State Advocacy Group Fights District

ALBANY — An organization charged with safeguarding disabled New Yorkers is locked in legal combat with the North Colonie school district over whether the group should be allowed to investigate allegations that special education students suffered abuse and neglect in their elementary school.

According to court filings, Disability Rights New York last June approached the district, seeking to enter Blue Creek Elementary School after receiving allegations that several youngsters in a special "Academic Skills" class were inappropriately isolated in time-out rooms and restrained.

Opposition Grows to Use of Restraint and Seclusion in Schools

Deb Bellare isn't sure when her son Sam's nightmares began, but remembers it as sometime in 2006.

Sam Bellare and his mother Deb.

That was the year Bellare's breast cancer developed, the year of her mastectomy and chemotherapy treatments. It was also the year Sam, who has autism, turned 6.

And it was the year Bellare first learned Greece Central School District employees, coping with Sam's destructive physical and emotional outbursts, would sometimes pin her first-grader to the floor before whisking him off to a tiny "quiet room" to scream himself into exhaustion.

"I was sick, I wasn't paying attention and I didn't know any better. I thought they were doing the right thing," said Bellare.

A Terrifying Way to Discipline Children

Interesting opinion piece in Sunday's edition of The New York Times by Bill Lichtenstein, an investigative journalist and filmmaker.

In my public school 40 years ago, teachers didn’t lay their hands on students for bad behavior. They sent them to the principal’s office. But in today’s often overcrowded and underfunded schools, where one in eight students receive help for special learning needs, the use of physical restraints and seclusion rooms has become a common way to maintain order.

It’s a dangerous development, as I know from my daughter’s experience. At the age of 5, she was kept in a seclusion room for up to an hour at a time over the course of three months, until we discovered what was happening. The trauma was severe.