* Kaskaskia Special Education District home page…

KSED #801 is a special education cooperative whose Central Office is located in Centralia Illinois. KSED #801 partners with its thirty member school districts within the Clinton, Marion, and Washington Counties. KSED strives to provide integral special education services, support, and leadership to our member districts and the needs of the students within their districts.

One division of KSED…

Bridges Learning Center (BLC) is a therapeutic education center that serves students with severe behavioral, emotional, and developmental disorders. Self-contained classrooms are located at BLC that provide services to students enrolled in grades kindergarten through high school.

The mission statement for the Bridges Learning Center is to

“provide a safe, caring, and therapeutic learning environment where students with emotional, social, and educational challenges can best develop the skills and character necessary to achieve at his or her highest potential and transition to a successful future.”

* Now, let’s go back to the ProPublica/Tribune story on forced student isolation…

By 8:35 a.m. on Dec. 19, 2017, all five of the timeout “booths” at Bridges Learning Center near Centralia were already full. School had been in session for five minutes.

Each booth is about 6 by 8 feet, with a steel door. That day, one held a boy who had hung on a basketball rim and swore at staff when they told him to stop. In another, a boy who had used “raised voice tones.”

Two boys were being held because they hadn’t finished classwork. Inside the fifth room was a boy who had tried to “provoke” other students when he got off a bus. Staff told him he’d be back again “to serve 15 minutes every morning due to his irrational behavior.”

None of those reasons for seclusion is permitted under Illinois law.

Yet, over the course of that one day, the rooms stayed busy, with two turning over like tables in a restaurant, emptying and refilling four times. The other three were occupied for longer periods, as long as five hours for the boy who hung off the basketball rim. In all, Bridges staff isolated students 20 times.

Seclusion is supposed to be rare, a last resort. But at Bridges, part of the Kaskaskia Special Education District in southern Illinois, and at many other schools, it is often the default response.

Bridges used seclusion 1,288 times in the 15 months of school that reporters examined. The school has about 65 students.

According to the Tribune/ProPublica Illinois analysis of Bridges records, 72% of the seclusions were not prompted by a safety issue, as the law requires.

Only 65 students and yet forced seclusion was used 1,288 times in 15 months? That place needs to be investigated pronto.

* Meanwhile, this is from Hope School in Springfield…

Rich,

In today’s Capitol Fax, you write about the ProPublica/Chicago Tribune article about the widespread use of “isolation rooms” to deal with children experiencing behavioral issues. We also read that alarming article and wanted to share Hope’s stance on these rooms and our own answer to providing the best care for our students.

At Hope, we specialize in educating children who represent a broad spectrum of learning styles and abilities. We recognized years ago that so-called “isolation rooms” are not an appropriate answer to the behavioral needs of children, nor are they appropriate for use on any child with a disability. Hope utilizes open sensory rooms for our students to elect to use them who need a quiet space to cope with overwhelming sensory stimuli, or to re-regulate. These rooms are located within classrooms and the students are always near their peers and the classroom staff. Students are not permitted to enter the room unless accompanied by a staff person. The goal of these rooms is to be a calm atmosphere where students can choose retreat. The rooms do not have a door so the children are free to come and go. Our trained behavioral staff monitor each classroom to ensure that these rooms are being used correctly at all times. For children with sensory issues, a room such as this has been proven to be helpful in dealing with the overwhelming feelings they may experience in a situation where they become overstimulated.

We strive to provide the very best learning environment for all of our students. The idea of isolation rooms is antiquated and does nothing to help a child learn. In fact, it does the exact opposite. At Hope, our mission is to educate our students in the most inclusive environments, which is why we focus on adapting our classroom environments to help our children learn and grow to the best of their abilities.

Jodi Ogilvy
Director of Communications
Hope