
Seclusion and Isolation Rooms Misused in Illinois Schools - ssully
https://graphics.chicagotribune.com/illinois-seclusion/
======
mcguire
" _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.

~~~
duxup
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.

~~~
perspective1
Okay but the one time you might expect "teachers" to get the documentation
right is when they're throwing their kids into solitary confinement.

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afandian
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.

~~~
burfog
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.

~~~
afandian
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?

~~~
burfog
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.

~~~
afandian
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](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.

~~~
burfog
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.

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

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

~~~
archi42
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).

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perspective1
> 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?

------
mnm1
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.

------
aklemm
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.

------
grenoire
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.

~~~
goda90
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.

------
ptah
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?

~~~
duxup
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?

~~~
PeterisP
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.

~~~
burfog
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.

------
throwanem
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.

~~~
tptacek
Well, sure, that and Algebra II/Trig.

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

edit: 76%? I'm suspicious.

[https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=97](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=97)

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

~~~
simonsarris
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.

~~~
pvg
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?

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lumberingjack
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.

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nathan_compton
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.

~~~
Shivetya
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...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/10/26/illinois-100000-club-94000-six-
figure-public-employees-and-retirees-cost-taxpayers-12b/#658f77f6481a)

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

