Timeout rooms under scrutiny

From his teacher's point of view, Christopher Nygren's behavior merited a stay in the school's timeout room.

Once inside the 5-by-6-foot room, Christopher, a special-education student whose disabilities include extreme sensitivity to noise, rammed his body against the steel-reinforced door and banged his head on the cement-block walls, pleading to get out.

His mother says she later saw the dashes on a piece of paper where the school staff member observing Christopher marked each harmful act.

Christopher's parents have brought a lawsuit against the Minneapolis school system, and complaints from other parents, too, are bringing new attention to the use of "timeout" rooms in Minnesota. State officials have proposed new regulations to limit the amount of time students can be placed in such rooms and to bar school officials from locking the doors.

The concept of timeout is not new. About three decades ago, residential treatment centers, and then schools, began using timeouts to de-escalate conflicts and to give disruptive residents and students a chance to cool off.

But now schools sometimes use timeout rooms to discipline students rather than just let them calm down, prompting debates about the proper balance between students' needs and school safety.

As originally conceived, "timeout" was intended to briefly remove attention or stimulus from children who were acting up and give them time to reconsider their behavior, says Ken Merrell, a University of Oregon professor who studies children at risk.

In a classroom, a teacher can simply withdraw attention for as few as 10 or 15 seconds by looking in another direction. In some cases, though, teachers decide it's best to remove a student from the group setting.

"There are times when children become so out of control that they become a safety hazard to themselves and staff," says Lorie Schulstad-Werk, president of the Minnesota Administrators of Special Education. "They're able to take time to wind down and cool down and get themselves together."

As schools pay more attention to safety and strive to place more special-education students in regular classrooms, teachers may be inclined to use timeout rooms more extensively.

"If a student gets on your nerves and you a have a timeout room and you can put the child in a place where you don't have to deal with them, the tendency is to leave them there," says C. Michael Nelson, a professor of special education at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

At the combined middle school and high school in Clairton, Pa., students can find themselves sitting in a former girls' locker room for hours at a time. The school replaced the showers, toilets, and plumbing with a dozen study carrels from the library and relabeled it the isolated classroom environment - the ICE room.

Teachers can send students to the room for one class period at a time, instructing them to mull over misdeeds and write up a plan for better behavior. The school's two principals can also direct students to spend whole days in the ICE room, in lieu of suspensions for infractions such as excessive tardiness or insubordination.

More than a third of the students have spent some time in the ICE room, with an even split between special-education students and the general population.

"They don't like it. It takes them out of the social mix. They can't see their friends," says middle-school principal Susan Hicks. "Parents are a lot happier because we're not sending as many students home as we normally would have."

Page: 1 | 2