ACLU to monitor punishment in Miss. schools

Mississippi's disproportionate use of harsh punishments like seclusion and restraint on disabled and minority K-12 students will get extra scrutiny by the American Civil Liberties Union, which this month won a $350,000 grant to monitor the practice.

The grant, awarded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, will fund the two-year project spearheaded by ACLU of Mississippi. During this time, the ACLU will not only monitor use of restraint and seclusion in school districts but will engage key stakeholders in advocating for the phasing out of this practice in favor of positive behavior interventions.

"No child should be subject to abuse, particularly at school," said Jennifer Riley-Collins, executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi. "Schools are supposed to be a safe place conducive to learning, not to torture."

Children with disabilities are nearly six times as likely as their nondisabled peers to be restrained at school, Collins said.

A Clarion-Ledger investigation on special education earlier this year found at least 30 school districts use physical restraint, mechanical restraint or seclusion — or a combination of all three — on children with disabilities.

In the 2009-2010 school year, for which the most recent statistics were available via the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 329 such incidents were reported. Riley-Collins said she believes school districts under-report such incidents.

Among districts that did report, the most frequent use of seclusion and restraint appeared on the Gulf Coast: Harrison County logged 74 incidents, Moss Point and Jackson County had 46 each and Gulfport had 36.

The Jackson Public School District, which in 2011 was sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for chaining a teen with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to a pole, had two reported incidents that year.

JPS settled the suit one year later by agreeing to no longer engage in that practice.

"As many reports have documented, the use of restraint and seclusion can have very serious consequences, including, most tragically, death," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a letter to school districts urging them to review their policies on the practices.

"Furthermore," Duncan said, "there continues to be no evidence that using restraint or seclusion is effective in reducing the occurrence of the problem behaviors that frequently precipitate the use of such techniques."

Yet Mississippi is one of five states without any laws or regulations regarding the use of seclusion and restraint at school, Riley-Collins said.

An attempt to correct that problem failed earlier this year when House members killed a bill called the Mississippi Student Safety Act. Introduced by Senate Education Committee Chairman Gray Tollison, the act would have prohibited certain punishments and defined when it's acceptable to use others. It also would have collected and analyzed data in an effort to reduce seclusion and restraint.

"We need to make a change," Tollison had said at the time.

Although she hopes the bill will resurface and ultimately pass in the 2015 legislative session, Riley-Collins said her organization will do its part by monitoring seclusion and restraint through public records requests and testimony from parents and educators.

"This isn't a witch hunt," she said. "We're hoping to have school districts embrace this project."

Contact Emily Le Coz at elecoz@jackson.gannett.com or (601) 961-7249. Follow @emily_lecoz on Twitter.