SO, WHAT IS A SECLUSION ROOM?

Since my wife is an employee of EPSB and familiar with seclusion rooms I'll let her speak to their use in schools.

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SO, WHAT IS A SECLUSION ROOM?

Children are being put in cages against their will, and against the will of their parents, by government employees.

This is happening under the same school board that, for four years, kicked police out of all their schools, saying it contributed to what they call the school-to-prison pipeline.

Now, they’re increasing the use of little prisons inside the schools...

They just call them “seclusion rooms” instead.

So, what is a seclusion room?

It’s a room with one door that locks from the outside, for schools to use when a student is dysregulated and cannot be in a classroom for a period of time.

They are meant to only be used when a student’s behaviour presents a danger to the student themselves or others.

Students frequently request to use the rooms voluntarily, and parents are supposed to be able to opt their children in or out of the practice.

But, administrators recently told the Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) that kids are being placed in the rooms without advance permission.

They also told the EPSB that usage of seclusion rooms is going up, and 25 more have been installed, despite the school board’s promise they would be phased out.

The EPSB now accounts for 63% of all seclusion room usage in the province, despite accounting for just 14% of the student population.

In the absence of another theory as to why Edmonton public schools should see such disproportionate use, it would seem a failure of leadership is responsible for the frequency of such an extreme practice.

Those are good reasons why resorting to seclusion rooms should receive more scrutiny.

Here’s another: a 16-year-old boy with a rare condition was left in one in Ontario and found dead at the end of the day.

In his case, his mother had told the school he needed to be supervised at all times, especially when napping, as sleep could trigger his seizures.

He was not being monitored, allegedly, leading to his death.

This would be against the provincial regulations in Alberta, but so is using seclusion to prevent property damage, as a punishment, or as anything but a last resort.

It raises the question, if a trained staff member is truly available to monitor each student in seclusion, in keeping with those regulations, are the rooms truly only being used when absolutely necessary?

Why is their use seemingly so much more necessary for schools under the authority of the Edmonton Public School Board than any other authority?

That the EPSB is using seclusion inappropriately is clear enough, but it’s also clear that violent dysregulation has become more common everywhere.

This means that your school board may not be immune from drifting into the same insane policies.

Violent dysregulation is up because we closed schools, playgrounds, and outdoor hockey rinks - sometimes even while restaurants, bars, clubs, and casinos were open.

When we did that, we robbed kids across several key age cohorts of absolutely essential socialization and opportunities to learn self-regulation.

(Yes, the EPSB was particularly keen to hurt kids in this way, but not 4.5 times more than everywhere else.)

We broke a lot of things with COVID restrictions - especially among school-aged kids - and poor policy then limits policy options now.

The other major limitation on policy options now is the adoption of “inclusion” policies.

In this context, “inclusion” means the ideological insistence that students with special needs must be kept in “mainstream” classrooms, rather than specialized programming.

In the absence of “inclusion” policies, one solution would be to have these kids in specialized schools or programs, with staff who know how to deal with their particular situation.

Staff who are not trained and experienced in dealing with violent dysregulation may well be more likely to resort to seclusion rooms.

Without such training, one of the more common solutions in settings without seclusion rooms is to move all students and staff, except for the violently dysregulated student, out of the room.

Obviously, that is maximally disruptive to everyone else’s education.

Yet, equally obviously, children being locked in a padded cell without their parents’ advance consent is also not an acceptable solution.

The error here is thinking that regulations and educrats solve problems with kids being mistreated, rather than contributing to them.

So, let’s do for seclusion rooms what we already do for special needs programming itself: require a plan, written down, subject to review by the parents.

Stop assuming - against evidence - that school board trustees and their administrations are only resorting to these extreme, horrifying solutions when all other options are exhausted.

Stop assuming - as educrats seem always to do - that parents are an impediment to the best care for and education of their children.

Trust, instead, that parents love their own children more than strangers do, and that parents will be their kids’ best advocates!

Now that we’re into the summer and everyone - from parents, to teachers, to the trustees themselves - is paying less attention to what’s going on inside school boards, our work shining a light on them has never been more important.

If we’re going to protect kids from the prison-within-a-school pipeline, or anything else that may slip through, we have to be vigilant.