I finally have a full draft of my book, What Today Withholds: Autism and Human Rights in America!
Still need to do some copy editing and formatting, but I hope the book will be out this summer.
If you want to keep up with the process, check out my other wordpress site, meganmclaughlinwriting.com, and sign up for my newsletter (which I must admit has been pretty pitiful so far, since I’ve been so focused on the book itself).
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’m pulling material out of my overly long book in order to make it shorter. And then I’m posting that material here. This is an extended version of a post I made in February 2017, but with extra material I added for the book. Hope you find it interesting.
The vast majority of adults recognized as autistic today did not have that label when they were children. Certainly, most adults with what we today call “level 1 autism”[1] would never have been considered autistic in childhood, first because they did not meet the very strict diagnostic criteria laid out by Leo Kanner in the 1940s, and also because so few people had even heard of autism. They might only have been considered “weird” or “eccentric.” An exception was Temple Grandin, famous today for her work in animal science and her advocacy on behalf of people with autism. As a child, she was diagnosed as “brain-damaged”—only much later was she recognized as autistic.[2]
On the other hand, most adults today described as “level 3” autistics[3] were incorrectly diagnosed in their childhoods. They were almost always labelled “psychotic” or “intellectually disabled” or both.[4] Before the 1990s, only a tiny number of children who happened to come to the attention of the small number of researchers interested in the subject, and who met Kanner’s strict criteria, were ever actually labelled “autistic.” As a result, we will need to distinguish between the ways in which these three groups were educated in the past—those who were “eccentric” but “normal,” those who were considered intellectually disabled/mentally ill, and the tiny number actually diagnosed as “autistic.”
Before 1975, when the Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed, most “eccentrics” attended the same schools as their siblings. They usually did so without any support services unless they had additional disabilities, or some thoughtful teacher came to their assistance. A few of them flourished. Others report a painful struggle at school, being punished for behaviors that were beyond their control and wrestling with learning problems that neither they nor their teachers understood. Dawn Prince-Hughes (who later earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology) recalls the horrible year in third grade when she both developed severe asthma and encountered a particularly nasty teacher. This teacher punished her for her unexplained failings in math by refusing to let her engage in the reading and writing assignments at which she excelled. She also announced Prince’s failing math grades, plus the fact that she was being tested for “mental retardation,” to the entire third-grade class.[5]
These undiagnosed children almost always endured horrendous bullying from both teachers and classmates.[6] Insults, real and threatened beatings, tripping, pushing, being shut in lockers, suffering “swirlies” in the toilet and other forms of humiliation were commonplace.[7] For some, this was simply the way things were:
It never occurred to me at that time to talk to my parents about the problem of bullying in school and the teachers never told them either. I accepted it as a fact of life.[8]
Others were driven to retaliate. After years in elite private schools for girls, Temple Grandin finally got tired of being called names. When one of her seventh-grade classmates called out, “Retard! You’re nothing but a retard!”, Grandin threw a book at her, hitting her in the face. She was expelled from the school as a result.[9] A few of these kids became bullies themselves. [10] Still others, like John Elder Robison, finding it too difficult to cope with the stresses of school, either dropped or failed out.[11]
But what about the other two groups, the tiny few with an actual autism diagnosis, and the much larger number considered “mentally retarded” or “psychotic”? Before 1975, these children seldom received much schooling at all. Most public school systems refused to allow them in their classrooms.[12] A few parents managed to get a diagnosed child into a school, but the experiment seldom lasted more than a few months before the child was either withdrawn or expelled.[13] No services existed to help such a child survive, let alone thrive, in the public school environment. A few well-informed or well-connected families managed place their children in one of a handful of establishments designed specifically for the “severely damaged” or “profoundly disabled.”[14] These establishments tended to focus on teaching functional living skills (toileting, dressing, speaking). But sometimes they offered the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic to children who were considered able to manage those subjects.[15] Judgments about ability were seldom correct, however. Charles Martel Hale, Jr., for example, who was non-speaking and labelled “severely to profoundly mentally retarded,” attended a supposedly high-quality program in Queens, New York in the early to mid-1970s. He learned living skills, but not academics. But when he finally learned to communicate on the typewriter and computer in the 1990s, he explained that he had taught himself to add, subtract and multiply by listening to conversations and television programs.[16]
Most “autistic,” “psychotic” or “mentally retarded” children were (on the advice of doctors and other professionals) swiftly shunted into psychiatric institutions or homes for the “feeble-minded,” and left to fend for themselves.[17] Tom McKean, who had attended his neighborhood school from kindergarten through third grade, before being transferred to classes for the Learning Disabled, was finally diagnosed as autistic in seventh grade and promptly removed to a psychiatric institution.[18] Some of the institutions in which these children were confined called themselves “schools,” but few offered much in the way of an education. They might provide various forms of vocational training, so that residents could help “earn their keep.” Most, though, were simply warehouses. There, autistic residents lived in ignorance and squalor, exposed to hunger, cold, and disease, and subject to abuse by older children and adult residents and staff. Jerry Alter entered the first of a series of psychiatric institutions at the tender age of five. When they visited, his parents found him with bruises and black eyes, and so heavily medicated that he spent most of his time sleeping; later his sister expressed gratitude that he “only” acquired tuberculosis, and not—like so many other residents—a venereal disease at the state hospital where he was living.[19] This was the kind of brutal environment in which most obviously autistic children found themselves before 1975.
[1] Still commonly called “high functioning” autism, even though functioning labels have little real meaning, as we shall see below.
[3] Commonly called “low functioning,” although, again, these labels are largely meaningless.
[4] Autism, as defined by Kanner, was considered a form of childhood schizophrenia until the 1970s.
[5] Dawn Prince-Hughes, Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 41-44. Given the popular association of autism with special math skills, it is worth noting how many autistic adults, undiagnosed as children, remember struggling with the subject in their childhood. Liane Holliday Willey reports that she “hated and was terrible in math”: Pretending to Be Normal: Living with Aspergers Syndrome (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1999; expanded ed., 2014), p. 47. Stephen Shore’s first grade teacher told his parents that he would never be able to do math. In college, however, he successfully completed calculus and statistics, and earned a degree in accounting, before going on to earn a Ph.D. in Special Education: Beyond the Wall: Personal Experiences with Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Shawnee Mission, KS: Autism Asperger Publishing Co., 2002; 2nd ed. 2003), p. 53
[6] Sparrow Rose Jones, “Autistic Pride Day 2015—Letter to Myself as a Child,” on the Unstrange Mind blog: https://unstrangemind.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/autistic-pride-day-2015-letter-to-myself-as-a-child/ .
[7] There will be more on this topic below.
[8] Stephen Shore, Beyond the Wall: Personal Experiences with Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Shawnee Mission, KS: Autism Asperger Publishing Co., 2002; 2nd ed. 2003), p. 56.
[9] Temple Grandin, with Margaret Scariano, Emergence: Labeled Autistic (Novato, CA: Arena Press, 1986; reissued with additional material: New York: Grand Central Press, 2005), pg. 68.
[10] Cynthia Kim, Nerdy, Shy and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 2015), pp. 12-17.
[11] John Elder Robison, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Aspergers (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), pp. 85-94.
[12] On the exclusion from school of children with an autism diagnosis before 1975, see Anne Donnellan, “An Educational Perspective on Autism: Implications for Curriculum Development and Personnel Development,” in Barbara Wilson and Anneke Thompson, eds., Critical Issues in Educating Autistic Children and Youth (Washington, DC: United States Department of Education, 1980), p. 53.
[13] For an example of a diagnosed child who spent a short while in the public schools, see Jules Bemporad, “Adults Recollections of a Formerly Autistic Child,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 9 (1979), p. 184. Incidentally, the word “formerly” in the article title does not refer to any form of “recovery” from autism. Instead, the child whose life is recounted has turned into an adult and Bemporad seems unwilling to describe an adult as “autistic.”
[14] E.g., Rud Turnbull, The Exceptional Life of Jay Turnbull: Disability and Dignity in America, 1967-2009 (Amherst, MA: White Poppy Press, 2011), Chapter 2.
[15] The individual interviewed by Jules Bemporad (note 11 above), learned to multiply in such a school—this skill later provided him with great satisfaction. But his school was exceptional.
[16] Charles Martel Hale, Jr., “I Had No Means to Shout” (Bloomington, IN: 1stBooks Library, 1999).
[17] Wendlyn Alter, “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby: An Interview with Jerry Alter,” Chalice (April-May, 2014), pp. 11-15, describes how her brother Jerry was hospitalized at the age of 5.
[18] Thomas McKean, Soon Will Come the Light: A View from Inside the Autism Puzzle (Arlington, TX: Future Horizons, 1994; 2nd ed. 2001), pp. 3-5.
[19] Wendlyn Alter, “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby: An Interview with Jerry Alter,” Chalice (April-May, 2014), pp. 11-15.
Dear Folks. As you know, I’ve been working for years now on a book on autism and human rights. I’ve recently been looking for publishers, and one of them, on their submission portal, asked how long the book was. So I went back and counted words.
Whoops! It’s way, WAY longer than anyone is going to publish or most normal (autistic or neurotypical) people would want to read. Being who I am, I need to provide data to back up the points I make. But the data is making the book far too long. So–change of plan.
I’m going to take most of the data and detailed arguments about the data out of the book and put it here on my blog. So if anyone wants to know why I say certain things in the book, the back-up information will be here.
Of course, dear readers, that means YOU get stuck with all that data. I will do my best to feed it to you in small and fairly palatable chunks, and to intersperse it with other things. I hope you will stick with me, because this information is important and should be widely known.
Thanks for your patience.
Hi. As many of you know, a lot of the posts on this blog are part of a book on autism and human rights in the United States that I am close to finishing.
Now I’m starting to spread the word about it (before they even consider your book, publishers want you to have a group of people who are interested in buying or reviewing it already in place . . .)
If you are interested, please go to my author’s website at http:/meganmclaughlinwriting.com and sign up for email updates (I promise there won’t be too many, because that’s annoying, right?)
Thanks!
In Utah, an autistic 13-year-old with severe separation anxiety had a meltdown when his mom had to go back to work. She called the police to help get him to a hospital. She explained that he was autistic. She explained that he was unarmed.
And yet, they marched into the house, ordered him to “get on the ground” (great idea during a meltdown–*sarcasm*) and then shot him multiple times. He’s in the hospital with injuries to his intestines, bladder, should and ankle.
This is what comes of having “warrior” policing. It’s time the police start thinking of themselves as guardians of the people, not warriors. (see Seth Stoughton, “Law Enforcement’s ‘Warrior’ Problem” on the Harvard Law Review Forum). And it’s way past time for the police to learn what a meltdown really is and how to deal with it.
Many students—not just autistic ones—believe that they have been unfairly suspended or expelled from school. Many students—not just autistic ones—do not fully understand why they were suspended or expelled (sometimes it is hard for adults to figure that out either). Suspensions are very often used as a punishment in U.S. schools not only for serious offences, but also for all kinds of minor infractions of the rules. Crying in school may lead to unofficial suspensions, in which parents are told to pick up their children and take them home. But students may be officially suspended for not meeting the school dress code (this includes even very young children, whose parents pick out their clothes), for having the “wrong” hairstyle, or even for carrying a backpack with the “wrong” picture on it.[1] Most school codes of student conduct still include vague terms for misbehavior, such “insubordination” or “willful defiance,” which individual teachers can interpret subjectively. In recent years, some major school districts have removed this language, but in many other places students can still be suspended for eye-rolling, walking away from a teacher without being dismissed, failing to complete homework, or even tapping their feet on the floor.[2]
Sometimes just needing to use the restroom at an inconvenient time for the teacher or other school staff member will be enough. In December 2018, an 11-year-old autistic African-American child asked to use the bathroom in his elementary school. The principal of the school, who was escorting him and another student back to their special education classroom, refused to let him go–even though access to the restroom at any time was the rule for Special Education students. The child couldn’t get around the principal to reach the nearby bathroom, so he went out the back door of the school to find another restroom. The principal then ordered school staff to lock all the doors and not let the student back in. He wasn’t trying to run away—in fact, he spent 15 minutes circling the school, as teachers ignored his appeals for help, walking past him outside without speaking, and even pulling down the window blinds in his face. Finally, another student took pity and opened a door for him. The school sent his parents an incident report, but they failed to mention the dangerous and illegal lock-out—and the child received a two-day suspension for leaving the school building without permission. Only after the school’s security tapes were reviewed did the true story come out. The principal was then placed on paid administrative leave.[3]
Suspension and expulsion are over-used forms of discipline in American schools, for students of all neurotypes. But autistic children face special challenges. Sensory, emotional, or other stressors can drive them into meltdowns or shutdowns, during which their “fight or flight” instincts take control, sometimes leading to violent reactions. Meltdowns /shutdowns are clearly “manifestations” of autism, and so theoretically schools should respond to them with behavioral interventions. Yet in practice, many autistic students face suspension, expulsion, and even arrest for what they do during these episodes. Students cannot control their own actions during meltdowns, so is it reasonable or fair for them to be punished in this way?
Moreover, many teachers don’t acknowledge their own role in triggering these problems. In New Mexico, for example, a second-grader had a meltdown because his teacher yelled directly into his face, and then took away his Ipad, which was a very important comfort object for him. She caused the meltdown, during which she was struck in the nose, causing a bruise. Yet not only was the child—who happens to be black—suspended from school for having a meltdown, but his teacher actually pressed battery charges against an 8-year-old.[4]
In Florida, an autistic fourth-grader who had just gone through a long, stressful day of testing, was bothered by the noise when his teacher put on a movie (presumably as a reward for the other students.) Seraph put on headphones and sat at a computer to distract himself from the noise, but he could still hear the movie. So he started tapping computer keys loudly to drown it out. That’s where the trouble began. The teacher called in the dean, the assistant principal, and the school resource officer to remove him from his classroom. He was willing to leave, but, looking for a quiet place to recover from the noise, he entered the school media room. At this point, another teacher began reading a book to him—yet more noise. Seraph, with his hands covering his ears, went over to the teacher and knocked at the book, using his elbow. (The teacher was untouched). The school resource officer then tackled him to the ground with so much force that Seraph ended up with carpet burns on his face. He was suspended for several days—not because anyone was injured or even threatened, but simply because he was autistic and overstressed by noise.[5]
It is not unusual for autistic students to be get in trouble for leaving their classroom, or even their school without permission. What is unusual is for schools to acknowledge what autistic students remember–that they often fled to avoid bullying:
I received three suspensions from my school during my time there, two for leaving the room to seek sanctuary in the library when the entire class (teachers included) united in mocking me, and one for deliberate non attendance over a period of days (truanting).[6]
Autistic students are disproportionately bullied at school. And within a few years of being in school, they realize that the advice they are given—”speak to a member of the school staff”—is almost always ineffective. School staff rarely stop the bullying. They may fail to see what happened (and bullies are very adept at flying under the radar). They may believe the bullies rather than the victim—because a highly verbal neurotypical bully can be more convincing than an autistic victim, or because there may be multiple bullies whose united testimony outweighs that of the victim. (This is what happened to my own daughter.) School staffers may simply not care.
one time a boy way bigger than me punched me in the face and made my nose bleed, and a teacher caught me inside trying to clean myself up, and I got yelled at for being inside during recess even though I was dripping with blood; nothing was done about the boy who hit me . . .[7]
People beat me up and they’d go free and I’d be in detention.[8]
Teachers may even dislike the autistic student and want him or her to suffer. One autistic student listed reasons why she hated school:
Being bullied and being told it was my fault.
Being my teacher’s punching bag.[9]
The only solutions for these students are either to endure the suffering (the trauma this causes was described in an earlier post), to run away (and thus be suspended), or to retaliate—and retaliation often ends in their being suspended or expelled as well. Here is “Aristophanes’s” description of his experience at school:
Attempting to avoid a fight, getting flat out sucker punched instead, and going to the principal who gave me as much detention as the aggressor, reasoning ‘you’re going to be an adult soon, you need to learn to solve your own problems, that’s the lesson here.’
Going back literally a week later, getting punched again, and retaliating by stomping my heel on the kid’s ankle, fracturing his tibia and earning me a suspension that go around.[10]
Other autistic students remember fighting with their bullies, and then being punished for it—while the bullies got off scot free:
Once [a privileged person] tried to stab me and he got off without a punishment simply because [his] family was rich. I got a suspension and was threatened with expulsion because i kicked him in the stomach and dropped him to the ground.[11]
An increasing number of parents are filing lawsuits against school districts that allow things like this to happen. For example, a Staten Island teenager was suspended for three days because he allegedly pushed to the ground bullies who had been physically assaulting him for years—including breaking his arm at one point. His parents sued the school district, “claiming he was wrongfully punished for something his school should’ve done — and that’s stop his bullying.”[12] A lawsuit pending in Cinncinnati, Ohio, charges a local school district with denying a student’s right to FAPE, both by refusing to recognize his disabilities and provide appropriate accommodations, and by failing to address the constant bullying he was subjected to. The suit alleges that the school district suspended this young man multiple times, when he fought back or even just shouted at the students bullying him. Even when he didn’t fight back, the school sometimes disciplined him. In one of the incidents reported in the lawsuit, a bully spit on him, and called him names on the school bus. It was the victim, not the bully, who was suspended for this incident.[13]
Perhaps the most significant problem with the use of suspension and expulsion as forms of discipline is that many autistic students hate school, and therefore prefer being removed from it. This is the attitude of “Agent Smirnoff”:
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in suspension, as it granted me peace from the incessant bullying and allowed me to play on my computer all day.[14]
“deog” felt the same was about expulsion:
The highschool years are very difficult. . . . My misery and depression was profound. I got expelled by my sophmore year. i was ditching certain classes almost every single day… I was so happy when I got expelled and I have no regrets about that because I was just done . . .[15]
It is fairly common for autistic and other students to misbehave on purpose in order to get some relief from their sufferings at school. Sebastian, a student in New Mexico “relished being sent to in-school suspension, which he came to see as a haven from the stress of the classroom. Once, his mom says, he randomly punched a classmate in the parking lot in an effort to get sent back to the peace and quiet of in-school suspension.”[16]
When I was in grade school, I would purposely act up in order TO GET suspended. Sure my mom wouldn’t let me watch TV and stuff and would sometimes make me work on store bought workbooks, but I didn’t care. I just didn’t want to be at school. Suspension was a reward to me. The school was starting to catch on that I was acting up on purpose and tried something called an “in school suspension”. I was in a classroom with a “babysitter” and with the exception of the “babysitter”, I was all alone. I was allowed to draw and color all day long. The classroom I was in was even quieter than my own house. I perfered quiet. Some punishment.[17]
The problem with students seeking out suspension and even expulsion for relief from stress is that they don’t realize the implications for their future. Having a “record” is not helpful when applying to college or looking for a job, but many autistic students find school so painful that they don’t care.
Instead of suspending autistic students at such high rates, school districts should be looking for ways to make school more tolerable for them, ways to prevent them from having meltdowns, ways to seriously address the problem of bullying.
[1] Morgan Craven et al., “Suspended Childhood: An Analysis of Exclusionary Discipline of Texas’ Pre-K and Elementary School Students, Updated with 2015-16 Data,” for the Texas Appleseed organization, November, 2015; updated March, 2017: http://stories.texasappleseed.org/suspended-childhood-updated.
[2] Nina Agrawal, “California expands ban on ‘willful defiance’ suspensions in schools,” Los Angeles Times September 10, 2019: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-10/school-suspension-willful-defiance-california.
[3] Jessica Oh, “Child with autism locked out of school,” report on Kiro 7 television in Seattle, January 23, 2019: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/child-with-autism-locked-out-of-school/908564250/. This incident was widely reported elsewhere.
[4] “Teacher files charges against 8-year-old student who hit her”, report on KQRE TV, April 14, 2018: https://abc13.com/education/teacher-files-charges-against-8-year-old-student-who-hit-her/3344462/. The incident was also widely reported.
[5] David M. Perry, “America Keeps Criminalizing Autistic Children,” Pacific Standard June 12, 2017: https://psmag.com/education/america-keeps-criminalizing-autistic-children.
[6] Agent Smirnoff, in the “Is Suspension Really a Punishment?” discussion on the Wrong Planet website: https://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=194004.
[7] dragoncat, in the “Things You Hated About School” discussion on the Autism Forums website (October 28, 2017): https://www.autismforums.com/threads/things-you-hated-about-school.22361/#post-443119. It is worth noting that this topic elicited four pages of responses.
[8] tlc, in the “Things You Hated About School” discussion on the Autism Forums website (March 30, 2018): https://www.autismforums.com/threads/things-you-hated-about-school.22361/#post-443119.
[9] SchrodingersMeerkat, in the “Things You Hated About School” discussion on the Autism Forums website (October 27, 2017): https://www.autismforums.com/threads/things-you-hated-about-school.22361/#post-443119.
[10] Aristophanes, in the “Why School Sucked” discussion on the Wrong Planet website: https://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=357585&start=60.
[11] The Musings of the Lost, in the “Why School Sucked” discussion on the Wrong Planet website: https://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=357585&start=60.
[12] Elizabeth Rosner and Chris Perez, “Autistic student suspended for standing up to bullies, $5M suit claims,” New York Post August 17, 2018: https://nypost.com/2018/08/17/autistic-student-suspended-for-standing-up-to-bullies-5m-suit-claims/.
[13] Max Londberg, “Suit: Winton Woods Officials Allowed Bullying of Student with ‘Significant Autism’ for Years,” Cincinnati Enquirer August 19, 2019: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2019/08/19/suit-winton-woods-officials-allowed-bullying-student-autism/2054763001/.
[14] Agent Smirnoff, in the “Is Suspension Really a Punishment?” discussion on the Wrong Planet website: https://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=194004.
[15] deog, in the “I’m So Done!!!! discussion on the Autism Forums website: https://www.autismforums.com/threads/im-so-done.27361/#post-552380.
[16] Ed Williams, “Criminalizing Disability,” Searchlight New Mexico, May 7, 2019:
[17] MagicMeerkat, in the “Is Suspension Really a Punishment?” discussion on the Wrong Planet website: https://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=194004.
The reality of school discipline is more complicated than the law would suggest. To begin with, students with disabilities, as a group, are much more likely to be suspended from school than students without disabilities. A 2018 report, “School Climate and Safety Report” published by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found that even though only 12% of all students in the U.S. have disabilities, 26% of those subject to out-of-school suspension and 24% of those expelled have disabilities. In other words, students with disabilities are being suspended and expelled at roughly twice the rate of other students.[1] Students of color, especially African Americans, face even higher rates of disciplinary removal from school. Among students with identified disabilities, roughly 9% of whites and Hispanics were suspended in any given year, while 21% of Native Americans and 23% of black students were suspended.[2]
If we look specifically at autistic students, we should remember, first of all, that there are still many autistic students who have not been formally diagnosed. Unless they happen to have another, recognized, disability, they are not protected under IDEA and may be suspended or expelled because of behavior that would be considered a “manifestation” of autism in a diagnosed student. Since girls and minority students are much less likely than white male students to be diagnosed with autism, they are also more likely to lack IDEA protections against excessive suspensions and expulsions.[3]
Relatively little research has focused on children with an actual autism diagnosis, but a 2018 report from the Center for American Progress states that pre-school children diagnosed with autism are ten times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their “typically developing” peers.[4] A 2017 research study analyzes data for older children in the state of Maryland, from 2004 to 2015. The authors found that about 3.3% of both white and African American students with autism were suspended during this period. White autistic students were much more likely that non-disabled white students to be suspended, while autistic African American students were less likely to be suspended than non-disabled African American students.[5]
The fact that both groups of autistic students this study were suspended at the same rate suggests that both groups were treated equally. But bear in mind that African Americans are much less likely than whites to be diagnosed with autism and may instead be diagnosed with intellectual or emotional disabilities. In the same study, 10.5% of African American students with intellectual disability had been suspended at least once, compared to only 7.3% of white students with ID. If we assume that at least some of those diagnosed with ID also have autism, or have been misdiagnosed with ID instead of autism, then it looks like the rate of suspension for African American students with autism probably is higher than it is for whites.[6] The authors provided no data comparing students with autism and students with “emotional disturbance,” but African-American children with autism are very frequently misdiagnosed with ED, and students with ED are the most likely of all disability groups to be suspended or expelled. It seems plausible, then, to assume that African Americans and members of other minority groups with autism are at higher risk of being removed from school than white students with autism.
There is also the question of how often autistic students are suspended. Sometimes schools suspend children “unofficially,” by saying they are having a “bad day” and would be better off at home. They call the parents to pick the child up, but do not register this event as a suspension.[7] This allows the school to get around federal regulations that limit the number of suspensions that can be imposed on students with disabilities. As a result, suspensions from school can occur with stunning frequency. A report on television news in Washington state looked at statewide rates of suspension and expulsion for students with disabilities, with results similar to those described above. The main focus of the report, a young autistic man named Austin, was suspended for more than 100 days during his time in middle school (far, far beyond the 10 days a year allowed under IDEA and federal regulations). Another young autistic man in Washington state was officially suspended for 24 days, and unofficially for 45 days, for a total of 69 days out of the classroom during a single school year.[8] While these are extreme cases, it is not at all unusual for schools to use unofficial removals to evade the limits set on suspensions by law.
Repeated removals from school obviously limit children’s educational opportunities, leading them to fall farther and farther behind other students academically. But beyond that, repeated suspensions and expulsion from school have devastating emotional effects on children. As Austin, the young man mentioned in the last paragraph, put it: “I felt like I was one of the worst kids that ever was because they were just constantly sending me home.” [9] Disciplinary removal may alienate children from schools which they see as simply not wanting them. And so, children repeatedly suspended and expelled are much more likely to drop out of school altogether.[10] “As a teen, I was expelled from the entire county school system and my parents had to find a private school willing to take me. At sixteen, I dropped out of school altogether,” recalls one autistic adult.[11]
Finally, repeated suspensions and expulsion promote entry into the “school-to-prison pipeline,” especially, but certainly not exclusively, for young African American males.[12] School “resource officers” (i.e., armed police officers) often intervene in disturbances at school, all too often in inappropriate ways. They may end up handcuffing and even bringing to jail autistic students seen as “disruptive”—setting up a vicious cycle in which these students see authorities as the enemy and act out accordingly. In addition, many suspended and expelled students spend their days unsupervised at home or on the streets, where they may engage in a variety of criminal activities, eventually leading to arrest and imprisonment.
As research has repeatedly shown, disciplinary removal from school has no positive impact at all on student behavior. On the contrary, it is more likely to worsen that behavior.[13] As a result, the official policy of many school districts is that suspension and expulsion should only be used when necessary to protect other students and staff, or when guns or drugs are involved. In practice, however, these disciplinary techniques are often used to “punish” students who skip classes, fail to complete their homework, or talk back to their teachers. As we’ll see in the next post, autistic students who receive these punishments often view them as senseless, and even malicious (a way for “mean teachers” to get back at them).
[1] Office of Civil Rights, Department of Education, “School Climate and Safety,” 2018 report based on the 2015-16 Civil Rights Data Collection: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/school-climate-and-safety.pdf. The disparity begins in preschool: Cristina Novoa and Rasheed Malik, “Suspensions Are Not Support: The Disciplining of Preschoolers With Disabilities” (Report from the Center for American Progress, January17, 2018: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2018/01/17/445041/suspensions-not-support/. See also [No author], “Washington special needs students disciplined more than twice as often as general education peers,” report on King5 television news: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/washington-special-needs-students-disciplined-more-than-twice-as-often-as-general-education-peers/281-608161669.
[2] Nicholas Gage, et al., “National Analysis of the Disciplinary Exclusion of Black Students with and without Disabilities,” Journal of Child and Family Studies 28:7 (2019), 1754-64.
[3] Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Special Education: A Multi-Year Disproportionality Analysis by State, Analysis Category, and Race/Ethnicity” (2016), pp. 23-24: https://www2.ed.gov/programs/osepidea/618-data/LEA-racial-ethnic-disparities-tables/index.html.
[4] Cristina Novoa and Rasheed Malik, “Suspensions Are Not Support: The Disciplining of Preschoolers With Disabilities” (Report from the Center for American Progress, January17, 2018: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2018/01/17/445041/suspensions-not-support/.
[5] M. Krezmien, et al., “Suspension Rates of Students with Autism or Intellectual Disabilities in Maryland from 2004 to 2015,” Journal of Intellectual Disability 61:11 (November, 2017), 1011-1020
[6] M. Krezmien, et al., “Suspension Rates of Students with Autism or Intellectual Disabilities in Maryland from 2004 to 2015,” Journal of Intellectual Disability 61:11 (November, 2017), 1011-1020.
[7] Robert Tudisco, “Can the School Give my Child With an IEP ‘Unofficial” Suspensions?’”, on the Understood.org website: https://www.understood.org/en/school-learning/your-childs-rights/basics-about-childs-rights/can-the-school-give-my-child-with-an-iep-unofficial-suspensions; see also Cristina Novoa and Rasheed Malik, “Suspensions Are Not Support: The Disciplining of Preschoolers With Disabilities” (Report from the Center for American Progress, January17, 2018: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2018/01/17/445041/suspensions-not-support/.
[8] Report from the Washington State ACLU, “Pushed out; kicked out: Stories from families with special education students in Washington”: https://www.aclu-wa.org/pages/pushed-out-kicked-out-stories-families-special-education-students-washington.
[9] [No author], “Washington special needs students disciplined more than twice as often as general education peers,” report on King5 television news: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/washington-special-needs-students-disciplined-more-than-twice-as-often-as-general-education-peers/281-608161669.
[10] Amity Noltemeyer, Rose Marie Ward, and Caven Mcloughlin, “Relationship Between School Suspension and Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis,” School Psychology Review 44 (2015), 224-40; Susan Faircloth, “Factors Impacting the Graduation and Dropout Rates of American Indian Males with Disabilities,” in Susan Faircloth, Ivory Toldson, and Robert Lucio, eds., Decreasing Dropout Rates for Minority Male Youth with Disabilities from Culturally and Ethnically Diverse Backgrounds (Clemson, SC: National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities, 2014), pp. 8-9.
[11] Max [formerly known as Sparrow Rose] Jones, No You Don’t: Essays from an Unstrange Mind (Self-published, 2013), p. 51
[12] Abigail Novak, “The association between experiences of exclusionary discipline and justice system contact: A systematic review,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 40 (2018), 73-82; Amity L. Noltemeyer, Rose Marie Ward, and Caven Mcloughlin, “Relationship Between School Suspension and Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis,” School Psychology Review 44: 2, (June, 2015): 224-24; A.E. Cuellar and S. Markowitz, “School Suspension and the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” International Review of Law and Economics 43 (2015), 98-106.
[13] Ambra Green, Deanna Maynard, and Sondra Stegenga, “Common misconceptions of suspension: Ideas and alternatives for school leaders,” Psychology in the Schools 55:4 (April, 2018), 419-28.
My apologies for all the legal stuff that follows. Understanding how suspension and expulsion can legally be imposed on autistic children requires understanding the complicated provisions concerning student discipline laid out in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), as amended in 1997 and 2004.
In the United States, under the current, amended form of IDEA, not only are children with autism and other disabilities entitled to FAPE (a free, appropriate, public education, in the least restrictive environment possible), but school actions that might deny them FAPE by removing them from the classroom are subject to legal limitations.[1] The school must be very careful about removing a child temporarily (suspension) or permanently (expulsion), if the child’s behavior is a “manifestation” of her or his disability—that is, the behavior is caused either by the disability itself, or by the school’s failure to carry out the child’s IEP plan. For example, if a child gets into trouble for not doing what the teacher says, and if it turns out that the child has an auditory processing disorder which makes it difficult or impossible to hear what the teacher is saying, and if the accommodations for auditory processing disorder written into her or his IEP have not been fully implemented, then the school cannot suspend or expel the child.
The school also cannot use removals from the classroom in ways that turns them into an unofficial “change of placement” to a more restrictive environment.[2] If the school does want a change of placement, it is supposed to follow a formal review process, showing that the school has done all that it can to offer the student accommodations and teach him or her “better” behaviors, without success. But because these actions present a major obstacle to their child receiving FAPE, parents who know their child’s rights can and do appeal school decisions through the state education system and possibly in court.
Schools use both in-school suspensions, in which a child is removed from the classroom but remains in the building, and out-of-school suspensions, in which a child is normally sent home, to punish unwanted behaviors. According to federal regulations, a disabled child cannot be suspended in either setting for more than ten consecutive school days in response to a particular incident. If the school wants to suspend a child for a longer period of time, it must provide appropriate educational and additional IEP services, at the school or at home, so that the child can continue to receive an education. The school must also hold a “manifestation determination review” to decide whether the child’s unwanted behavior or behaviors is a “manifestation” of their disability. If they conclude that it is, additional efforts must be made to modify the child’s behavior. The school is required to review his or her Individualized Education Program (IEP) to ensure that it is being fully implemented, possibly conduct a first or a new Functional Behavior Analysis (FBA) to determine why the child is “misbehaving” in the first place, and then find ways to teach the student “better” behaviors, while keeping her or him in the classroom.[3]
Even for students whose behavior is determined to be a “manifestation” of their disability, there are exceptions to the “ten day” rule. Under certain circumstances—involving guns, drugs, or serious violence against another person—a student may be removed from the school for up to 45 days, as long as educational services continue to be provided in an “interim alternative educational setting.”[4] The law does not specify what this term refers to—it simply says that the child should continue to receive educational services while in this setting. Under some circumstances and in some places, children may be sent to special programs run by the school district, but located away from the school itself. Under other circumstances, children may be sent to juvenile detention centers, residential treatment centers, or even psychiatric hospitals. There are educational opportunities at these places, but they are—to say the least—extremely limited.
Even without guns or drugs or violence being involved, schools can legally suspend autistic students more than once a year, so long as educational services continue to be provided. But if a school repeatedly suspends a child, as punishment for the same or similar behaviors, then it is moving into dangerous legal territory. Repeated suspensions (even if each one is no more than ten days in length), create a “pattern” of administrative behavior that begins to look like an unstated change of placement (a denial of FAPE). Federal regulations warn schools not to suspend a student with disabilities for the same or similar behaviors for more than 10 days over the course of a single school year, because this begins to look like a change of placement. [5] If there are more than ten days of suspension during the year, the school district determines whether the suspensions constitute a change of placement, on a case-by-case basis– but parents have the right to appeal to the courts on the grounds that their child is not receiving FAPE.
If a school decides it wants to expel an autistic child, the IEP team must hold a manifestation determination review within 10 days after the decision is made. If the child’s behavior is found to be a manifestation of autism, then the child cannot be expelled. If the behavior is not found to be a manifestation of disability, parents have the right to call for a due process hearing, in which the IEP team’s decision will be reviewed by a hearing officer. Depending on the state, there may be a one- or a two-tiered system—in the former, the case is heard by a state hearing officer, in the latter, the case is heard first by an officer from the school district, and then (if the parents decide to appeal) by a hearing officer from the state. If the parents are still not satisfied, they can bring a civil law case against the school district.
This is the law as laid out in the amended text of IDEA and in federal regulations. Disabled students’ rights to a free, appropriate, public education must be protected. Unfortunately, though, far too many school districts do actually find ways of removing “troublesome” students without considering whether the “troublesome” behaviors are manifestations of the students’ disabilities, and without following the procedures required by law. I will discuss some of these practices in my next post.
[1] IDEA, part B, subpart E, sections 300.530-300.536: https://sites.ed.gov/idea/regs/b/e.
[2] IDEA, part B, subpart E, section 300.536
[3] IDEA, part B, subpart E, section 300.530.
[4] IDEA, part B, subpart E, section 300.530.
[5] Code of Federal Regulations, 2005. Title 34: Education. Section 300.536, “Change of Placement Because of Disciplinary Removals.” This regulation was added to the Code in 2005, to clarify the 2004 amendment of IDEA.
The traditional term for not speaking is ‘dumb.’ That says it all. If someone can’t talk then they are ‘dumb.’ I am dumb, apparently. The thesaurus offers these synonyms for dumb: among them mute, speechless, silent, and then fifty additional synonyms for stupidity, including the colorful pinheaded and dim-witted. The bias equating intelligence with speech…
Civil Rights for Nonspeakers — Ido in Autismland
Trigger warning: descriptions of abusive practices.
Annoyance warning: this post is really long–sorry about that . . .
In November 2018, Alex Campbell, 13 years old and autistic, travelled to Washington, D.C., where he spoke to congressional staffers and disability activists about being physically restrained and secluded in his elementary school. Alex is a seasoned advocate—he started talking to legislators in his home state of Virginia about these abusive practices at the ripe old age of ten, and the trip to Washington in 2018 was his second visit with federal legislators and staffers. He plans to be a civil rights lawyer when he grows up.
But back when he was seven years old, Alex attended a private elementary school for children with disabilities. He remembers being repeatedly dragged from his classroom to the school’s “crisis room,” a converted storage closet with black-painted walls and a tiny window. The teacher or administrator who took him there would shove a heavy desk against the door to prevent it from opening and then leave him alone, confused and terrified. “When I asked for help or asked if anyone was still there, nobody would answer,” Alex said. “I felt alone. I felt scared.”[1] At the time, Virginia had no law requiring such schools to inform parents if their children were restrained or secluded, and the principal of Alex’s school threatened to confine him to the “crisis room” for the rest of the year if he told his parents about what was happening. However, his mother and father soon noticed that their son had unexplained bruises, and that he was becoming more and more anxious. Eventually, he broke down and told them what was happening to him at school.
Sadly, Alex Campbell’s history is far from unusual. Shortly after Alex spoke in Washington for the second time, another autistic thirteen-year-old, Max Benson, was held for a prolonged period in a dangerous “prone restraint” by staff members in the private school for children with disabilities he attended in California. Max later died in hospital from his injuries. The use of prone restraints in schools is against the law in California, but the school in question (which has since gone out of business) frequently used them anyway.[2]
The U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection reports that roughly 124,000 students were restrained or secluded across the country during the latest period for which data is currently available, the 2015-16 school year.[12] But this is certainly an undercount, and perhaps by a large amount. Many school districts do not collect the relevant data, or they fail to deliver it to the Department of Education as required. Even when they do make a report, the information provided may not be accurate. For example, the internal records of Cedar Rapids Community School District in Iowa showed that there had been 1,400 restraint/seclusion incidents from 2012-14—but none of these was reported to the U.S. Department of Education. Iowa’s two senators launched an investigation into this underreporting.[13] Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia likewise reported zero cases of restraint or seclusion during the 2015-16 school year. However, following an investigation by a journalist from American University, Fairfax County Schools reported 1,700 cases in 2017-18.[14] In the CRDC survey, roughly 70% of all school districts nationwide reported zero cases of restraint and seclusion in 2015-16.[15] If their reports were anything similar to those of Cedar Rapids or Fairfax County, then many, many cases of children being restrained and secluded have probably been kept hidden from the Department of Education’s view.
Children with disabilities (primarily children with autism and ADHD) are much more likely than those without disabilities to face physical restraint and seclusion (isolation), as well as other forms of discipline such as suspension and expulsion. According to the U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2015-16 school year, while children with disabilities represented only 12% of students nationally, they represented 71% of those suffering restraint and 66% of those facing seclusion.[3] Children of color are especially likely to face restraint, seclusion, and even arrest, for minor infractions of school discipline. After eleven-year-old African-American Kayleb Moon-Robinson, who is autistic, kicked a trash can during a meltdown in 2014, his Virginia school’s police officer filed charges of disorderly conduct against him in juvenile court. The punishment imposed by the school was that he was only allowed to leave the classroom after his classmates had done so. A few weeks later he broke this rule by leaving with the other kids. The school principal called the police officer, who grabbed Kayleb and tried to take him to the office; when the child resisted, he was slammed down, handcuffed, and taken instead to juvenile court, where he was charged not only with a second count of disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor) but also with “assault on a police officer” (a felony). A judge later found him guilty on all charges, and Kayleb faced doing time in a juvenile detention facility, but in the end the case was dropped and he transferred to a different school.[4] The Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection does not break down data by both race and disability, but it does note that while African-Americans make up only 15% of the student population in the United States, they represent 27% of students restrained and 23% of those secluded.[5]
Children have few legal protections against these practices. A 2012 resource document from the U.S. Department of Education explicitly states that restraint should not be used “except in situations where the child’s behavior poses imminent danger of serious physical harm to self or others.”[7] Yet as of December 2016, only 22 states required that a child must pose an immediate physical threat to her/himself or others before restraint can be used. Elsewhere, restraints could be applied in cases where a child simply disobeys a teacher or acts out in non-threatening ways—as, for example, in the case of Thomas Brown of Denton, TX, who had a meltdown when he couldn’t get his shoes on and disrupted his class by swinging a computer mouse around. Eventually Thomas hid in his classroom cubby and refused to come out. At this point—when he actually posed no threat to anyone—his teacher and the school police officer dragged him out of the cubby, down the hall, and into the seclusion room, where he was handcuffed by the police officer.[8] David Sims, of Conroe, Texas, who is also autistic, was not even having a meltdown when he was restrained. Instead, he was pretending to point an imaginary rifle at his art teacher. Nevertheless, he was handcuffed and taken to the local Juvenile Detention Center and held there for several hours.[9]
As of December, 2016, only 24 states forbade the use of mechanical restraints such as handcuffs or leather straps.[10] Many others continue to permit tying children to their seats with handcuffs, straps, duct tape, and other materials—a significant safety hazard in case of fire or other emergencies.[11] Only 20 states forbade the use of sedatives (“chemical restraints”) to keep children under control. 17 states continued to allow the use of physical restraints that impede breathing (such as prone restraints). Only 23 states banned non-emergency seclusion of children with disabilities—elsewhere autistic children can still be locked in “crisis rooms,” storage closets or even bathrooms, sometimes for hours, for minor infractions. Only 32 states required that disabled children remain under observation while in seclusion, even though lack of observation could and can lead to the injury or even death of an overwhelmed child. As I write this, there is still no federal law regulating the use of restraint and seclusion in schools (this is what Alex Campbell has been lobbying for).
Restraint and seclusion are dangerous practices, both for the children subjected to them and for the staff implementing them. They expose children (and staff) to physical dangers: bruises, bloody noses, broken limbs, and—in the case of the children—even death. Still more disturbing, however, are the psychological effects. Remember that autistic children do not “choose” to have meltdowns. They are unable to control themselves during a meltdown, and are usually very frightened by what’s already happening to them—even before they are “punished” by an exasperated teacher or an untrained police officer.[16] When that happens, they usually don’t understand why this is happening to them—they just know that they are being manhandled and locked up, and as a result they fight back even harder. Hannah Grieco reports that her son needed a year of “intensive therapy” to recover from the restraint he suffered at school.[17] An autistic blogger remembers being secluded in school for hours at a time as “torture.”[18] Many children who have been subjected to these practices suffer from PTSD. They may cry, scream or hide when they even see their school; they may beg their parents not to leave them there. Some have committed suicide during seclusion (when a school has failed in its duty to keep children under observation) or at home, after repeated incidents of seclusion.
Finally, it is the case that restraint and seclusion are completely ineffective as forms of discipline. As former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put it: “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.”[19] The techniques may teach children to fear their teachers, aides, or school resource officers, but they do not teach them anything at all about controlling their own behavior—which is out of their conscious control anyway. If anything, they tend to make autistic students more anxious, more stressed, and therefore more likely to suffer meltdowns, creating a vicious cycle of stress, classroom disturbance, punishment, escalating stress, further disturbance, and so on. In dealing with meltdowns, immediate resort to restraint and seclusion represent “worst” practice.
There are better ways.
[1] Hannah Rappleye and Liz Brown, “Thirteen-year-old Activist with Autism Wants to Close Seclusion Rooms at Schools,” NBC news report, November 23, 2018: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/thirteen-year-old-activist-autism-wants-close-seclusion-rooms-schools-n935356.
[2] Sawsan Morrar and Phillip Reese, “School Where Student with Autism Collapsed and Later Died Violated Restraint Rules, California Regulators Find,” The Sacramento Bee, December 8, 2018: https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article222799470.html.
[3] U.S. Department of Education,“2015-16 Civil Rights Data Collection: School Climate And Safety,” p. 12: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/school-climate-and-safety.pdf.
[4] Susan Ferriss, “Virginia Tops Nation in Sending Students to Cops, Courts: Where Does Your State Rank?” The Center for Public Integrity website, April 10, 2015; revised February 19, 2016: https://publicintegrity.org/education/virginia-tops-nation-in-sending-students-to-cops-courts-where-does-your-state-rank/ ; Susan Ferriss, “Virginia drops felony charges against sixth-grade boy with autism,” Reveal (published by the Center for Public Integrity), March 15, 2016: https://www.revealnews.org/article/virginia-drops-felony-charges-against-sixth-grade-boy-with-autism/.
[5] U.S. Department of Education, “2015-16 Civil Rights Data Collection: School Climate And Safety,” p. 11: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/school-climate-and-safety.pdf.
[6] National Disability Rights Network, “School Is Not Supposed to Hurt: Investigative Report on Abusive Restraint and Seclusion in Schools”: https://www.ndrn.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SR-Report2009.pdf.
[7] U.S. Department of Education, “Restraint and Seclusion: Resource Document,” 2012: https://www2.ed.gov/policy/seclusion/restraint-and-seclusion-resource-document.html.
[8] “Denton ISD Faces Scrutiny After Officer Seen Handcuffing, Pinning Down Autistic Child,” report on the Dallas-Fort Worth CBS affiliate: https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/08/11/denton-isd-officer-seen-handcuffing-pinning-down-autistic-child/; see also Tom Steele, “Autistic child severely bruised after school officer handcuffed him, Denton parents say,” Dallas News, May 15, 2018: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/denton/2018/05/15/denton-parents-say-autistic-child-severe-bruises-after-school-officer-handcuffed.
[9] Matthew Martinez, “12-Year-Old with Autism Arrested for Using ‘Imaginary Rifle’ in Art Class, Family Says,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 10, 2018:
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/state/texas/article210879114.html ; Maria Perez, “Texas Student with Autism Arrested for Allegedly Firing ‘Imaginary Rifle’,” Newsweek, May 12, 2018: https://www.newsweek.com/imaginary-rifle-autism-texas-923316.
[10] These and the following numbers come from Jessica Butler, “How Safe is the Schoolhouse?: An Analysis of State Seclusion and Restraint Laws and Policies,” published in 2017 for the Autism National Committee: https://www.autcom.org/pdf/HowSafeSchoolhouse.pdf.
[11] See for example, the cases of a little girl in Indiana: https://www.apnews.com/6c1bf5670c23465c9d48ce4a77634131;
And a little boy in Florida who spent all day strapped to a toilet training chair with his pants down around his ankles: https://www.jacksonville.com/article/20090320/NEWS/801237594.
[12] Jenny Abamu, “Children Are Routinely Isolated in Some Fairfax County Schools. The District Didn’t Report It,” on WAMU radio, updated March 13, 2019:
[13] Erin Jordan, “Senators Ask Federal Probe of School Seclusion Reporting,” The [Cedar Rapids] Gazette, June 3, 2018: https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/senators-ask-federal-probe-of-school-seclusion-reporting-20180603.
[14] Jenny Abamu, “U.S. Schools Underreport How Often Students Are Restrained Or Secluded, Watchdog Says,” All Things Considered, on National Public Radio, haveJune 18, 2019—based on a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/18/731703500/u-s-schools-underreport-how-often-students-are-restrained-or-secluded-watchdog-s.
[15] Jenny Abamu, “U.S. Schools Underreport How Often Students Are Restrained Or Secluded, Watchdog Says,” on All Things Considered, on National Public Radio, June 18, 2019—based on a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/18/731703500/u-s-schools-underreport-how-often-students-are-restrained-or-secluded-watchdog-s.
[16] Schools general deny that restraint and seclusion are used as punishment, but it is hard to see how aversive actions that do not teach children anything (see below) are anything else.
[17] Hannah Grieco, “Restraining Students with Disabilities is Harmful,” The Baltimore Sun, April 22, 2019:
[18] Anonymous, “Seclusion as Punishment,” in the “We Always Liked Picasso Anyway” blog, October 3, 2013:
https://autistictimestwo.blogspot.com/search?q=seclusion
[19] U.S. Department of Education, “Restraint and Seclusion: Resource Document,” 2012, p. iii: https://www2.ed.gov/policy/seclusion/restraints-and-seclusion-resources.pdf.
that Bloody Cat 