Stuart Candell was a 9-year-old, underweight, intellectually gifted student with autism, anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder when, with the consent of his parents, his home school district Oakland Unified placed him at the Anova Center for Education Contra Costa in 2013. Stuart had a history of biting, hitting and kicking and Anova, a private special education school, specializes in managing the behavior of high-functioning children with autism.
Over the next 11 months, Anova staff restrained Stuart face-down on the floor 92 times for cursing, hiding under a desk, “too much silly” and other behaviors, according to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. He regressed academically and became suicidal while Anova and Oakland Unified took little action, investigators found.
“It is Oakland Unified School District’s highest priority to provide safe learning environments for all students,” the district said in a statement. Oakland Unified, which contracts with Anova and other private special education schools for services the district cannot provide, is actively complying with the terms of the resolution, the statement said. Further, the district said it believes the changes called for will “positively impact” Oakland Unified students with special needs who are placed in private special education schools.
In a statement on Aug. 4, Anova said the Office for Civil Rights investigation report was not a public document and that Anova had not received a copy. “Once available, we will carefully consider the findings of the report,” the statement said.
Advocates and news organizations found the documents through a news release posted Aug. 2 on the website of Disability Rights California, the state watchdog organization that filed the complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.
In its statement, Anova defended its use of prone restraints and said the method is “fully legal and used only when ongoing means of behavioral therapy have been unsuccessful to prevent physical harm to the pupil, or to other students or staff.” Staff follow a strict protocol when using prone restraints, the statement said.
In one example cited by investigators, Stuart was put in a prone restraint for 35 minutes because “he was upset about walking into dog droppings and ran into the classroom screaming.” In another example, Stuart was held in a prone restraint for 45 minutes for throwing a chair. On another day, he was put in a prone restraint twice, for 15 minutes each time, “due to the student’s frustration regarding a game of Uno,” investigators found.
Related
Michael Ashline, left, and his son Andrew, a special needs student in Orange, at their home in 2014.
Little Oversight Of Restraint Practices In Special Education
At Anova, investigators said Stuart was held in a prone restraint for an average of 29 minutes each time; the longest prone restraint was 93 minutes, with staff taking turns holding him down. While being restrained, he was not allowed to go to the bathroom or given food or drink.
“The district allowed Anova to routinely use prone restraint in response to the behavior of the student that was defiant and disruptive, but not dangerous,” the report focused on Stuart stated.
The prone restraints are a sharp contrast to the system of positive interventions that Oakland Unified is required to apply to its non-special-education students with behavior issues, under the terms of a previous Office for Civil Rights resolution regarding the outsized number of African-American students being suspended, said Suge Lee, supervising attorney at Disability Rights California.
Lee said she was unaware of any other Office for Civil Rights investigation that included such strongly worded findings on the dangers of prone restraint in special education and the legal responsibility of school districts to oversee their students in private special education schools.
“The Office for Civil Rights found, rightly, that what happened to this kid deprived him of a free and appropriate education under education law and that his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act were violated because he was denied an equal education to that of students without disabilities,” she said.
“The findings show that Oakland sat on its hands.”
https://edsource.org/2016/federal-investigators-cite-harsh-discipline-in-special-education-at-oakland-district/567767
August 2016
Oversight of private special education schools begins at Oakland Unified
In a violation of federal civil rights protections for students with disabilities, investigators found that Oakland Unified failed to intervene even as its staff members sat through meetings where serious concerns about Stuart’s progress were raised. On more than one occasion, Stuart’s mother said that her son was so distraught about being repeatedly restrained that merely driving up to Anova would trigger his disruptive behaviors; he also had expressed thoughts of suicide, she said. At another meeting, instructors in speech and language reported that they couldn’t provide services to Stuart because he spent so much time being restrained or recovering. Nearly a year passed before Oakland Unified took action to schedule an evaluation of Stuart’s behavior, investigators said.
https://edsource.org/2016/oversight-of-private-special-education-schools-begins-at-oakland-unified/568041
