Carson Luke, a young boy with autism,
shattered bones in his hand and foot after educators grabbed him and
tried to shut him into a “scream room.” Kids across the country risked
similar harm at least 267,000 times in just one school year.
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The room where they locked up Heather
Luke's 10-year-old son had cinder block walls, a dim light and a fan in
the ceiling that rattled so insistently her son would beg them to
silence it.
Sometimes, Carson later
told his mother, workers would run the fan to make him stop yelling. A
thick metal door with locks—which they threw,
clank-clank-clank—separated the autistic boy from the rest of the
decrepit building in Chesapeake, Virginia, just south of Norfolk.
The room that officials benignly
called the "quiet area" so agitated the tall and lanky blond boy that
one day in March 2011, his mother said, Carson flew into a panic at the
mere suggestion of being confined there after an outburst. He had lashed
out, hitting, scratching and hurling his shoes. Staff members held him
down, then muscled him through the hallway and attempted to lock him in,
yet again.
But this time, the effort went awry.
Staffers crushed Carson's hand while trying to slam the door. A surgeon
later needed to operate to close the bleeding half-moon a bolt had
punched into his left palm. The wound was so deep it exposed bone.
Carson's ordeal didn't take place in a psychiatric facility or juvenile jail. It happened at a public school.
For more than a decade, mental-health
facilities and other institutions have worked to curtail the practice
of physically restraining children or isolating them in rooms against
their will. Indeed, federal rules restrict those practices in nearly all
institutions that receive money from Washington to help the
young—including hospitals, nursing homes and psychiatric centers.
But such limits don't apply to public schools.
