Following up on my post yesterday, I am going to make a follow-up plea today that we start eliminating these rooms. Last night I had access to some school data on usage of time-out rooms and I was absolutely in shock. Unfortunately, I cannot share this raw data and you will just have to take my word for it, but it was stark. Students were being forced into the "time-out" room sometimes more frequently than they were in the classroom. In one school year, one of the students at this school spent 80 hours in the time-out room. Some teachers referred students to the time out room on a daily basis. Sometimes for nothing more than not having their homework finished. Some administrators, in taking in a troubled student from another district, planned for the student to spend the majority of his days in time-out. Before they even met the kid.
This has got to stop.
The question is how do you make this stop.
Legislation would be a good idea. A bill in Missouri attempted to do just that, and hopefully those bills will become more popular across the country until a few get passed and hopefully that will start the ball rolling. Some departments of education are passing guidance, but I see this as being above the DOE level.
Secondly, Colleges of Education have to do better on preparing administrators and teachers for this. The disparity between teachers in how they used this room in the data I saw (some teachers never, some teachers daily) speaks to the lack of preparation for this issue.
Third, though, I think there is a huge potential for lawsuits here to bring these rooms down. First, this is false imprisonment. Certainly my post yesterday had the makings of a viable false imprisonment claim and the beauty of a false imprisonment claim is that it is an intentional tort, so immunity laws would not protect and teachers could be personally liable as well. It wouldn't take many of these cases to shock administrators and teachers into changing their behavior. There may even be a criminal charge that could be applicable (I would have to do more research on that to be sure).
Next, there is a lot of due process issues entangled in this - and my feeling is that schools are not getting them right. Really, this is a suspension, plan and simple. Since it is a suspension, all the due process that accompanies suspensions should accompany this ... but my feeling is that it is not. From the number of incidents I saw yesterday, the principal would be spending all her time filling out paperwork for these things if it was being done properly. Students and parents need to be aware that their rights are probably being violated in a ton of these cases, and again, a few highly publicized lawsuits would help.
Bottom-line: This needs to stop. The padded room concept has gone way past its original intentions and there is simply no way to justify the expansive use of these rooms today. How did we even allow this to happen in the first place?