Kathrina Litchfield
Schools across eastern Iowa are using unfinished pine boxes, some measuring just six feet by six feet, to hold and discipline children. These “time-out rooms” or “seclusion enclosures,” set inside the classroom, feature padded walls and a door that can only be opened from the outside.
Children can be confined to one of these rooms without parental consent, although state rules require schools attempt to contact parents the same day.
The amount of time a child spends secluded is left up to the individual teacher, but with an administrator's permission, it can exceed one hour.
Former Cedar Rapids resident Tammy Mims tells The Progressive about a little girl for whom she is a legal guardian, who was locked inside an unapproved “time-out room” fashioned from a utility closet. Mims could hear her third grader in the background screaming to be let out when the Cedar Rapids school called her. By the time she got to the school, the little girl had been released but was still traumatized by the experience.
“If I was to do what they did, it would be child abuse,” Mims says. “Why is it OK for the school district to do that to a child?”
Akwi J. Nji, director of communications for Cedar Rapids Community School District, responded to The Progressive with the following statement:
“Prior to the incident last April, the room had been used over the years for storage and as a meeting location for teachers and students. It was made inaccessible to students after the incident last spring.”
Nji also went on to say that changes have been made since that day, including
“proactive measures that were taken after the incident in the spring to review our procedures and practices.”
Daniel Zeno, policy counsel for the Iowa American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has joined a group of attorneys filing a petition with the Iowa Department of Education asking it to limit use of time-out rooms to emergencies, as a last-resort safety measure to protect a student from hurting themselves or others.
In addition to the punitive nature of these boxes, Zeno says they are being used to disproportionately punish black children. According to Iowa Department of Education 2013-2014 data, Zeno tells The Progressive, “all the kids who were put in seclusion rooms who didn't have a disability were African American. Every one.”
While some school officials defend the boxes as helpful for students needing to be removed from over-stimulating environments, the Autism National Committee opposes seclusion enclosures. The organization has produced a report outlining the restraint and isolation practices across each U.S. state.
Chris Liebig, a school board member with the Iowa City Community Schools, has blogged about secluding students as punishment in his district. He tells The Progressive that seclusion enclosures have a variety of different names but are often described to parents as “time-out rooms.” In Liebig’s view, there is no hiding what they really are.
“The physical nature of these boxes is pretty disturbing,” he says, describing them as “little dungeons.”
Iowa permits the use of seclusion when there is no threat to personal physical safety, as do Arkansas, Illinois, Montana, and New York. Twenty-nine other states have outright bans on the use of these rooms for discipline or punishment of children.
Private charters, however, can maintain controversial punishment measures regardless of parental concerns or public opinion. Charters can receive waivers exempting them from state or district-enforced discipline policies. In 2011, a charter school in New Orleans came under fire for its use of seclusion enclosures.
In response to a complaint filed last year, Iowa Department of Education officials found Iowa City School district’s use of seclusion rooms in violation of state law. Reviewing 455 incidents involving 64 children, the review showed that the majority of students detained in these rooms were those in kindergarten through third grade, and for an average time of nearly thirty minutes.
Childcare expert Dean Pearson recommends timeouts of one minute for each year of the child’s age.
The department called for the district to avoid use of the rooms unless there is a threat to safety and “less restrictive interventions have failed.” It stopped short of an outright ban.
Critics say this language is still too broad. Liebig concedes that in limited cases, removing a child from the main classroom is required to protect them and others. But he maintains that seclusion could potentially be misused by overburdened teachers to cope with normal childhood disobedience. Liebig recalls an incident when a child had been in the seclusion enclosure twenty-three times before his parents finally moved him to a new school district.
“No matter what kind of experience it is and no matter how palatable you can make it,” he says, “they’re not getting an education when they're in the seclusion box.”
Fiona Tapp is a freelance travel, education and parenting writer. Her work has been featured by National Geographic, The Washington Post, The New York Post, HuffPost, Brides, and Fodor's among many others. Follow her at @fionatapptravels on IG or @fionatappdotcom on Twitter.