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.

The Damage Done By Special Ed Disaparities

From John Thompson on the Huff Post's Education Blog.

The recent GAO report, "Charter Schools: Additional Federal Attention Needed to Help Protect Access for Students with Disabilities," could help us understand why well-intentioned school "reforms" have done so much harm to the children that they were designed to help. The problem is not special education students. The problem is not charter schools. The problem is the refusal to acknowledge what would have been necessary to help schools with extreme concentrations of traumatized children as they had to serve even greater numbers of students with disabilities left behind in an age of choice.