‘Scream Rooms’ Inside Connecticut Elementary School
January 12th, 2012Via: CBS:
Parents in a Connecticut suburb are outraged over disturbing disciplinary actions at a local elementary school.
They claim students are being locked in unsupervised “scream rooms,” where some children have harmed themselves, reports CBS 2’s Hazel Sanchez.
The Middleton School District is on the hot seat as furious parents are demanding to know what’s going on behind closed doors at Farm Hill Elementary School.
“My daughter is telling me that there’s kids being taken out in ambulances, by stretcher,” parent Sean Archer told CBS 2’s Hazel Sanchez on Wednesday.
Disturbing allegations have surfaced of teachers locking students in closet-sized concrete “scream rooms” for punishment.
“Kids come home and they cry, because they’re afraid to go to school. And it’s often,” parent Brian Robillard said.
“She can hear the kids screaming at the top of their lungs, while she’s trying to read and she asks her teacher what’s going on and they never give her an answer. They tell her to ignore it,” said Liz Archer, the sister of one Farm Hill student.
Parents said their children have witnessed teachers placing unruly students into the tiny “time-out” rooms to calm down.
“From what I heard it’s more traumatizing for the child than it was as a help,” parent Jeff Daniels said. “Kids were hitting their heads on the concrete wall. Kids were urinating in the room.”
School Superintendent Michael Freschette said allegations of children harming themselves in the timeout rooms are not true. However, the Board of Education is investigating. The chairman spoke to CBS 2’s Sanchez by phone Wednesday night.
“We certainly are concerned with these allegations and I’m looking into every single one of them to be certain that our staff is providing a safe environment for our students,” Gene Nocera said.
Related: Public School as Kafkaesque Nightmare
another example of internalized values of authority figures, in this case literally. i suppose its good to have role models, but dear god. hears hoping this is the bottom of the barrel and not the tip of the iceberg.
trickle down indeed.
this is going to SERIOUSLY fuck those kids up. jesus christ.
when i was in first grade, i had a racist, military-raised, 23-year-old bitch for a teacher… we had to sit with our ankles and hands crossed all day long, and when a kid (usually the black boy or the jewish boy) made a mistake, she would call them out and shout about how he was STUPID and ask the rest of us if we wanted to be stupid like him. that is the only thing i remember about that year–i have a nearly photographic memory for the most part–but apparently i went home sick 2 or 3 days every week with stomach aches to the point that my mom came into the class to ‘volunteer’ and saw what was going on. the teacher didn’t work at the school for long after that.
to this day, i cannot abide seeing someone degrade another in earnest – it makes me physically ill AND excessively emotionally distraught. what i saw is laughable compared to these kids having to hear the screams of their peers and/or getting locked in the dark themselves …by grown-ups they are constantly told they can trust! then i think about how many kids are like my 2.5 year old, highly empathetic, terrified of the dark and of confined spaces…
this is torture.
I have worked in a few therapeutic residential centers for children removed from their biological parents for abuse/neglect, and who were not “doing well” in foster care (generally due to severe violence and sexual issues). I suppose some of these kinds of kids would be the “special needs” children the school district was thinking of. These kinds of rooms (usually called something innocuous-sounding like “quiet rooms”) are ubiquitous in group homes like the ones I’ve worked in. In my experiences, the idea was if you were dealing with a child who was escalating into a violent outburst, you got them into the room to keep everyone else safe from them until they calmed down. The ones I’ve used always had a window in the door and a mirror in the corner of the ceiling, plus you had to hold the door closed from the outside — the child was never, ever to be unobserved. On one hand, it did keep kids from hurting their peers and put them into a smaller space than a normal-size room which could *possibly* help them feel more contained. On the other hand, it certainly felt barbaric every time I used one. Oh, the layers of trauma here… I mean, should the “therapy” involve another kind of trauma?
I don’t see any reason a public school should have these, or be using them in a non-“therapeutic” context. I know there are some schools with large “mainstreaming” programs (i.e., children who have violent outbursts for whatever reason are attending public school) that allow teachers to physically restrain students, also in the name of safety and therapy. Seems like that would involve similar controversy, depending on how and when teachers were doing restraints.
In my experience, every time staff have to use a “crisis intervention” strategy like a room or a restraint, you then have to process with the child afterwards… much of which is basically getting the child to take on the responsibility for “needing” to be in a room or put into a restraint, because it’s all based on behavior modification which assumes we can all make “good” or “bad” choices in our behavior. The more enlightened staff members would also take into account an individual child’s trauma history and try to get into what let to the outburst to begin with. Then of course, you’re supposed to coach the child to come up with “better” ways to deal with similar situations later.
It’s a lot to put on a kid who’s been to Hell and back, really.
Methods like using “quiet rooms” or physical restraints were always viewed as a last resort, after a staff member had used other de-escalation techniques with a child. I have felt increasingly conflicted about these typical “intervention” methods. Reading a story like this only reinforces my concern about their use.