Ohio Education Department rules that district can require schools to keep ‘seclusion & restraint” records, but prevent public disclosure of records

The Columbus Dispatch reports that the Ohio State Board of Education (OBE) plans to adopt the state’s first policy governing seclusion and restraint in public schools. Although the new rules would require schools to keep records of how often and why educators place children in seclusion rooms or physically restrain them, those records would remain private.

Only the parents of the child who was secluded or restrained, or the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) would be informed of such incidents. Making information about seclusion private could prevent the public, including other parents, from knowing whether their schools have improperly secluded kids.

Currently, the state knows virtually nothing about seclusion in Ohio’s public schools because it never has asked which schools have rooms, how often they are used or why. The policy to be adopted says schools can use seclusion on students only when they are a physical danger to themselves or others, but never as a punishment, to force them to behave or as a convenience for school employees.

Under the new policy, ODE would be the watchdog, though it does not specify how often the department would collect data from schools about seclusion and restraint, only that it may. It also does not specify exactly what kind of data schools must keep.

ODE spokesman John Charlton said the department expects to be able to examine why students are secluded, but that its’ current data-collection systems are not yet prepared to collect seclusion-and-restraint information from schools. “It’s not that we don’t want that information. But we don’t have a good way to collect it, so we did not build that into the legislation,” Charlton said. Until those systems are in place, the department will examine aggregate data, including how many times seclusion was used in a particular district during the school year.

Although some school districts complain the rules are too burdensome, child protection advocate applaud the new rules. “We hope that this rule will end some of practices observed during the course of our investigations, such as the use of seclusion for minor behaviors and the use of restraints that restrict a student’s breathing,” said Sue Tobin, Executive Director of Disability Rights Ohio.

Source: The Columbus Dispatch, 1/10/13, By Jennifer Smith Richards

[Editor's Note: In September 2012, Legal Clips summarized an article in the StarNewsonline.com, which reported that Rick Holliday, Assistant Superintendent for Support Services, had announced that New Hanover County Schools’ use of seclusion rooms to deal with students’ aggressive behavior does not violate North Carolina law. According to Holliday, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights completed an investigation of the district’s seclusion rooms, finding that the district had no non-compliance issues with North Carolina’s Greenblatt Act, which gives schools strategies, such as seclusion rooms, to deal with students’ aggressive behavior.

In July 2012, Legal Clips summarized an Associated Press article in The Washington Post, which reported that the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions recently convened a hearing on the use of restraint and seclusion to raise awareness of how much physical force is used when disciplining students. The Committee is considering a bill, S. 2020, that calls for restraining or secluding students only if they might physically injure other students.]

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