Tim Miller

The children return from school confused, scared and sometimes with bruises on their wrists, arms or face. Many won’t talk about what happened, or simply can’t, because they are unable to communicate easily, if at all.

“What Tim eventually said,” said Dr. John Miller, a podiatrist in Allegany, New York, about his son, then 12, “was that he didn’t want to go to school because he thought the school was trying to kill him.”

Miller learned that Tim, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was being unusually confrontational in class, and that more than once teachers had held him down on the floor to “calm him down,” according to logs teachers kept to track his behavior; on at least one occasion, adults held Tim prone for 20 minutes until he stopped struggling.

The Millers are suing the district, in part for costs of therapy for their son as a result of the restraints. The district did not dispute the logs but denied that teachers behaved improperly.

For more than a decade, parents of children with developmental and psychiatric problems have pushed to gain more access to mainstream schools and classrooms for their sons and daughters. One unfortunate result, some experts say, is schools’ increasing use of precisely the sort of practices families hoped to avoid by steering clear of institutionalized settings: takedowns, isolation rooms, restraining chairs with straps, and worse…

Reece Peterson, a Nebraska professor, illustrates the challenges by citing two recent cases in Iowa. In one, the parents of an 11-year-old who died while being held down called for a ban on restraints; in the other, parents charged that a school failed their son by not restraining him. The boy ran away and drowned.

“It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Peterson said, “and it reflects the level of confusion there is about this whole issue.”

I’ve been on both sides of similar questions. Fighting for the right of a child to be mainstreamed. Confronted by youth completely incapable at the moment of rational, comprehending response beyond violence.

I haven’t any easy answers. Neither has this article. But, it is praiseworthy and worth reading to help anyone convinced of only one side that things ain’t so cut and dried.

A special note: Tim Miller’s father has commented extensively on his son’s mainstreaming and the questions arising along the way. In the comments section at the IHT – his are comments 4,5 and 8. I’ve had a few emails forth-and-back with Dr. Miller and he thinks the article by Benedict Carey is terrific btw.