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This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partners at Maryland Matters. Sign up for Maryland Matters’ free email subscription today.
Following a federal investigation that revealed an alarming number of seclusion and restraint incidents in one Maryland school district, parents and disability advocates are renewing their push to ban the use of seclusion in Maryland schools.
Del. Eric Ebersole (D-Baltimore County) is sponsoring a bill that would ban the practice of seclusion in public schools, which he equated to “putting a child in a prison cell,” during a Ways and Means committee meeting this month.
House Bill 1255 would still allow nonpublic schools to use seclusion, but with stricter limits such as requiring the person performing the seclusion to be a trained physician, psychologist, clinical social worker, registered nurse or clinical professional counselor who is “clinically familiar with the student.” It would also impose stricter reporting requirements by local school systems and the State Department of Education on restraint and seclusion incidents.
“The bottom line is — education has changed,” said Sen. Craig Zucker (D-Montgomery), the lead Senate sponsor of the bill. “Things that we might have done a hundred years ago or 50 years ago might not make sense in this current time — and one of those things that does not make sense is secluding children in public schools,” he said during a bill hearing before the Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee.
School employees struggle to deal with disruptive and sometimes violent students and say they have to use seclusion to keep everyone in the classroom safe. But disability advocates argue that there is no evidence that secluding students is effective in reducing problematic behaviors and instead traumatizes children.
Guy Stephens is one of those advocates. He said his 16-year old son named Cooper was illegally restrained and secluded in Calvert County Public Schools, which traumatized him and left him afraid to return to school. Cooper finished the rest of the school year in a home and hospital program, Stephens said.
“I would never have imagined that children are routinely restrained and secluded in schools across the state,” said Stephens, who founded the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint.
After extensive research, Stephens found that Calvert County had the highest restraint incidents per student during the 2017-2018 school year, trailing behind Frederick County. He contended that there were “trauma-informed alternatives” that can be executed instead of restraint and seclusion in both public and non public schools.
John Woolums, the director of governmental relations for the Maryland Association of Boards of Education, took exception with the bill exempting nonpublic schools from the use of seclusion because it could open a “gateway” to nonpublic schools if a public school deems a student too difficult to supervise.
Maryland’s State Superintendent of Schools Mohammed Choudury testified in support of the bill and called for even stronger legislation.
“Locking a student in a room by himself and preventing him from leaving is simply unacceptable, regardless of whether that room is in a public or nonpublic school,” he said.
Choudury urged lawmakers to also require schools to create an evidence-based corrective action plan because “simply doing more professional development is not the answer.”
This bill comes three months after the U.S. Department of Justice and Frederick County Public Schools reached a settlement after federal investigators found a concerning pattern within the school district of secluding and physically restraining students with disabilities.
Between 2017 and 2020, federal investigators found more than 7,250 instances when students with disabilities at Frederick County Public Schools were improperly restrained or secluded. Those cases involved 125 students, including some as young as five years old.
There are some school districts — including Anne Arundel, Baltimore City, Caroline, Prince George’s, Somerset, Wicomico — that already ban the use of seclusion as a behavioral intervention. Frederick County recently banned the practice in its public schools after the settlement with federal officials. And the Howard County Board of Education voted to ban the use of seclusion in the next school year.
But “[the Department of] Justice should not have to come district by district throughout the state,” said Leslie Margolis of Disability Rights Maryland.
State law currently stipulates that seclusion and restraint can only be used during emergency situations to prevent, “imminent, serious, physical harm.” State law also requires local districts to report their total number of annual seclusion and restraint incidents to the state, but proponents of the bill argued that this was not enough because there are no accountability measures for school systems that have high rates of restraint and seclusion.
If passed, the bill introduced this year would also require local school districts to report how many restraints each individual student experienced and to notify the State Department of Education “at the earliest opportunity” if a student is restrained ten times or more in a school year.
But different schools have different interpretations on what counts as an emergency situation, “so the standard should be that there is no such thing as seclusion anymore in public schools,” Zucker said.
In fact, students are routinely restrained for non-life threatening situations such as for disrespecting a teacher or refusing to clean up and flipping the light switch on and off, said Stephens. He said his son was put into seclusion for splashing water.
Jeannie-Marie Leoutsakos shared with the Senate committee that she found her autistic son pinned to a chair by multiple staff members and in another instance, locked up in a small room, shirtless and drenched in sweat, begging for water. He then had nightmares about monsters chasing him and said he wanted to end his life, she continued. Although he is homeschooled now, “he’s not the same kid as he was before,” she said.
“This is what repeated use of restraint does to kids and his story is far from unique,” she said.
Cameras in the classroom
The legislature is also considering a measure this year that would establish a pilot program to install video recorders in classrooms with students who have disabilities to monitor any inappropriate behavior and abuse.
On Friday, the House of Delegates voted 128-4 to approve the bill, House Bill 226, after last-minute arguments on the House floor.
Del. Lisa Belcastro (D-Baltimore County), who works as a special educator, said she struggled with the bill because “it signals to our special educators that we do not trust them.”
She urged her colleagues to focus their efforts on filling teacher vacancies.
“In a state where 500 of our 2,000 teacher vacancies are special educators,” she said. “I ask: Can we really afford to perpetuate that message?”
Del. Sara Love (D-Montgomery) said she worried the pilot program would lead to the spread of more surveillance in classrooms. “If we are not careful, we will end up in a society where our every move is watched,” Love said.
Del. Vanessa Atterbeary (D-Howard), who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee where the bill received unanimous approval, said the measure would protect children who may not be able to communicate with their parents.
“Imagine that your child has come home from school with bruises on their body, with hair pulled from their head with scratches on their body, but cannot tell you what has happened to them while they were at school,” Atterbeary said.
Ebersole said the bill was narrowly tailored to help a “specific and very needy population,” and could also serve to exonerate teachers accused of wrongdoing.
“So this is a good place for us to start,” he said. “It’s probably a good place for us to stop as well.”
