February
is Jewish Disability Awareness Month, and all month, we’ll be featuring blog posts
about disability inclusion. Read our posts here and visit our Jewish Disability Awareness Month page.
Last week, I wrote about the issue of high unemployment among people with disabilities in the United States, some of the issues that contribute to this, and particularly, inadequate or limited education opportunities for young people with disabilities. I want to address an extreme case of this last problem – the use of “restraint and seclusion” methods for students with disabilities in many American public schools.
It sounds unbelievable, but many American public schools use what are called “seclusion and restraint” methods to “educate” children with disabilities. These include:
- Placement in small rooms, closets or boxes
- Prolonged restraint using manual, mechanical or chemical means
- Withholding of meals
- Slapping or pinching
- Dousing with cold water
- Extremely loud white noise
As disturbing as the specific techniques is the frequency with which they are used. A recent study by the disability rights coalition TASH found that 65% of students with disabilities had been exposed to these and other “educational” methods.
Seclusion and restraint techniques are the sort of thing regularly used on prisoners in a bygone era, some of which the Geneva Conventions were written to outlaw during war. That they are used on students is both disgusting and unacceptable. If schools and teachers had the curriculae, resources, funding and support to understand how to teach students with different needs and were accountable to enforced laws written to punish offenders, we could move beyond these barbaric methods and provide supportive educational opportunities.
There is a bill in Congress that would address this issue. Just introduced at the end of last year, the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act (H.R. 4247/S. 2860) would protect all students, including students with disabilities, from physical or mental abuse, behavioral interventions which compromise health and safety, and restraint or seclusion used for the purposes of punishment or convenience.
Please email me or call me at 202-387-2800 for more information and what you can do to become involved in preventing the use of these barbaric methods upon American students.