Craig Gaydos

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  Craig commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  Hearing About Restraints and Seclusion Today

  This is Paige Gaydos' dad.
  
  The really sad part, and the part that many people don't get, is that safe restraint practices have been established and are used successfully all over the country.  It is not as if the teachers have to choose between abusive restraints and letting the kids run free.
  
  After Paige's ordeal at Cupertino Union School District (one of the top rated districts in California, ironically), she enrolled at Esther B Clarke (EBC) school, which is sort of a school-of-last-resort for difficult kids.  What an oasis!  The policies and procedures are explained to parents and children at the beginning.  If/when restraints are necessary, they are performed in safe ways that leave the child and teacher unharmed.
  
  One positive side effect of this is that kids end up needing far fewer restraints.  After Paige had one restraint early at EBC she learned from it and never needed one again.  Because of the approach taken, kids are far more likely to adapt their behaviors positively.
  
  Unfortunately, there are a few schools (public and private, poor and rich, red states and blue states) where for whatever reason teachers either aren't taught the safe approaches or just choose to ignore them, and the administration looks the other way.  In Paige's case we later learned that the restraints her teacher used were expressedly forbidden by California law as life threatening, and that the teacher had received the proscribed training.  Yet, she'd been called out several times by aides and parents, and each time the district took steps to cover up the issue.  In our case they just denied everything and claimed that all the requisite paperwork had been miraculously lost.
  
  Ironically, districts sometimes complain about the cost of special education programs, but a well-run program costs a lot less than a poorly-run one, when you take into account all the fallout from the inevitable incidents involving abused children.