Legislation seeks to end electric shock treatment

NEW YORK — Two recent pieces of legislation are renewing a long-running fight over the practice of using electric shocks on people with disabilities as a behavior modification tool — and the role of New York taxpayer dollars in funding the only school in the country doing it.

The Judge Rotenberg Center, a residential school for kids and adults in Canton, Massachusetts, has ignited controversy for decades for its use of a device that shocks people with disabilities to prevent what the school describes as dangerous or violent behaviors.

Despite multiple attempts by lawmakers, parents and disability rights advocates to halt the practice it remains legal, and the school continues administering electric shocks to roughly 50 adult residents, according to school officials.

Proposals pending in New York’s state Legislature and Congress could soon change that.

A bill by New York state Sen. Jabari Brisport, D-brooklyn, would block the state from sending public money to the school if it continues using the practice — stopping an annual flow of more than $20 million in taxpayer dollars from New York school districts and the state’s office for adults with disabilities that make up a major source of the school’s funding, according to Brisport.

Roughly half of the school’s 300 residents are from New York, including 62 students whose tuitions are covered by the New York City Education Department after education officials determined they couldn’t be served in other public or private schools in the state. The DOE spent more than $8 million last year on those tuition costs, according to department data.

“This is an inhumane practice that every other facility in the U.S. has stopped,” said Brisport, whose bill is named after Andre Mccollins, a former Rotenberg student who was hospitalized in 2002 at age 18 after being shocked 31 times in a matter of minutes while strapped to a board.

At the federal level, legislation that’s cleared the House of Representatives and is awaiting a vote in the Senate would require the Food and Drug Administration to ban the device that the Rotenberg Center uses to deliver the shocks.

The FDA banned the device in 2020, but a federal appeals court ruled that the agency didn’t have the authority to enact the ban on its own.

But the practice is also fiercely defended by some Judge Rotenberg residents’ families, who describe it as a lifesaving, last-resort treatment that prevents their loved ones from severely injuring themselves or worse.

Parents and administrators at the school argue that the issue should get a full public debate in the Senate, and that banning the device outright would be a harmful incursion into personal medical decisions.

“My daughter will die if they take this away from us,” said Marcia Shear, of Long Island, whose 29year-old daughter, Samantha, has been at the Judge Rotenberg Center since she was 12.

Samantha, who has autism, an intellectual disability, and a behavioral disability, tried multiple specialized schools and a cocktail of medications to stop self-harming behaviors including slapping the side of her head so hard that she detached her retina, Shear said.

But nothing made a difference until the electric shocks, which are administered by staff members in two-second intervals through a device worn in a backpack attached by wires to patches on students’ skin, according to Shear.

School officials add that everyone receiving the electric shocks — the youngest of whom is 26 — has the approval of a judge, and that the school has made changes since the early 2000s, including halting use of the board Andre Mccollins was strapped to.

But some former students who have experienced the electric shocks say they were administered in response to more than just violent or dangerous behaviors — and that the device caused more harm than it prevented.

“It’s like nothing you can really prepare yourself for. It was terrifying,” said Jennifer Msumba, 46, who has autism, tics and obsessivecompulsive disorder, and attended the school between 2002 and 2009, receiving electric shocks for most of that time.