Say yes to pro-active teaching methods (such as positive behavior supports_ and no to the use of restraints and aversives on students with disabilities. 

The National Disability Rights Network issued a report,School is Not Supposed to Hurt, in January 2009. The report found that, while 32 states have rules or laws that refer to the use of restraint and isolation, these policies are "either unclear or inadequate." According to the April 17th EdWeek, the report prompted U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, to charge the Government Accountability Office with researching and releasing its own report on the use restraints and aversives. The report is expected to appear in the next few weeks. 

EdWeek notes that there is some confusion about terminology: 

"Some schools use what they call 'timeout rooms,' where children leave the regular classroom for short, supervised periods of time to calm down after an emotional outburst. But a “timeout room” in another facility might be an isolated and locked area where students are left alone for hours. 

"The 2000 Children’s Health Act defined restraint and seclusion for facilities receiving federal funding. Seclusion is involuntary confinement in a room or area that a person is physically prevented from leaving. Restraint is any manual method, or physical or mechanical device, that immobilizes or reduces the ability of a person to move his or her arms, legs, body, or head freely."

There's no evidence that using restraints or seclusion improves a child's behaviors, according to Reece L. Peterson, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose research is focused on the education of students with emotional or behavioral disorders. Peterson notes that there are "shades of gray" that are hard to capture in a single policy: 

"In rare circumstances, a restraint option or some kind of calm-down area may be necessary, he said. For example, in Iowa, a school was strongly criticized in 2004 for not restraining a 15-year-old who ran from a treatment center and ended up drowning when he jumped off a Cedar Rapids bridge. 

"But in 2001, an 11-year-old Des Moines, Iowa, boy suffocated after being placed in a prone restraint."

Teachers should rather be trained to use positive behavior supports and other teaching strategies that identify when a child is getting anxious and upset. One of the problems---and I've noted this in some of the staff who taught Charlie in a previous placement---is that restraints and seclusion tend to be used as a punishment. Barbara Trader, the executive director of TASH is quoted: 

“Probably the most frustrating thing we hear is that people at the local level don’t feel like they have an alternative"....... “We would like to get to a place where there’s not one teacher who says that, and where the standard is that people know what to do to support kids who have behavior issues........It would be inexcusable if an elementary school teacher didn’t know how to teach literacy, but it is excusable that they don’t know how to deal with behavior.”

There are ways to teach children, including children who (like my son at times) have difficult and dangerous behaviors, and not to see restraints and seclusion as the only alternative. In this season of IEPs, let's make sure that everyone involved in teaching individuals on the spectrum, from teachers to paraprofessionals, from OTs to administrators, is educated about pro-active teaching methods including positive behavior supports and others, and how to implement them