Scores of private special education schools restrain and seclude children hundreds or even thousands of times each year, an investigation found.
This story was produced by the Teacher Project, an education reporting fellowship at Columbia Journalism School.
Story continuesExactly how many children receive this kind of treatment, however, is unknown. Most states don’t require private schools to report any information about restraint and seclusion – even if they get millions of dollars each year from the public school district. In a first-of-its-kind effort, the Teacher Project and the USA TODAY Network reached out to all 50 states for data on restraint and seclusion in special-education private schools. Just 10 states and Washington, D.C., were able to provide complete information.
“The thought of us literally paying our tax dollars to institutions that are affirmatively harming kids … is unacceptable,” said Annie Acosta, a public policy director at the Arc, a disability-rights advocacy network. “I went along with it because at the time I didn’t know much about the school system, the way I know now,” she said.
In 2011, at the urging of the school district, the siblings enrolled in High Road Academy of Wallingford. Every child in those campuses is placed by a public school, and the company sees itself as an extension of the public school system. Connecticut taxpayers paid a little over $12 million in tuition and transportation expenses to High Road schools in 2018-19, according to information from a public records request.
"They put your arm like this,” Shirley explained years later, sticking her arms out behind her, “tie your arm behind your back and squeeze it tight. And it hurts your bones.” “These are highly trained professionals that are accustomed to working with students that have significant needs,” said Jeff Cohen, CEO of Catapult Learning. Restraint, he said, is “a last resort in all instances” after staff have tried other ways to de-escalate a situation.
Shirley was unresponsive for five minutes before she came to, according to what a school aide later told doctors. The school called an ambulance that took her to the emergency room. Doctors wrote she’d had a seizure. Sometimes, staff put Shirley into the seclusion rooms for dangerous behavior, like trying to climb out of a window or hitting her teachers. Other times, the danger was less obvious, like when she threatened to throw water at a teacher’s face or punched coats hanging on a wall.
Profit doesn’t understand why Shirley kept getting restrained and put into the seclusion room, when it triggered such intense fear and anxiety. "When we isolate kids, what we're doing is we are literally damaging their neurobiological responses,” she said. “And we are compromising the stress response system and damaging brain tissue.”
Another school that defends restraint and seclusion is the Faison Center in Richmond, Virginia, which enrolls around 190 students with autism. In a single school year, 2017-18, Faison documented 968 incidents of restraint and 2,988 of seclusion. When told the school had almost 4,000 incidents in a year, she said,"Looking at those numbers without a context is completely unfair to this school and is not at all what all the parents I know here would say. This school takes in students that no other school will keep because of recurrent behavior problems."
“If those procedures are banned, there are students who are going to find difficulty maintaining school placements,” said Danielle Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Private Special Education Centers. “We are concerned about things like the increased involvement of law enforcement and other agencies who aren't necessarily trained to support students with these behavioral needs.
A state that counted restraints – until it didn't Despite the high numbers at schools like Faison and High Road, most states have been reluctant — or never even considered — monitoring private schools’ use of restraint and seclusion. California, where around 12,000 special education students have been placed by the state in “nonpublic schools,” used to require all schools to report use of restraint and seclusion.
Rosalia Muñoz and Anthony’s aunt, Gloria Muñoz, said they nonetheless kept Anthony at Bright Futures because he always seemed excited to go to school. “He didn’t speak, so he couldn’t tell us what he liked and what he didn’t like,” Muñoz said. “But as soon as you mentioned school, he’d light up.” Bonilla tried to perform CPR, without success. Anthony was declared dead of asphyxiation at a nearby hospital.
The records show Anthony had been restrained in a similar way on the bus just a week before his death. Anthony’s grandmother said Bright Futures never reached out to the family for suggestions on how to calm Anthony down. Between 2015 and 2018, 21 out of 22 formal complaints in California about restraints and seclusions involved non-public schools like Bright Futures.
Families make their complaints publicYet even when families do speak up for their children, it doesn’t always lead to change. All of the families who complained that night were African-American. Brenda Penn-Williams, the president of the Norwalk NAACP and Profit’s friend, believes race factors into who is restrained in her state. People with disabilities experience discrimination, too: They're protesting police violence, COVID-19 discrimination
The report says investigators interviewed parents, but Profit said they never spoke to her. Otherwise, they would have known about Shirley’s trip to the emergency room. Similar investigations from the police and child protective services were also closed.
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