Many US school districts still aren’t reporting their uses of restraints on children, despite the fact that the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights recently made such reporting mandatory, reports ProPublica.
“Like all school districts across the country, New York is required to record every time a public school kid is held or tied down and report totals each year to the U.S. Department of Education. The number New York gave the government? Zero,” reports ProPublica. “There’s not even a remote possibility that the number zero is correct,” a director for the New York Civil Liberties Union said to ProPublica.
“New York, the nation’s largest school district, wasn’t the only one to incorrectly report zero restraints to the federal government. So did Los Angeles and Chicago – the nation’s second and third largest school districts,” reports ProPublica. “(U)nderreporting appears to be rampant. Our analysis found that more than two-thirds of all school systems reported zero instances of restraining a student or isolating them in so-called “seclusion” rooms.”
Los Angeles and New York Pin Down School Kids and Then Say It Never Happened (ProPublica, December 2, 2014)
