Browsing Tag: breaking news

A new investigation reveals that children
in Illinois are being locked away, terrified and alone at schools for reasons that often
violate the law. RTs Brigida Santos joins me now from LA to
talk about it. First of all, Brigida, why are children being
isolated at schools to begin with? What, what’s this story about? Well, children are often sent into isolation
as a form of timeout. In Illinois, it’s legal for school employees
to put children in a separate room if they pose a safety threat to themselves or others. But a new investigation of timeout logs reveals
that school workers in at least 100 districts have been isolating children’s for reasons
that are not legally permitted, including swearing, spilling milk, and refusing to do
assignments, for example. So far, journalists have tallied up over 20,000
incidents between the fall of 2017 through December of 2018. Now, out of those only 12,000 reports were
detailed enough to determine what prompted seclusion and in 42% of those cases, no safety
concern was even documented. You know, ProPublica looked at this and the
numbers that they reviewed are startling. You talked about some of those numbers, but
what they found was a pretty ugly pattern. And they say they’re supposed to be somebody
standing outside the room when these children are isolated in basically padded rooms, taking
notes about what’s happening minute to minute. But the problem is nobody’s reviewing those
notes. And that brings me to the question, how old
are these children and, and how did they react to being locked up? What, what are some of the stories here? Must be pretty bad. ProPublica did an entire exposé on this story. Yes, so many of these children are as young
as five years old and according to the timeout logs, most of the students who end up in isolation
are either physically or mentally disabled or suffer from behavioral disorders like autism. Now because adults are legally required to
stand outside the door and write down what happens, as you said, we know that in isolation
students have injured themselves while scratching at the windows and tearing at padded walls. They’ve even thrown their bodies against locked
doors, hit their heads and gotten bruises. Their hands have bled from banging on the
doors and in some cases they’ve even wet their pants. Now the median time that students have been
kept in isolation is 26 minutes, but some of these students have been locked up for
hours or been locked up on multiple occasions. Records also reveal the heartbreaking things
that some of these kids have said during seclusion. For example, one child screamed, I’d rather
die, you’re torturing me, while in isolated timeout. Workers and teachers say that seclusion helps
keep everyone in class safe. They also claim that it helps children learn
to calm themselves down. But in 2012 the US department of education
warned against seclusion saying it’s dangerous and that there’s absolutely no evidence that
it reduces behavioral issues and special education experts agree. They say isolation has no therapeutic or educational
value and that it can actually traumatize children. Well, you know, a lot of States use isolation. I mean this is, I understand this is being
looked at right now and it should be with these stories, but it seems like this is a
little bit wider than just Illinois. I mean, if these incidents are illegal, why
isn’t anybody cracking down on the practice to begin with? I mean, why is this even taking place? Yeah, it’s not strictly happening in Illinois. Now, at least 19 States though, have banned
seclusion. But there are no federal laws regulating the
practice. And even though Illinois school workers are
legally required to file those detailed reports about the incidents, no one’s required to
read them, which means that state education officials are not monitoring these types of
timeouts. People are now questioning whether our tax
dollars should fund schools that illegally lock up children. So hopefully this investigation will raise
awareness and result in some much needed systemic changes. Well, and to me, you can’t miss this. You can’t miss this point about the story. This isn’t just the average child that misbehaves. These children have all kinds of disabilities. They’re mixed up with kids that are also put
into these same rooms. So they’re just, just behavioral problems. So this, this goes beyond just trying to correct
behavioral problems. These are children that have some real fundamental
disabilities and that’s, that’s easy to miss in this story. Anyway, Brigida, thank you for joining me. Okay. Thanks, Mike.