House Committee Passes Bill to Ban Physical Restraint in Schools

Flickr/Robert S. Donovan (Creative Commons)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A bi-partisan group of legislators from the House Education and Labor Committee has approved a bill that will protect students, especially those with special needs, from teachers who use restraint and seclusion as punishment.

According to a Government Accountability Office report published last spring, special education teachers have disciplined students by sitting on them or strapping them into devices that look like electric chairs. Many children have survived such torture, albeit with physical and emotional scars, but for others like Cedric Price, whose mother spoke before lawmakers at a committee hearing last May, the treatment was fatal.

Though the GAO report speculates that this type of abuse is widespread, and even though there are laws protecting children from such abuses in hospitals and other facilities that receive federal health funding, there are currently no federal laws addressing restraint and seclusion in schools. The bill now awaits a full vote in the House before it moves onto the Senate. “This bill makes clear that there is no place in our schools for abuse and torture,” said committee chair Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). “The egregious abuse of a child should not be considered less criminal because it happens in a classroom—it should be the opposite.”

The bill will apply to public and private schools, but it’s uncertain what effect it would have on residential treatment centers like the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, which uses electric shocks to discipline its special needs students. At very least, the bill would establish national reporting standards, documenting for the first time the frequency and number of students being restrained or secluded.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate