Thursday, October 28, 2010

National Disability Rights Network Endorses Senate Seclusion and Restraint Bill

Disability Rights North Carolina has been working to support federal legislation that would establish new guidelines for the use of seclusion and restraint in public schools.  If you are unfamiliar with our work in this area, please refer to our website.  A House version of the bill was filed earlier in the session.  Shortly before the break, the Senate filed its own version, S. 3895.  There were two big differences in the Senate bill: 1) It has a Republican co-sponsor, our own Senator Richard Burr; and 2) It allows seclusion and restraint that complies with the standards set out in the bill to be included in a child's IEP when there is a documented history showing a series of behaviors in the past 2 years that has created an imminent danger of serious bodily injury in school and a comprehensive, data-driven functional behavioral assessment has been conducted, and a behavioral intervention plan implemented, by a qualified team of proffesionals.  Depending on the outcome of the election, the first change may allow this bill to pass and become law this year.  The second change has been very controversial in the advocate community.  Many groups feel that the inclusion in the IEP will increase the use of seclusion and restraint and serve as an impediment to enforcing a child's rights when the use is inappropriate.

Our national organization, National Disability Rights Network (NDRN), has adopted the following recommendation with regard to teh pending Senate bill, which we at Disability Rights NC endorse:

This legislation responds to a critical need identified by the P&As and NDRN for strong, consistent national standards regarding the use of restraint and seclusion. While NDRN recognizes that there are reservations about allowing restraint and seclusion in an Individualized Education Program (IEP), we believe that the criteria contained in this legislation for when these interventions can be utilized or written into an IEP are sufficient to ensure this occurs only in very limited circumstances. On balance, the benefits of establishing national standards, together with creating a threshold for their enforcement, outweigh the ever present risks that restraint and seclusion will be misapplied. Therefore, we support this legislation and believe it should be passed.

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