Half of state schools secluded, restrained students last year
Some used last-resort practice hundreds of times; some say zero
A new state report shows half of Wisconsin schools physically restrained or isolated a student at least once in the last year, a practice that is considered a last resort, when there is no other way to stop dangerous behavior.
Milwaukee schools reported using restraints slightly less often than the rest of the state, with about one incident per 100 students, compared to about 1.1 statewide. Instances of seclusion were more rare, with about 0.1 incidents per 100 students in Milwaukee, compared to about one seclusion per 100 students statewide.
Statewide, some schools reported hundreds of
incidents of seclusion and restraint; others none. Those with the most incidents tended to be elementary schools that serve a large amount of students with disabilities — but many schools fit that description, yet report rarely or never using the practices.
There was a wide range of reporting in Milwaukee schools, with 36 schools reporting zero incidents, 25 schools reporting more than three incidents per 100 students, and the majority in between.
Officials in districts where schools reported the highest number incidents told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin they try their best not to use seclusion and restraint, but it’s necessary sometimes as they work toward finding a long-term solution to outbursts. And, they say, it doesn’t help that many kids’ mental health needs aren’t being met because of a shortage of services inside and outside of school.
Districts with fewer incidents say they avoid seclusion and restraint incidents by teaching all students — not just those struggling — how they should behave in school, and by increasing staff training, being transparent with families, and creating a safe and supportive school environment.
The data on incidents is the first of its kind, the result of recent legislation that requires more transparency around the controversial practices.
During the 2019-’20 school year, schools across the state reported 8,733 incidents of seclusion, defined by the Office of Civil Rights as the involuntary confinement of a student in a room or area not to punish them, but to calm them.
There were 9,795 instances of restraint, defined as a physical restriction that immobilizes or reduces a student’s ability to move their torso, arms, legs or head. In Wisconsin, the practice is limited to hands-on techniques; mechanical restraints are barred.
Those definitions are open to interpretation, and schools may not have reported incidents in a uniform way. The numbers may have also been skewed by the pandemic, which shuttered the state’s schools from March onward.
But the new data is a “milestone,” said Hugh Davis, executive director of Wisconsin Family Ties, a Madisonbased children’s mental health advocacy organization that has fought for years to limit use of the practices and increase transparency in the state.
“Without visibility of this data, this issue has gone largely unnoticed,” Davis said. “I’m hoping now with greater visibility, with (the Department of Public Instruction) having this data and researchers being able to analyze it, that it’s going to help spark the movement of trying to come up with alternatives to these techniques.”
Wide range of seclusion and restraint
Wisconsin didn’t have laws restricting the use of seclusion and restraint in schools until 2011, after a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that, nationwide, the practices were related to hundreds of cases of abuse and deaths over the previous two decades.
In one case described in the report, a 14-year-old Texas boy died after a teacher laid on top of him while he was facedown on the floor because he wouldn’t stay seated in class. In another instance, a New York school repeatedly put a 9-year-old boy in a seclusion room for hours at a time for offenses like whistling, slouching or hand waving. His mother reported the room smelled of urine, and the boy’s hands were blistered from trying to escape.
Wisconsin legislators passed state Act 125, which mandated that seclusion and restraint only be used when a trained school staffer determines a child is a danger to themselves or others. It also required schools to annually report the use of the practices to their local school boards, and inform parents when they’ve documented an incident.
Over the decade since that law passed, calls to further limit or eliminate seclusion and restraint have mounted in Wisconsin and across the nation.
In 2019, Wisconsin passed Act 118, which requires statewide reporting of the practices and puts stronger emphasis on de-escalation training, requires schools to provide parents written incident reports, and calls for staff to hold a meeting after each incident.
No school reported more use of either practice than the Menasha Joint School District’s Butte des Mortes Elementary, which reported secluding 20 students a total of 217 times and restraining 20 students a total of 256 times.
Only six other schools in the state — all elementary schools — reported more than 100 of either type of incident. Nearly 1,100 of the 2,200 schools reported no incidents, but 167 schools used at least one of the practices 20 or more times last year.
Administrators at schools reporting the highest numbers of incidents say they work hard to avoid using seclusion and restraint, but the data alone doesn’t capture the complexity of their situations.
‘We know we have work to do’
One reason Butte des Morts Elementary has so many incidents is that it hosts the district’s alternative program for students with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. About threefourths of its students who were secluded or restrained had disabilities.
Marcena Thiry, the district’s director of student services, said that group had particular struggles in fall 2019 for various reasons.
“No one benefits from having to engage in seclusion and restraint,” Thiry said. “The bottom line is we know we have work to do and we need to continue to look closely and make sure we’re taking a trauma-sensitive approach to these incidents.”
Since the difficulties of 2019, Thiry said, she’s added new programs incorporating mindfulness, meditation and yoga to help kids learn how to regulate their own behavior and emotions. And her staff continues to work hard to build relationships with the kids.
All special education and core general education teachers, as well as pupil services staff members like school psychologists and social workers, receive nonviolent crisis intervention training, which focuses more on how to calm students rather than seclude or restraint them. Every two years, they take a “refresher” class.
“We try to come at this from a place of empathy and care and concern — we try to get to know our students’ stories and try to intervene in positive ways,” she said. “Many of these students just don’t feel safe . ... We are trying to intervene in a way that helps them come back to that safe place.”
Still, even if the district’s staff does all the right things, Thiry said, it’s a struggle for many students to gain access to mental health services.
While the district provides some inschool mental health services through United Way’s Providing Access to Healing program, it can’t provide that to all students. And Wisconsin has long faced a dearth of therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Thiry said she often hears from parents that they’re on sixor eight-week waiting lists for mental health services — a long time to wait if a child is in crisis.
Try as they might, it may take teachers and staff weeks or months to figure out which strategies work to prevent a child from having an outburst.
Like Menasha’s Butte des Morts, other schools toward the top of the list serve some of their districts’ highestneed students. The Sheboygan Area School District’s Jackson Elementary, for instance, had the fourth-most seclusion incidents last year, with 144, but it hosts a special education program with students whose behaviors are especially challenging, according to Jason Ledermann, director of student services and special education.
And Thiry said she can’t help but wonder if seclusion and restraint data was reported consistently across all Wisconsin schools. Even now, Thiry said, she’s not sure whether transporting students from one room to another “to give them space to calm down” counts as a restraint, though that’s how Menasha reported it to DPI last year.
Previous federal reports on seclusion and restraint have cast doubts on the accuracy of data that schools have been required to submit to the U.S. Department of Education every two years. During the 2015-’16 school year, 70% of more than 17,000 school districts reported zero incidents of seclusion and restraint.
Explaining the zeros, officials from nine of the country’s largest school districts said they had incidents they didn’t or were unable to report, or they simply weren’t collecting data.
Brandi Simonsen, the co-director of the University of Connecticut’s Center for Behavioral Education and Research and the Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, said the new Wisconsin data is an important tool, but that the data shouldn’t be used to villainize anyone.
Simonsen said schools that neglect to track that kind of data or underreport it are only harming themselves and students.
“We should be praising districts that report data honestly, because then it gives them the capacity to change,” she said. “It gives them a chance to be honest with themselves, look at what supports are in place and how they can improve.”
Expectations, training and self care
Simonsen said schools can improve their responses to difficult behaviors using a three-tier framework called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS.
Tier one, she said, is explicitly teaching kids how they should behave and cope if something doesn’t go their way.
Tier two is to support the students with additional needs, targeting specific skills that may be lacking through extra reminders and support.
And tier three, she said, involves the few students who have more intensive social, emotional and behavioral needs that require a more individualized response.
For example, Simonsen said, it’s teaching a child who starts hitting teachers when they’re given a task or an assignment to instead ask for a break.
That’s the approach most Green Bay School District schools take, said Katy DeVillers, associate director of pupil services.
The district, the state’s fourth-largest, reported 330 incidents of seclusion or restraint last year, involving 150 of its just over 20,000 students.
DeVillers said most schools also use the CHAMPS framework, an acronym for conversation, help, activity, movement, participating and success. CHAMPS teaches kids how and when they can do those things within the classroom.
“I can’t (overstate) how hard our staff works at this,” DeVillers said.
Schools typically focus training efforts on principals, other administrators, social workers, school counselors and special education teachers. DeVillers hopes to train as many staff as possible.
While schools were shut down last spring, nearly 500 support staff members — paraprofessionals, lunch supervisors, special education aides — used that time to take a course on de-escalation in order to fill a “gap” in training, DeVillers said.
The Kenosha Unified School District goes beyond ensuring students feel safe at school: It tries to ensure that the adults who teach and support those kids feel that way, too.
The district requires all teachers to take a self-care class, and Schmidt and her colleagues created a virtual calming room for stressed teachers (and kids) who need to “reset, find calm and reenergize.” The site features mindfulness and yoga videos, calming music, journal prompts and relaxing live cameras of puppies, penguins, elephants and more.
“If we have regulated adults, we hope that will spill over to the kids,” Schmidt said.
Last year, the district reported 255 seclusion or restraint incidents among 98 students, a small portion of the 21,000 students in the state’s third-largest district.
Schmidt said Kenosha teachers also work hard to gain the trust of parents and guardians.
For example, after a student with autism had several behavioral episodes that led to seclusion or restraint last year, the child’s team of teachers and support staff met monthly with his mother to discuss how to better meet his needs and figure out what skills they needed to work with him on.
Over time, Schmidt said, the behavioral incidents decreased, and it improved the school’s relationship with his family.
In another effort to boost transparency and collaboration with families, the district has invited parents to attend the same nonviolent crisis intervention training that staff receive, said Stacy Guckenberger, coordinator of special education and student support.
“When you see the word ‘restraint,’ you could have many visuals going through your head, so we would take the time to show them what we mean,” Guckenberger said. “I think they felt a level of comfort like, ‘Oh, that’s what you meant.’ And we really emphasize to them how little we do this — only if a child is a danger to themselves or others.”
While the first batch of seclusion and restraint data is imperfect — and it will be next year, too, because COVID-19 has led many districts to stay online — it’s a step forward, said Joanne Juhnke of Disability Rights Wisconsin.
Juhnke said she knows firsthand that seclusion and restraint can never be fully eliminated. One day, when her daughter, who has significant disabilities, was in fifth grade, she ran out of the school and made a beeline for a busy street. To get her back to the school, an aide had to tackle her to the ground.
But she hopes schools will take a hard look at the data and look for repeat incidences so they don’t keep happening.
“The overarching point of the law is to make things better for students and staff alike, and families, too,” Juhnke said. “Hopefully we really see the fruit of that when we get a more complete source of data.”
Rory Linnane of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
Contact reporter Samantha West at 920-996-7207 or swest@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @BySamanthaWest.