Parents blast use of child restraints
Legislators aim to impose stricter oversight on public schools’ punishment of students
A bipartisan group of Texas House members is pursuing legislation to apply stricter oversight and enhanced transparency into the use of physical restraints against children in the state’s public schools.
Last year, Hearst Newspapers published an investigation documenting how — in Texas and around the country — school staff members are able to restrain students or seclude them alone in small rooms, leading to abuse and discrimination. Parents are not always told when their children are punished, and the students are often children with special needs, sometimes with disabilities that make it harder for them to communicate their distress.
In Fort Worth in 2021, Xavier Hernandez died after staff members immobilized him on the floor at a school for students with disabilities. “I hurt,” he said, and staff adjusted his position because it was “a little awkward.” Shortly after, his lips changed color and he lost consciousness. He was pronounced dead hours later.
Parents from around the state appeared Monday morning at the Texas Capitol to share personal stories of how their children have been harmed by being physically restrained at school.
Among them was Jeanna TenBrink, from the Houston area. Her daughter, Leah, has special needs and is mostly nonspeaking. In middle school, Leah began returning from school with cuts, bruises and even bite marks. TenBrink learned that her daughter was being routinely restrained and even confined in a dark bathroom at school where she was physically abused at times by other students.
TenBrink said she had to fight with the school administration to find out what was going on, and finally obtained a video of her daughter being restrained. She said she felt the school administration and staff have been able to evade accountability for what happened to Leah. Two teachers who she said harmed Leah by physically restraining her are still employed, she said.
“So the cycle will continue,” TenBrink said.
The Texas Education Agency regulates physical restraints at schools. Restraints are allowed in “emergency” situations
where people or property could be harmed. The restraint is only supposed to last as long as the emergency, the school officials are limited to using “reasonable force” and the safety of all students is to be protected.
Schools are supposed to record each instance of restraints being used, but TEA only reviews the data every six years.
The agency requires a number of staff at each campus to be trained on how to safely restrain students, although other people can administer restraints if they undergo training afterward. Physical holds that intentionally inflict pain as a deterrent, known as “aversive techniques,” are banned by TEA, but they are allowed in emergencies, and advocates say they happen too frequently.
The policy changes being pushed include: stricter rules surrounding the use of physical restraints, empowering the state’s Child Protective Services to investigate any harmful use of physical restraints at school, and requiring schools to set up video cameras and make footage available to parents upon request.
Another parent, Thelma Lira, said her son, Damien, was abused in his special education class. He was repeatedly physically restrained in an unsafe way, she said, but the state’s Child Protective Services said it didn’t have the authority to classify what happened as abuse.
A theme from several parents at the press conference was concern that schools didn’t tell them what was happening with their kids, that they instead only found out about their children being restrained after repeated incidents. Special needs children are particularly vulnerable to this, they said, because they may struggle to communicate what’s going on.
“I wish my son had the ability to tell me with his own voice what was happening to him, but he simply couldn’t,” Lira said. “But I am his voice now.”
The parents were joined at the press conference by several lawmakers: Reps. Mary González, John Busey and James Talarico, all Democrats, and Republican Rep. Lacey
Hull of Houston. Hull has introduced legislation that would ban children from being handcuffed at school.
The Legislature will spend much of its time and energy this session making decisions about how to spend the historic, $30-some billion surplus available to the state, and rightly so, Busey said. But the issues of parents and children, such as that of physical restraints, shouldn’t slip through the cracks.
“We can’t hear story after story and not feel a responsibility to do something,” González said.