“ABU GHRAIB – COMING TO A SCHOOL HOUSE NEAR YOU”: NYS Ed. Dept. Seeks Approval for Schools to Electric Shock Disabled Students”

The Special Education Muckraker:

“ABU GHRAIB – COMING TO A SCHOOL HOUSE NEAR YOU”
NYS Ed. Dept. Seeks Approval for Schools to Electric Shock Disabled Students”

To sum things up in a nutshell, as part of a NYS govt. move to end out of state placements for exceptionally severely disabled kids, the NYS Education Department is moving to allow the use of all aversives, including electric shock as aversives on disabled kids – in all NYS schools and all publicly-operated or publicly-funded programs; in all state-approved private schools; in all residential schools. Disabled kids subject to family/juvenile court placements will come under this proposal, too. At this time, there is no legal or regulatory authorization for the use of painful aversives in any NYS school, public or private, state-approved or not. The way the proposal is written, it will – literally – allow any little local district to set up its own committee of “experts” – “experts” being completely undefined – and approve the district using any aversive it wants. It will protect districts, schools, programs, IEA’s, from being sued for unconstitutional cruel and inhumane treatment of disabled kids, which appears to be what this proposal is designed to allow. It is simply cruel and inhumane, period. The proposal to allow this abuse is breathtaking in its scope and virtually unlimited in what it will permit.The NYS Ed. Dept. is one of the few state education or state child welfare departments which currently approves (and pays for) sending severely disabled kids to the Judge Rotenberg School (MA), where aversive electric shocks are used on a continuous basis.

Currently, some NYS little local districts, some state-approved private special ed. schools, and IEA’s (BOCES, here) do the following to kids with disabilities:

1. Young kids with autism being strapped into restraining Rifton Chairs for hours on end – daily. To make them stop flapping, stimming and force them to pay attention, I assume. This isn’t just restraint, it’s torture for young children who cannot necessarily communicate what’s being done to them and are powerless to make it be stopped.

2. Young kids, some who have never been evaluated, much less classified as disabled, thrown into time out/isolation rooms – daily – for hours on end, with no free access to toilets or water. One was found unconscious in one a few years ago; it was hypothesized that he had a seizure, but nobody knows because nobody was watching him. Kids being thrown into time out rooms for lengthy periods of time with no access to toilets or water. Some have floor coverings which retain dried feces, urine, saliva and other body fluids (one kid clawed his fingers bloody, trying to get out). I am told that at least some of these floor coverings therefore represent imminent public health dangers involving potential transmission of HIV, hepatitis, TB and other communicable diseases. NYSED’s “guidelines” say that districts and IEA’s have to meet all local safety and health codes, but don’t say how; NYSED does not police this requirement. I know of no district or IEA which has a local health department check to see if time out rooms actually meet public health standards and requirements.

3. No limits on restraints at all. Kids of all ages being beaten up by adults in the course of being physically “restrained.” Currently, NYSED has no guidelines, regulations, at all on restraints and no requirement whatsoever that anyone who uses them have any training whatsoever. The proposal would legitimize use of restraints and require training “as appropriate,” with no definition of “appropriate.” Think – 5 minutes of a training film – or less – for appropriate training. I get contacts re a kid being beaten or hurt while being “restrained” in regular little districts on a regular basis. A teacher in an IEA threw a young developmentally disabled child into a time out room “because he didn’t eat his lunch.” Or so she told the mom, who found out about it by accident from another parent. Needless to say, this child had no Functional Behavior Assessment, no Behavior Improvement Plan and the IEA had never informed the mom that it had time out rooms, much less that it had any policy re their use. And this incident violated the facility’s time out room policy. Teacher not disciplined, of course. (The NYSED proposal would permit the unrestrained use of restraints to “protect” any school property, including one piece of chalk, paper clip or one piece of paper.)

4. Currently, at least one school uses liver powder sprinkled on food as an aversive for disabled children’s “bad” food-related behavior.

5. When an Associated Press reporter did a story showing that the % of districts and IEA’s making “mandatory” corporal punishment reports to NYSED had decreased, while the number of reports of corporal punishment use had increased, NYSED called it a “reporting problem.” The AP story also noted that one IEA teacher put a young child with a disability out in the cold, in winter, without shoes or jacket, as a punishment, and that as a result, she was given a letter telling her not to do it again. No discipline for the teacher. NYSED accepted filed this report; but did nothing about it. A State Senator, who is a retired cop, was quoted as saying that what the teacher did was a crime and she should have been prosecuted (but wasn’t). This is typical. NYSED neither monitors nor actually regulates physical abuse of children in NYS schools, disabled or non-classified. Now, it seeks to protect such abuse by regularizing it via its proposed regulatory scheme.

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