Stop the ‘quiet room’ abuse of Illinois schoolchildren
On Tuesday a joint investigation by the Tribune and ProPublica Illinois revealed a shockingly abusive practice by public schools across the state: Children with emotional or behavioral disabilities were being confined — alone — in small enclosures for classroom disciplinary reasons, in violation of the law.
A day after the report appeared on chicagotribune.com, Gov. J.B. Pritzker responded. The Illinois State Board of Education will end isolation of students, and revamp its rules so that any timeout for a child must have a trained adult in the room. The door must remain unlocked, and timeouts can be used only to protect the safety of students and staff or for therapeutic reasons — not as punishment for disobedience or other infractions.
Pritzker’s swift statement is heartening. It’s also understandable because the treatment of these students by Illinois school administrators and teachers was so confoundingly inappropriate and hurtful. The state needs to follow up by making fundamental, permanent changes to its approaches to seclusion and examining how this abominable practice became routine and who was responsible. The state board said it would investigate “known cases of isolated seclusion to take appropriate disciplinary and corrective action.”
The joint Tribune/ProPublica Illinois investigation appears on Page 1 of the Sunday print edition. The report, by
Jennifer Smith Richards, Jodi S. Cohen and Lakeidra Chavis, looked at tens of thousands of school records from the 2017-18 school year through early December 2018. The reporters found that children were routinely put in seclusion rooms for unwarranted reasons.
In Illinois, children can be put in isolation only if the students pose a safety threat to themselves or others. But schools across the state regularly flouted that law, putting children in isolation as a means of punishment, the investigation found.
Reasons for seclusion ran the gamut — children failing to finish classwork, talking back or swearing, raising their voices and more. Under state law, none of those behaviors warranted seclusion. The investigation also documented damage wrought by schools’ abuse of the seclusion law.
A boy in Danville who routinely banged his head against the wall when placed in isolation rooms began complaining of headaches, ringing in his ears and dizziness. Parents reported children becoming afraid of school, or not wanting to sleep alone. Repeated seclusion could cause children who already are academically struggling to fall further behind, experts told the reporters.
Jace Gill, 9 years old, was kept in a quiet room for more than three hours on one occasion at the Kansas Treatment and Learning Center, a public school in east central Illinois for children with emotional and behavioral disabilities. His crime: ripping up a math worksheet and going into the hallway in an attempt to leave school. “Let me out of here. I’m crying alone,”
Jace complained, according to a school logbook.
The investigation uncovered a glaring lack of oversight of schools and their seclusion policies. Parents of children isolated in seclusion rooms often received bare-bones notice of the incidents — at times a form letter with a checked box indicating the child had been secluded. At the school Jace attended, the district’s director said he wasn’t aware how often seclusion was being used until he began looking through incident reports requested by the reporters. Afterward, he said, the scale involved “really did kind of hit home.”
It’s hard to fathom that kind of inattention to a flagrantly illegal practice so damaging to students with disabilities. Parents and their children rely on school administrators to provide oversight to prevent such abuses. If officials can’t do that, they are failing in their work.
So much went wrong at these schools. So much also went wrong at the state level.
A student who poses an immediate physical danger to himself, herself or others requires an immediate response, perhaps separation of the child from others, with supervision by a teacher or aide.
What happened in Illinois didn’t help or protect children. It hurt them. Quiet room abuses should never have happened.