Two tracks: Local, state education leaders consider ending student restraint, seclusion practices
April 19, 2023 | By Lisa ScagliottiEditor’s note: This story contains some clear descriptions of restraint and seclusion involving primary school students.
The bill hasn’t left the House Education Committee yet this session but state lawmakers have made time to hear testimony on a proposal to end the state’s allowance of restraint and seclusion for children even as young as preschoolers in Vermont schools.
Meanwhile, the Harwood Unified Union School District School Board has a draft policy it hopes to adopt for the 2023-24 school year that would curtail the dangerous practices regardless of whether the state’s rules change.
At its meeting tonight, the Harwood board will consider whether to advertise the draft policy for adoption at a meeting next month.
The topic of restraint and seclusion has gotten the attention of both local and state education policymakers after revelations a year ago that the Harwood district had a disproportionate number of reports of using such practices with students. A total of 281 incidents were reported for the 2017-18 school year at Thatcher Brook Primary School in Waterbury – since renamed Brookside Primary School. The figure was the highest for any school in Vermont and was flagged as an outlier in data collected by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights.
The seclusion room at Brookside Primary School in September 2022 before the door was removed. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti
Brookside is the district’s largest elementary school with students in grades pre-K through 4. It had 369 K-4 students in 2017, according to district enrollment data; this year it has 311. (Preschool data is not broken out by building.)
The response from the school district in 2022 was to institute a moratorium for this school year on using prone and supine restraints and to end the use of closed rooms for seclusion.
According to the state definitions, physical restraint means using physical force “to prevent an imminent and substantial risk of bodily harm to the student or others.” The current debate and the moratorium in the Harwood school district focuses on prone and supine restraints. Prone physical restraint means holding a student face down on their stomach using physical force in order to control the student's movement. Supine restraint means holding a student on their back using physical force for the same purpose.
Seclusion refers to confining a student “alone in a room or area from which the student is prevented or reasonably believes he or she will be prevented from leaving.” This does not include a “time-out” situation where a student is not left alone and is under adult supervision, according to the state rules.
At the State House
State Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, (center) testifies to the House Education Committee about H.409. Screenshot
Waterbury state Rep. Theresa Wood and fellow Democratic Rep. Tiffany Blumle of Burlington introduced a bill in the state Legislature this session that would direct the state Agency of Education to prohibit these practices in Vermont schools.
The proposed legislation is H.409, “An act relating to keeping Vermont students safe by restricting the use of restraints and seclusion in schools.”
After the bill did not make the mid-March target to advance from the House to the Senate, House Education Committee Chair Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, told Waterbury Roundabout that the committee would still take testimony during this year’s session “so we are prepared for acting quickly in 2024.”
The committee has done so, starting with Wood, who introduced the bill to the committee on March 14. (available on video to view online)
Wood told of how former special educator at Brookside Primary School Brian Dalla Mura brought the issue of the use of restraints and seclusion to light last year in public comment to the Harwood school board. That touched off an effort to halt prone and supine restraints, greatly curb restraints in general as well as seclusion in the district, she explained.
She pointed out that students with disabilities are most likely to be subject to these practices and that the staff involved are impacted by having to take such actions as well. “These are issues that affect people for a lifetime,” Wood said.
She shared with the committee an essay posted online by the nonprofit advocacy group Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint. The firsthand account does not share the name of the writer, but the organization confirmed that it was written by a current student in the Harwood school district.
Wood said the draft of H.409 is modeled after recent legislation passed in Maine. And even though there also is draft federal legislation, she said she believes action at the state level is needed. “I’ve been contacted by teachers. I’ve been contacted by family members. I’ve been contacted by students themselves,” Wood said. “It’s time for Vermont to join other states in a ban on this.”
Firsthand accounts from a family physician
Montpelier family physician Dr. Mel Hauser in a video, ‘Restraint & Seclusion in Vermont Schools: Ending the Trauma,’ produced by the organization Lives in the Balance. Screenshot
In the same committee hearing, Wood was joined by Montpelier family physician Dr. Melissa Hauser whose medical practice includes caring for children and adults with developmental disabilities. Hauser founded a nonprofit organization called All Brains Belong Vermont that focuses on connecting neurodivergent Vermonters with health care and community programs.
Prior to sharing anecdotes from two children she sees as patients, Hauser warned the committee that their stories describe traumatic situations. She then recounted the experience of a 5-year-old on their first day of kindergarten being put into a windowless closet-like seclusion room for approximately 90 minutes.
“Imagine this 5-year-old trapped in a small space crying for their mother and no one comes. When the brain is under threat, this kicks off a nervous system response commonly referred to as fight or flight. The brain is assuming the worst. There is internal chaos. The nervous system is overcome by panic and desperation,” Hauser said, continuing the story of the kindergartner. “When an adult finally opened the door after the child had screamed themselves to exhaustion after 90 minutes, they saw that the child had removed all of their clothes, scratched up their tiny 40-pound body, and urinated all over themselves. This was their first day, their introduction to public school.”
Last week, Hauser joined the Harwood school board meeting via Zoom to share the same anecdote saying it took place at Brookside Primary School in Waterbury.
In her second example, Hauser told of a 7-year-old patient who didn’t want to go to school and whose family was receiving truancy messages from school. In discussing the situation, Hauser said the family related an incident two months prior where the child had been restrained at school.
“When the parents were called to come pick up, they found their small child had been pinned face down, immobilized by a large adult male under a cafeteria bench for a total of two hours,” she told the House committee. “We have a 7-year-old with post traumatic stress acquired from attempting to access their education.”
Hauser said doctors, counselors, educators know that the impacts of trauma can last long beyond the event itself, that they can be triggered by memories of the event or by being in the place where it happened. “The brain needs to feel safe in order to learn,” she said.
In addition, such restraint tactics are dangerous as they can restrict breathing. “The leading cause of death of children during restraint is asphyxia,” she said, noting that although there is no known case of such a death in Vermont, there have been deaths in other states.
Childhood traumas can also cause long-lasting mental and physical health issues, she noted. Hauser pointed to positive trends in Vermont regarding children such as ensuring access to health care, making education policy trauma-informed, and ongoing focus on equity and inclusion. Yet, the use of restraint and seclusion in schools reveals a “wrong paradigm,” she said. “There’s a striking dissonance between [such progress] and allowing trauma to occur in schools.”
Harwood’s ban sees results
A week later on March 21, Harwood Superintendent Mike Leichliter testified to the House Education Committee. He recapped how the issue came to light in 2022 and the steps taken since he joined the district last July as superintendent. Leichiter said that this year’s moratorium on prone and supine restraints along with a focus by school staff to address the need for training and other safer methods has had an impact.
He noted that in the 2021-22 school year from opening day in August until March 20, there were 129 incidents of restraint and 30 seclusions in the district. (The district reported a total of 157 restraints in 2021-22.) So far this year through March 20, Leichliter said, there were 38 instances of restraint and no seclusions.
Guy Stephens, founder of Alliance Against Seclusion & Restraint testifies to the House Education Committee. Screenshot
“We’ve seen some progress,” he told the committee. “Focus and attention does help us to reduce the use of restraint in our schools.”
Following the superintendent was Guy Stephens, executive director and founder of Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint. He addressed the House committee with a presentation that reviewed methods of restraint and seclusion and discussed national trends. Stephens said his research shows at least 34 states that ban prone restraint and at least eight states that ban seclusion. For example, Pennsylvania bans both.
Committee members asked Leichliter if he thought state rules should allow some exception for prone restraint for emergency situations. He replied that he spent 13 years as a superintendent in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in a large district with 5,400 students and its share of challenging behaviors. “We never used prone restraint, simply because it was banned by state law – completely,” he responded.
“There are better options out there” to restraint and seclusion, Stephens said. “We can do better.”
Agency begins to gather, share data
Last Thursday, April 13, Vermont Agency of Education spokesman Ted Fisher visited the committee and shared data that the agency has collected regarding instances of restraint and seclusion that Vermont schools have reported between Oct. 14, 2022, and the start of this month.
Ted Fisher (center) of the Agency of Education testifies to the House Education Committee. Screenshot
The information Fisher shared paints a narrow but specific picture of how a small number of Vermont school children are treated, some of them multiple times so far this school year and some at a very young age.
The state agency has received 125 reports from public and independent schools in Vermont saying that they used restraint or seclusion of students: 69 from public schools and 55 from a variety of private schools and therapeutic programs (the figures are off by 1).
Fisher qualified the testimony, explaining that the data did not necessarily cover all instances of restraint and seclusion that have occurred so far this school year as schools report cases to the state only under specific scenarios:
When physical restraint or seclusion is used with a student for more than 30 minutes;
When physical restraint or seclusion occurs in violation of the state's Rule 4500 that covers these practices, including cases where prohibited forms of restraint or seclusion are used;
When there is a death or injury requiring outside medical treatment or hospitalization for a student or a staff member as the result of a restraint or seclusion occurrence.
Fisher shared the figures for each of those categories (these figures are off by 4):
80 reports were due to restraint or seclusion lasting at least 30 minutes;
36 reports were for were cases that violated state rules;
Five reports fell into the “injury or death” category. Fisher said he could not comment on whether there was a death reported in Vermont due to a restraint or seclusion case without violating federal confidentiality rules. He did note that the figure was logged for a category that covers a wide range of circumstances, however.
The data show that the number of reports is more than double the number of students involved in these incidents. Just 55 individual students are covered by these reports, Fisher said – 40 in public schools and 15 in independent programs.
Nearly two-thirds of those (36) were restrained or secluded only once; 14 students were the subject of two to five reports; five students were listed in six or more reports. And, “the greatest number of incidents per student was 25,” Fisher said.
More than a third – 21, representing 38% – of the students were children age 7 or younger. Nine of those children are in public preschool or kindergarten programs, Fisher said.
The data from the Education Agency is just from this school year because the agency is “creating a record here for the first time,” Fisher said. “We review the reports, and we take a series of actions. But in the past, we haven’t collated the data in a way that’s really meaningful… we didn’t have a good tracking of this.”
The process has been revised, Fisher said in an interview later, in part due to the recent interest in the issue and in requests for information from the public and from the Legislature.
Fisher’s testimony offered more context to the incidents of restraint and seclusion being used in schools. “Restraint and seclusion are most often the result of extreme student behaviors. Students with a history of these behaviors are usually identified as having a disability,” he said, later emphasizing that “restraint and seclusion should only be used for safety reasons, not for discipline.”
More detail from the data from October 2022 through the start of April 2023:
24 of the students in the reports to the state – 43% of the total – have Individualized Education Program plans, a key part of special education services
45 of the affected students – 82% – are boys; 48 are white (87%); 39 come from low-income households eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (information still collected although lunches are free for all in Vermont schools).
Nearly half – 27 students – are between the ages of 8 and 14; seven were age 15 and older.
Nearly 44% – 24 students – are currently in grades 1 through 4; another 15 students are in grades 5 through 8; eight are in high school grades.
Harwood School Board policy draft
This school year began with an announcement from Leichliter and HUUSD School Board leaders that prone and supine restraints would be halted, and an administrative task force would look at school practices while the school board would review the district’s restraint and seclusion policy for revision.
Warren board member Ashley Woods has chaired the committee whose other members are Cindy Senning of Duxbury, Bobbi Rood of Waitsfield, and Victoria Taravella of Waterbury. Superintendent Mike Leichliter and Director of Student Support Services Jon Berliner have participated as well. The committee has held eight meetings since last fall.
The draft policy up for consideration is a revised version of the district’s current policy. Updates have been made to reflect the goals of the board, administrators, and community members to remove restraint and seclusion from practices staff are allowed to employ when dealing with difficult student behaviors.
Along the way, the discussed details such as the fact that many of the adults the policy would affect are not school staff but workers with outside agencies that the school district contracts with to support students with learning and behavioral disabilities. Administrators have explained that training methods for district staff and the outside agencies vary. The district contracts with Washington County Mental Health and Green Mountain Support Services for behavior interventionist staffing support.
The committee’s work has been informed by consultant, educator and expert on childhood trauma and education, Dyane Lewis Carrere, co-author of the 2020 book, “The Re-Set Process: Trauma-Informed Behavior Strategies.”
It also has relied on legal advice in crafting language in the draft policy.
By late January, the full board discussed the committee’s direction and expressed support for the district to ban both practices even if it meant taking that step before the state enacts any policy changes.
During this process, the school district’s lawyer Adrienne Shea has advised the committee on versions of the draft policy. Her input has been largely out of public view. The committee’s March 15 meeting, for example, was conducted nearly entirely in executive session to review guidance from Shea. In addition to the four board members on the committee, five other board members attended that meeting and the executive session.
The full board last week reviewed the committee’s draft and was divided on whether the current version is ready for adoption. Board members commented that they were pleased that the draft calls for an end to using prone and supine restraint.
“We are leading the way,” committee Chair Woods said, noting that Harwood would be the first district to make its policy more strict than state rules.
However, the draft still leaves open the possibility for school staff to use seclusion. It notes an exception for what administrators said are extremely rare cases where restraint would be “contraindicated” or not advised for a particular student, most likely by a medical professional.
At the start of the April 12 meeting, the board heard public comment from Hauser supporting a ban on seclusion without exceptions. Hauser shared with the board a 30-minute documentary produced by the Maine-based Lives in the Balance advocacy organization about the restraint-seclusion debate in Vermont. Both Hauser and Dalla Mura are interviewed in the clip along with Vermont parents, advocates and medical experts.
Also prior to last week’s meeting, Dalla Mura wrote to the school board urging members to take a strong stance on banning both practices. “Due to HUUSD’s extreme over use of restraint and under reporting of seclusion, you will need to take bold measures when adopting a new policy. Advocacy will not end until seclusion is banned completely with NO EXCEPTIONS,” he wrote.
Life LeGeros of Duxbury was among the board members who, during the meeting discussion, urged the group to take more time to hone the policy. “We are going up to the edge of doing the right thing. We’re so close,” he told the group.
Waterbury member Jake Pitman has several times spoken about his past experience working at Brookside Primary School as a behavior interventionist where he had to use restraint and seclusion with students. The work was difficult, he shared, and he ultimately left the position. He spoke in favor of banning all seclusion. “I want us to go that last inch,” he said.
Taravella and Vice Chair Kelley Hackett both stressed that the exception still in the policy refers to a rare circumstance – one that doesn’t apply to any current student, according to administrators. Taravella said she didn’t feel qualified to challenge what a potential student’s doctor might recommend in the future.
Senning however, requested more time for the committee. “I would like the option to be able to have our committee continue its work a little bit more,” she said, even if that means an adoption vote would not happen until June. “I would like us to continue the discussion about seclusion.”
Board members mentioned receiving emails from community members who supported a full ban on seclusion. Woods said she thought they were most concerned about the misuse of seclusion should the policy contain even a narrow exception. “I agree with Cindy. I would like to take another crack at it because I feel this seclusion piece is watery,” she said.
However, the discussion persuaded her to change her preference to support moving ahead without further revisions. “This is a jumping-in point, guys,” she said.
The matter ended with board Chair Kristen Rodgers taking a straw poll of the group to gauge whether the committee would have more time to review and possibly revise the draft. Thirteen of the board’s 14 members were present and a majority of seven agreed that the committee’s work was sufficient. (Jonathan Young of Warren was absent last week.)
Rodgers thanked the committee for its work. “I’m super-proud of our district for taking these steps,” she said.
The policy is on the school board’s agenda for tonight, Wednesday, April 19. The board would need to vote on whether to advertise the current version for adoption in several weeks.
“If the motion passes, the Restraint and Seclusion policy will be on the May 24th agenda for adoption with the idea that the policy will be in effect for the start of the school year in August,” board leaders Rodgers and Hackett write in their memo ahead of tonight’s meeting.
The meeting tonight begins at 6 p.m. The Restraint and Seclusion Policy item is listed near the end of the agenda after approximately two hours and 45 min. of other business.
The Harwood school board meets at 6 p.m. tonight in the Harwood library. The link to join via Zoom is on the meeting agenda. Meetings are also streamed on YouTube and available there afterward as recordings.