Inside a Training Course Where School Workers Learn How to Physically Restrain Students
While reporting on the use of physical restraint in schools, I wanted to understand if school workers properly used their training in the classroom. They often did not.
This week’s ProPublica Illinois newsletter is written by Jennifer Smith Richards, a Chicago Tribune reporter who has been working with ProPublica Illinois reporters Jodi S. Cohen and Lakeidra Chavis to investigate the use of seclusion and restraint in Illinois public schools.
In the year that we’ve reported on restraint and seclusion, we have worked hard to become experts on the topic.
We’re not educators, but we are dedicated learners. We read books and studies about how to work with children who have behavior disorders, and we talked to academic experts and researchers across the country about seclusion, or confining students in a place they can’t leave, and physical restraint. We learned by observing, too. ProPublica Illinois reporting fellow Lakeidra Chavis and I spent two days watching a Crisis Prevention Institute, or CPI, training for educators in the Chicago suburbs.
We saw school workers learn about verbal de-escalation and how to safely break free if a student grabs their hair or bites them. We saw how a CPI trainer walked them through standing and seated restraints and how to decide what type to use.
But we wanted to learn by doing, too. So I asked my editors at the Chicago Tribune to send me to a five-day training in Peoria last March. They agreed that this would help me better understand what school employees are supposed to do during a crisis. The state currently requires school workers who use physical restraint to be trained at least once every two years and to be taught alternatives to restraint, including de-escalation techniques.
Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, a Cornell University-based program, did not want an observer in the small session but agreed to allow one of us to participate.
So I signed up.
I learned about how children cycle through a crisis and how to help them calm CONTINUE READING: Inside a Training Course Where School Workers Learn How to Physically Restrain Students — ProPublica
