J. Stephen Conn / Flickr The Kentucky State Board of Education voted today to sharply limit the use of seclusion and restraint in public schools. The Kentucky policy would also require schools to tell parents when seclusion and restraint are used. Kentucky did not previously regulate the use of seclusion and restraint in public schools. Ohio [...]
Teachers in schools across Ohio that have seclusion rooms get little training in how to use the rooms. Teacher-preparation colleges don’t extensively cover how to seclude a student with special needs, either. But even without special training — and in many cases, no district procedure to follow — teachers are putting children in seclusion rooms in [...]
Seclusion rooms are enclosed spaces that are supposed to be used to calm or restrain children who become violent. In Ohio, no state law governs their use, and the Ohio Department of Education has provided little guidance and virtually no oversight to schools. An investigation by StateImpact Ohio and The Columbus Dispatch found that seclusion rooms are [...]
Ohio students are regularly taken out of class and put into separate rooms, known as seclusion rooms. Educators and special needs advocates alike agree that these rooms should only be used when a child is in danger of hurting themselves or others around them, but an investigation by StateImpact Ohio and The Columbus Dispatch found [...]
A 17-year-old Ohio girl died in 2008 in a home for troubled children after her caretakers pinned her face-down on the floor. A ban on that dangerous type of restraint was decreed, and a task force was convened to make rules to govern both restraining and secluding Ohio children. There was a firestorm, and then [...]
Some Ohio children with disabilities are regularly isolated in cell-like rooms, closets or old offices when they behave badly, and the state has no laws to regulate their use.
The Columbus Dispatch and StateImpact Ohio surveyed 100 Ohio school districts, charter schools and educational service centers on the use of seclusion rooms in their buildings. We found 39 of those 100 districts used seclusion rooms. Only thirteen had policies governing their use. Use this table to find out where your district stands.
StateImpact Ohio and The Columbus Dispatch used Ohio’s public records law to get answers on the use of seclusion rooms in Ohio public schools. You can do the same. To investigate seclusion rooms in Ohio schools, we filed records requests with 100 public school districts, charter schools and state agencies. (Here’s our story about what we [...]
The Columbus Dispatch and StateImpact Ohio requested logs of seclusion rooms’ use from 100 school districts across Ohio as part of our reporting on seclusion rooms. The logs show that the rooms are often used for their intended purpose: to calm or restrain children who become violent. But they also show that the rooms are misused. Here [...]
The Columbus Dispatch and StateImpact Ohio surveyed 100 Ohio school districts, charter schools and educational service centers on the use of seclusion rooms in their buildings. We found 39 of those 100 districts used seclusion rooms. For more information about which Ohio schools use seclusion rooms, including whether they have policies on the rooms’ use, click here. Schools [...]
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