Seclusion and Isolation Rooms Misused in Illinois Schools | Hacker News Reader

Seclusion and Isolation Rooms Misused in Illinois Schools

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"For this investigation, ProPublica Illinois and the Tribune obtained and analyzed thousands of detailed records that state law requires schools to create whenever they use seclusion. The resulting database documents more than 20,000 incidents from the 2017-18 school year and through early December 2018.

"Of those, about 12,000 included enough detail to determine what prompted the timeout. In more than a third of these incidents, school workers documented no safety reason for the seclusion."

Done. There's no need for any further discussion. 8000 without "enough detail" and 4000 with no documented safety reason.

The teachers I know say there is almost no other way they are allowed to discipline children.

It’s almost as though the primary way the brains of every warm blooded animal evolved to receive discipline has been eschewed by polite society and problematic consequences ensued?

What, hitting children? It doesn't seem to work.

The only analogue in nature I can think of is violent competition among adult males.

Nearly every animal with a brain has young that misbehave. Mama kangaroo, elephant, tiger, horse and chimp will put up with a certain amount of bad behavior, eg overagressive play or taking too much food, then they’ll grunt, then a growl, and then when bear cub keeps it up, Mama bear nips just hard enough to get them to stop and hopefully not do it again.

We’ve abandoned something that’s been at the core of nurturing the young for 60,000,000 years. I would assume there’s been a fair amount of natural selection at work in a fundamental aspect of the parent-child relationship. I think choosing not to teach that “when I say stop, stop” without thinking that it will not work out for a meaningful fraction of the population, seems a bit like trying to figure out what the Boeing MCAS engineers were thinking.

Sounds like you only know teachers in Illinois.

I don't want to take away from the importance of this specific issue.

But documentation at public schools is often a complete disaster anyway. The sheer volume of documentation and even where it should "go" is a huge burden put on teachers who are busy with other things.

I know of a school asking teaches to begin all documentation with some "standard" documentation for every form. Among things like date of birth and etc standard sheet asks for the race of the child, they're explicitly told to not ask the child or family for that information (for a variety of reasons depending on who you ask). They of course have no access to any of the information the school already has about that child. So any documentation automatically becomes impossible to fill out, let alone deliver to the appropriate people.

Okay but the one time you might expect "teachers" to get the documentation right is when they're throwing their kids into solitary confinement.

That's a valid concern, but given that this is a process where an adult has to stand outside the door to observe a child who is typically in severe distress, it seems like mandating adherence to documentation requirements is both important and something they can make time for. There's an upper limit to how much paperwork it will generate.

I think your point is valid and can even be drawn more broadly. Yes, this is horrible, but there's a way that we all share the blame for this. Society's expectations for what education should accomplish have gone through the roof, but nobody wants to commit the resources that are actually required to make it happen. Instead, what we get is more and more top-down legislation, based on questionable research, written by people who don't actually have to deal with real kids day in and day out, that dumps more and more burdens on teachers who are already at the end of their ropes and with insufficient support.

I disagree. Surely this has happened _because_ children have been treated as numbers, not humans. The one thing this needs is humanising quotes and narrative.

This is very deeply unsettling. Solitary confinement is torture, wherever it happens.

Doing this to children should be treated as a very serious crime. The psychological damage this must inflict is surely on par, or worse, with other types of assault.

Also, the fact that this happens to disabled children paints a very dark picture about who gets to be treated as a 'human'.

Establishment educational authorities of one kind or another round the world have a history of enabling and fostering child abuse (of one kind or another). That doesn't just stop by magic.

It can be a lot harder to work with special needs children, but torturing them is no solution.

It is easy to complain.

Propose a solution. Tell us what can be done to stop a crazy evil kid from destroying any hope that others can be educated. Make sure to propose something society can afford. To be affordable, it needs to work in a school of 1000 with 50 staff and 100 crazy evil kids. Remember also that the staff will quit if expected to just stand there while a kid bites them. Remember that the crazy evil kids must be protected from each other, even if you might think they don't deserve it. Remember that we've decided that even the most crazy and evil kid has the right to an education.

Society awaits your affordable non-abusive proposal.

No child is evil. End of. Maybe they are troubled because their needs have not been met. Maybe in the case of special needs children their extra demands are too much for the parents. But they are not evil.

Trying to treat traumatised children by inflicting more trauma is like admitting a child to a hospital and beating them until they somehow get better.

I'm not saying its easy. I don't have a better solution. But there is nothing wrong with saying how screwed up it is. If a society can't provide what is needed for it's children why not come out and say that it's failed, as a whole, on basically its most important job?

Do you believe that no people are evil? If it's just that no child is evil, does the evil pop into existence at age 18 exactly?

Unless you have a better solution, how can you justify saying that we screwed up or that our society has failed? Maybe you are asking for the impossible.

Other societies simply do not attempt to keep crazy evil kids in classrooms with normal kids. That works. Many societies manage to save a portion of the bad ones via various forms of discipline that the USA has mostly abandoned.

Schools in the USA are set up to fail. They have an impossible job. They have no authority to provide effective punishment, and they have no right to reject the crazy evil kids. Of course that doesn't work.

The question of 'evil' is getting a bit theological. I was taking it on face value for the sake of the debate. But no, IMHO evil, good, gods and so on are a social construct through which society finds meaning. Useful fictions like currency, nation states and laws. But fiction.

Certainly we have adults and children who hurt others. There are psychopaths. But they are still human, and they are caused by e.g. damaged attachment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory

The brutality of these rooms is, of course, that they put the boot in the most vulnerable spot by forcibly detaching the child.

But I'm not here to argue about religion. My pricipal point is that by labelling someone evil you are magicking away the cause. And that means you obviate yourself from having to face up to it. Antisocial behaviour can come from all kids of causes but this misplaced vengeful retribution can surely only make it worse.

I won't convince you away from labelling children as "crazy evil kids" especially not on a HN thread. If you can't see this as a real psychological crime, regardless of the externalities, then that's that. I'm sure your viewpoint is shaped by experiences I don't share.

I'm a non-believer and I'm fine with the term "evil". There is no magicking here. Some people are unfit for society. We can cast them out, lock them up, exterminate them, or (in rare cases) force them to behave. Funding is not unlimited, no matter how high we raise taxes.

There is brutality in allowing a crazy evil kid to deny better people their education. We can't run society that way because an uneducated society is simply unable to sustain modern life.

The cause of anti-social behavior is mostly irrelevant to the issue of what schools can or should do about it. It's not the school's job to fix youthful versions of Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Yang Xinhai, or Luis Garavito. The school can't do that. The school is supposed to teach children so that we can have an educated society. The good kids deserve to learn, and this is only possible if we focus our funding (staff, materials, rooms, etc.) on them while excluding those who would disrupt.

I do not assume that vengeful retribution is misplaced, and I do not agree that retribution can only make things worse. Humans evolved the desire for retribution because it often works. Sometimes an actively bad person will shape up as a result, and many other people will be encouraged to continue resisting the urge to misbehave.

Never mind vengeful retribution though. The value of isolating crazy evil kids should be obvious even if we have zero desire for vengeful retribution. By removing lost causes, we make education of other kids possible. The good kids deserve an education.

Never even knew there even were isolation cells in schools, that sounds completely insane.

After the barb-wire, armed guards, and metal detectors, you almost expect "the hole" as part of the deal, no?

Don't forget the automated ML surveillance of everything students say online.

Actually, if you put kids in there you will probably need barb-wire, armed guards and metal detectors at some point. I mean, who seriously expects that NONE of these kids go mental? "Best" case this ends up with a trauma, worst case one of them will eventually grab a gun (at least the odds increase a lot).

> Eli, 7, was secluded more than a dozen times in kindergarten and nearly 50 times in first grade while attending The Center in East Moline, records show

What. the. fuck?

They are just preparing the kids for their inevitable stint in prison isolation units later on in life that are guaranteed due to their being tortured as children. Of course torturing children doesn't need any supervision by the state. I mean come on, who would abuse children? That's never happened once in human history.

Anything beyond suspension should be moved out of the schools into juvenile justice or social services. Throw these problems back to the parents. Of course, such parents are utterly unprepared to deal with this, so focus on helping them.

As others have said, we need to pay up. Figure it costs 3-6 times as much to educate a kid privately as it does publicly, and perhaps that’s an indication out schools run too thin.

Misused? They should not be allowed altogether. It's really sad to read about this, and equally frustrating to see that nothing is being done about it. This kind of behaviour is just sociopathic; it's child abuse.

I think it's a horrible misuse of something that can be a good tool for helping children with sensory issues. A safe room where an adult and a child who is overwhelmed can sit, isolated from the hustle and bustle and sounds of the rest of the school. I have a young relative with autism, and their behavior in school and many other situations improved amazingly when their parents got them a pair of sound dulling ear muffs so that they were no longer overwhelmed by noises.

What precisely should be allowed then, within the budget available to public schools and without shortchanging the education other students who are not misbehaving?

I can see how this situation can come about due to penny wise pound stupid cost cutting. Surely one-to-one help for these kids inside the classroom would be better?

Potentially but it depends.

If you have a child who regularly hits other children, how much in classroom help do you need before you need to remove the child from the situation?

you will need one adult fulltime sitting next to the child supervising them

You'd be surprised how often that is not enough unless you're willing to hold their arms full time.

none of the cases in this article is like that. the adult would obviously be trained in how to deal with it without holding their arms down at all.

It may require to remove the kid from school, but it wouldn't require solitary confinement for the kid. An "isolation room" is something that may get used for adult prison inmates in case of serious infractions, or a psychiatric hospital might use in certain cases with an adequate medical supervision, but solitary confinement is definitely not something that schools should be able to impose at their discretion.

We pretty much banned teachers from removing kids from school. We decided that every kid has the right to be in school, mostly in the normal classrooms.

You can see the result.

Basically, every tool for controlling bad behavior gets labeled "abuse" and banned. We don't seem to notice that the resulting disaster of an environment is abusive to the good kids.

> Surely one-to-one help for these kids inside the classroom would be better?

Probably, but at this point additional spending on staff is likely off the table as Illinois schools districts are some of the most indebted in the nation: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/illinois-21-billion-i...

It's easy to imagine this is a perversion of the purpose that public schools are intended to serve, but it's not. This is the purpose public schools are intended to serve: to create conformity, by whatever means are required, in order to render a society predictable and thus manageable. In service of that purpose, individual children are disposable.

Well, sure, that and Algebra II/Trig.

Well, yeah, but Resistance to Interrogation training is valuable.

What % of high schoolers graduate knowing Algebra II and Trig?

edit: 76%? I'm suspicious.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=97

Algebra II / Trig was a graduation requirement at my kids public high school.

What is a graduation requirement for high school and what high school students know (or can read, at all) at graduation are very different, regardless of whether they graduate.

The same can be asked about the claimed requirement that students graduate as docile cogs in a pliant social machine. Like, what are the stats for that so we can assess which one is the more accurate description of the purpose of schools?

It was, if you ignored the escape hatch. Anybody unable to pass the classes can be judged to have a disability (call it "dyscalcula") and then allowed to graduate with reduced requirements.

This stuff is making a mockery of education. It has even hit college now, with many students getting extra time for tests simply because they were shameless about claiming a disability.

clearly the rooms were designed for a reason. We could have used one when I was in school I remember a case where a kid flipped out and destroyed the nurses room. Can we now talk about why there are mentally ill people everywhere I look.

But by all means, lets keep cutting taxes and letting rich people hide their money wherever. Its not at all possible that this kind of abuse is in part caused by understaffing and a general disregard in financial terms for the value of public education.

This is Illinois, those who want to cut taxes are a minority and rarely have power.

sorry, this is caused by government and buried by the same. it is the lack of accountability most government agencies have that abuses like this fester and only surface with people aghast. We pour billions into school systems but it is mostly aimed at the adults if not retirees of those systems.

I will give you my favorite link about Illinois, it describes the problem we face, we have let politicians reward themselves and their supporters to the point we spend too much sustaining golden retirements and not enough on the here and now[0]. This state is not alone in this problem.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/10/26/ill...

Illinois is a leader in taxes, if anything this highlights how poorly taxes are utilized

Nurse Ratched incarnate, named the fifth top villain in movies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_Ratched.

I'm surprised the word "sexism" doesn't appear, or rather not surprised but disappointed. If the ratio were reversed I suspect we would change the system immediately.

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