Reply to What does seclusion look like in an elementary school?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It depends on your school system. In FCPS we did have seclusion rooms in special ed center programs. They were small rooms with windows, no padding. They were outlawed, and now there are children who continue to have severe mental health crises and need to be contained, but can’t be. That’s a whole different topic. [b]They were only used after other interventions were tried and documented, with close supervision while the child was inside. Only if the child was a danger to self or others. [/b]Just a small room.[/quote]

While that may have been the intent, that's not what was going on. My child was in a CSS program in FCPS. At first we were in favor of the "quiet rooms" -- a safe place to calm down an regulate? No harm in that. The problem is that it became the automatic punishment for any sort of infraction. Didn't matter if the child was a danger to himself or others. Ripping up a writing assignment because of frustration? Off to the quiet room. My kid couldn't handle the room, and knowing where he was being brought, he'd try to run away to avoid the room, or when placed in there would wrap his shirt around his neck and bang his head on the floor or walls. Anything to try to get out of the room. The room was having the opposite effect of what was intended, and made the behavior so much worse. Impulsivity may have been why he did something wrong in the first place, but the fear of going to the room as a result would amplify the behaviors. And yet the school wasn't willing to try anything different because the script just called for putting kids in the room.

But this was in the days before the rooms were phased out. On the "plus side" for us, there was always documentation, and there was supervision -- this wasn't at one of the schools that concealed the info from parents. [/quote]

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