The state education board advanced regulations Tuesday to further restrict controversial “timeout” and seclusion policies in schools, the next step in a years-long effort to reduce the use of the practices.
There’s been growing national attention on so-called timeout rooms in recent years, as families of students with disabilities have raised alarms about inappropriate use of the secluded rooms to punish their children and keep them out of class for long periods.
Emily LaMarca, the mother of a son with Down syndrome, told the Board of Education in January that her son’s teachers began putting him in a timeout room when he was 10 years old, resulting in trauma.
“He was constantly afraid, afraid to go to school, afraid that his teachers would come to our house and harm him. He talked about angry eyes at school and the sounds that his friends made when they were taken to what he called ‘the naughty room’ in therapy. Cole acted out his trauma by locking himself in the therapy dog’s crate, because, in his words, he was a ‘bad boy,’ ” LaMarca said.
Acting Commissioner of Education Russell Johnston has made these rooms a focus of his one year helming the education department in an interim capacity after Commissioner Jeff Riley stepped down last March. He was a special education teacher and administrator before joining DESE, and among other roles he had at the department, served as an ombudsman during efforts to implement the Individuals with Disabilities Act.
Johnston is set to leave the department this week for a superintendent job in Pennsylvania, and the vote that board members took Tuesday to promulgate the timeout regulations for public comment was the among the last they took in Johnston’s tenure. The board will vote on whether to adopt the new rules in June.
The commissioner said during a board meeting in January that when he visits a school, his first stop is always asking administrators to see their timeout room.
“I walk into the rooms myself,” he said, “I close the door. I look to see what it’s like for a student in one of those rooms.”
One of the points he made during Tuesday’s meeting — which is reflected in the new regulations — is that the department needs to make a stronger distinction between “timeout” and “seclusion.”
The new regulations clarify that timeouts are voluntary, where students can opt to go to a private room outside of their classroom as a behavioral regulation tool. Seclusion, meanwhile, refers to the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room from which they cannot physically leave.
“This improved language really helps clarify that difference between timeout, which is a strategy to be used when students need to self-regulate, and then a very limited, prescribed circumstance that could lead to an emergency use of seclusion. But we need to call it that. We need to say that it is seclusion. It’s not timeout,” he said.
The regulations aim to codify what the department has issued in guidance since 2021, and impose new updates to those rules that include stricter restrictions.
The updates would mandate that timeout spaces have to be unlocked and an “appropriate size for the student. There’s adequate lighting, ventilation, temperature, and free of objects that may be harmful to the student,” said Iraida Alvarez, acting executive director of special education at DESE.
If seclusion is used in an emergency situation, the updated rules would add conditions that must be met.
The school would need documentation from a mental health professional that such intervention would not be ill-advised for the student, as well as parental consent. After using seclusion, the school would also be required to notify the child’s parents.
Schools that use this intervention would have to require weekly and monthly reviews of data about when seclusion is used, document it, and report it to DESE. The eventual goal is to eliminate the use of the practice, Johnston said.
Board member Michael Moriarty raised concerns about possibly taking away a necessary tool for special educators to control their classrooms.
He said that, while acknowledging that “abuses do exist” he worried the stricter regulations on emergency seclusion was “further constricting behavioral management” and could be seen as “a little tone deaf” to special educators who say they have limited tools.
“In all of those different schools, with all the different contexts and scenarios, how do you anticipate — for an emergency — that prior documentation? And not fall out of compliance and find yourself sued, with your license at risk, with the school’s reputation harmed in the media, with all the bad things, when all you were trying to do was maintain an effective learning environment and safe classrooms?” Moriarty said.
The board member added that he did not have his mind made up either way, and would lean on public comment to decide how he’d vote on the regulations in June.
Johnston replied to his concerns that “seclusion is not a behavior management strategy, and that’s what we really have to make clear with these regulations.”
“We can’t say that putting a student in a room and closing the door and observing them from outside is behavior management, and that any conflating of those notions is exactly why we need this,” he said.