake Forest Academy
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