When he was in sixth grade, Ember Power’s son began to act out in school.
Power’s son, whose name she declined to share, was exhibiting signs of slow processing speed, meaning he struggled to keep up in classes at Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury. Class was often overwhelming and stressful for him, and he sometimes refused to do work, or simply walked out of his classroom.
After his behavior interventionist left partway through the school year, Power’s son was sometimes left in the care of another staffer. One day, while being supervised in the staffer’s office, her son attempted to leave the room. The school employee “didn’t allow him out,” Power said. “And then when he tried to leave, she held him down.”
What her son experienced is known in education jargon as a prone restraint: a practice, intended as a safety measure, in which a student is physically held face-down on the ground.
Prone restraints, though strictly limited by state rules, are permitted in Vermont. But in Harwood Union Unified School District, which includes Crossett Brook, their use has drawn public scrutiny and criticism for months — culminating in a temporary halt to the practice.
In an Aug. 25 letter, signed by the district’s superintendent and the school board’s chair and vice chair, administrators announced that they were appointing a task force to examine the district’s use of prone restraints and implementing a moratorium, “effective immediately.”
‘They’re not interventions that work’
In a 2012 report, the federal Department of Education defined the term restraint as “a personal restriction that immobilizes or reduces the ability of a student to move his or her torso, arms, legs, or head freely.”
The practice is often put in the same category as seclusion, which is defined as “the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area from which the student is physically prevented from leaving,” according to the department.
Restraints and seclusions are an accepted practice in schools, although they are supposed to be rare. Under federal guidelines, “restraint or seclusion should never be used except in situations where a child’s behavior poses imminent danger of serious physical harm to self or others.” The practices “should be avoided to the greatest extent possible without endangering the safety of students and staff.”
But prone restraints, like the one that Power’s son suffered, are more strictly regulated. According to Guy Stephens, the founder of Maryland-based nonprofit Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint, more than 30 states have outlawed prone restraints in their schools. Vermont is not among them.
“Honestly, I’m a little surprised that Vermont’s state law still allows the use of prone restraint,” Stephens said in an interview. “That was a little bit shocking to me.”
In Vermont, prone and supine (face-up) restraints are supposed to be used as an absolute last resort — permitted by the Agency of Education only when a student’s “size and severity of behavior” require it, and only if “less restrictive” measures would fail to prevent harm.
Restraints, especially prone restraints, can be physically dangerous. And data shows that students of color and students with disabilities are more likely to be physically restrained or put in seclusion, Stephens said.
The practice can also be intensely traumatic for the affected children, he said, which, in turn, can make them more likely to act out in the future.
“So restraint and seclusion are really interesting because they’re not interventions that work,” Stephens said. “What you’re really doing is priming (kids) to feel unsafe, and priming them to be more likely to have behaviors.”
‘Like somebody’s being arrested’
In Harwood Union Unified School District, which serves six rural communities in central Vermont, the question of restraints has drawn attention largely thanks to Brian Dalla Mura, a former special educator in the district.
In late summer of 2021, Dalla Mura started a new job at Brookside Primary School in Waterbury. Almost immediately, he was disturbed to notice that teachers were restraining kids on a daily basis, he said.
Situations often began with students failing to complete “small compliance-based things,” he said. “Not following instructions. Not being where you’re supposed to be. Not completing your schoolwork.”
Kids were usually put in time-outs first. But if they resisted, Dalla Mura said, the situation often escalated into a restraint. At Brookside, staff often took students to a small, windowless room with no carpeting to restrain them, he said.
“It really looks like somebody’s being arrested, somebody who’s resisting arrest,” he said. “Except for it’s a 7- or 8-year-old kid. So yeah, they’re really upset. They’re yelling, screaming, fighting.”
According to the most recent publicly available data on restraints from the federal Department of Education, from the 2017-18 school year, Harwood Union Unified School District recorded a total of 451 restraints — the most of any district in the state. That year, 281 reported instances of restraint were reported at Brookside Primary School, then called Thatcher Brook.
It’s not clear from that data how many of those were prone restraints. All were used on students with disabilities.
Michael Leichliter, who took over as the district’s new superintendent this July, said in an interview that he did not know why the school and district had recorded such high numbers, but noted that the practice had decreased since then.
“I was not here. I don’t know the students involved,” he said. “But in general, it’s a very, very small number of students that are impacted by the use of restraints in the schools. And we have seen a decline from that school year.”
Brookside reported 192 restraints in the 2020-21 school year, and 157 in the 2021-22 year, Leichliter said.
‘A reasonable ask’
Dalla Mura said he voiced his concerns about the frequency of restraints with school administrators in fall 2021 and winter 2022, but was rebuffed. He decided to drop it, he said, until March or April, when he first saw students being held face-down in prone restraints.
“That was the time I was like, OK. I’ve had it,” he said.
This spring, he and other advocates brought the issue to the attention of the district’s school board. At a May 11 meeting, Jonathan Young, a Warren board member, asked whether the district could immediately stop prone restraints in its schools, saying the practice posed a “great risk to the children and to the district, legally.”
“I feel very strongly that we should do everything in our power to act immediately, or as soon as possible, to eliminate that risk,” Young said.
Brigid Nease, the district’s superintendent at the time, urged the board to consult an attorney and conduct more research into the practice. A new superintendent was scheduled to take over July 1, and, she said, it was unclear whether the board had the authority to end prone restraints in the school.
“Prone restraint is something that you need to learn about: what is it, when does it occur, why does it occur, who implements it,” she said. “You know none of that.”
The board voted to examine the issue at a later meeting.
On Aug. 25, just as school across the state was beginning, Leichliter and the board’s leadership announced a moratorium on prone and supine restraints.
In a letter to community members, administrators announced that the district was also appointing a task force, made up of the superintendent, principals and the district’s special education director, “to assess the current need for restraint and seclusion and methods to reduce their use in the school district.”
“We appreciate that this issue was raised with the school district and are committed to making improvements in our schools so that they are a caring and safe environment where all our children can learn and excel,” administrators wrote.
Leichliter said that enacting new policies on restraints and seclusions “requires a lot of conversations and thoughtful consideration, especially in cases where we have students who really need and who have trouble with that regulation.”
But the superintendent, a former administrator in Pennsylvania, noted that his prior home state did not permit prone restraints in schools.
“I come from a state where it was illegal,” Leichliter said. “It was not even on the books. (There) was not a possibility of use. And so for me, I think that was a reasonable ask.”
‘A very small step’
It’s unclear whether other Vermont school districts have taken steps to limit the practice. Education officials and disability advocates said they were unaware of any other districts with restrictions on restraints beyond those mandated by state rules.
Rachel Seelig, the director of Vermont Legal Aid’s Disability Law Project and the former chair of the Vermont Special Education Advisory Panel, said that the Harwood district’s moratorium is “a very small step in the right direction.”
“The ideal is that we’re meeting kids’ needs so that no restraint is ever really appropriate, because students never get to the place of being an actual danger to themselves or other people,” she said. “We’re not there yet. But I do think restraints and seclusion are overused, and in particular are overused and targeted (toward) students with disabilities.”
The campaign in Harwood Union has drawn the attention of at least one state lawmaker. Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, said that she is working with other lawmakers to draft legislation addressing the practice.
That bill is based on the Keeping All Students Safe Act, a proposed federal law that would ban prone and supine restraints nationwide.
Vermont lawmakers have tried and failed to ban prone restraints in the past. But, Wood said, “The world has changed in the last 20 years.”
“I’m hopeful,” she said. “Let’s just put it that way. I’m hopeful that we will have more support as we look at this issue.”
Power’s son, the former Crossett Brook student, currently attends high school in another district. His restraint had a lasting impact on him, she said: For a week afterward, he felt too unsafe to return to school, and he shied away from some forms of physical contact for a long time.
“We couldn’t hug our son for a long time after this incident,” Power wrote in a letter to the school board earlier this year.
The district’s new scrutiny toward the use of restraints is good news, she said in an interview. “As long as they actually follow through.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Rachel Seelig’s position at the Vermont Special Education Advisory Panel.
