Two 14-year olds, a 15-year old and a 17-year old were taken into custody by Columbus police after they reportedly caused a fight on the grounds of Woodward Park Middle School, 5151 Karl Road, between 2:52 and 4:01 p.m. Friday, Feb. 26.
The school principal and security officer told police the fight was spilling out into the roadway.
Upon arrival, police said the officers located a large mass of people in the middle of the roadway, with busy traffic completely blocked as the fight ensued.
The officers said they saw the teens physically fighting in the roadway, striking each other in the face and one was in a headlock.
Police said all four males were actively fighting each other and a “10-3 officer in trouble” call was broadcast on the police radio. Officers eventually sprayed pepper spray to break up the fighting before arresting the four teens, police reports said.
Tags: ohio school fight
SWISSVALE, Pa. (AP) ? Police in suburban Pittsburgh say 11 middle school students have been arrested following an after-school fight.
Swissvale Police Chief Greg Geppert says the Woodland Hills Junior High School seventh and eighth graders began fighting while waiting to get on a bus Wednesday afternoon, then others joined in.
All face disorderly conduct charges and four also face aggravated assault, resisting arrest and creating a riot charges.
A school spokeswoman says the students will be disciplined.
Some students were taken to the police department to be picked up by their parents, but others were taken to a juvenile detention center.
Two Swissvale police officers suffered hand injuries; no students required medical attention.
We are writing to express our concerns about the recently released DRNC report on seclusion and restraint. Based on press releases and news articles, we believe that DRNC is misusing its mandate as an advocate for the disabled to coerce, embarrass, harass and threaten schools, districts, personnel and teachers who are in compliance with the law, but who merely do not agree with some of DRNC’s positions.
DRNC’s call to have schools ban together and “voluntarily” restrict or eliminate certain intervention methods is illegal and in violation of the 5th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution as well as antitrust and unfair competition laws that prohibit agreements that reduce or restrict input or output.
The facts and legal bases for DRNC’s report is at times in error. For instance DRNC puts forth the proposition that all face down restraint places weight on the students back or chest and/or restricts breathing. This is simply untrue, there are several prone restraint techniques that do not place any weight on the student’s back or chest and do not restrict breathing.
the people have inherent rights that cannot be taken away. Some of these rights include the right to (1) life; (2) liberty; (3) pursuit of happiness; (4) equal process; (5) equal protection; and (6) speech to name a few.
Congress is currently debating on legislation regarding the use of restraint and seclusion in schools. H.R. 4247 and S. 2860. The proposed bill restricts the use of restraints that restrict or prevent breathing, but allows restraint, including prone restraint, that do not restrict breathing. The issue of whether it would be proper to ban prone restraint that does not restrict breathing was put squarely in front of Congress by National Disability Rights Network (NDRN). Congress rejected the NDRN’s suggestion to ban prone restraint.
Restraint used to maintain safety:
With respect to standing only restraints, the Department of Health and Human Services had this to say:
- In St. Catherine’s Care Center of Findlay v. CMS the Departmental Appeals Board held that the institution itself is responsible for protecting the safety of patients and staff by providing sufficiently effective training to manage risk.
- HHS held that the quality of care regulation (42 C.F.R. 482.13) requires facilities to provide supervision designed to meet the resident’s and facility’s real needs and protect the residents from violent and dangerous behavior. The fact that the facility had some crisis intervention and restraint program (in this case standing only restraints) in place is NOT enough. The program and training must be sufficient, capable and effective in maintaining safety.
- In the case cited, the restraint program that was used only contained standing holds which were determined in this instance to be insufficient in maintaining a safe environment.
Further in NDRN’s report on Restraint and Seclusion, NDRN lists 4 restraint fatalities over a 10-20 year period. We know that at least three and we think all four of those restraint fatalities occurred at facilities that had either no training or a standing only restraint program where staff were never trained in floor restraint. The one Michigan fatality where there was a 6 foot tall student that was having a seizure and could not be maintained standing — that school was only trained in standing restraint, and when standing restraint was not feasible had to improvise. The other Michigan school, was not trained in any crisis intervention or restraint program. We believe the Texas fatality occurred at a school that also only had standing restraint training. And we know that in the Wisconsin fatality, that staff were never trained in floor restraint.
Under Canton v. Harris, there is a duty on the part of the facility to train staff/teachers in interventions to deal with foreseeable events. Canton v. Harris. Failure to do so that results in harm is a common law violation and could be a constitutional violation depending on the severity and frequency of the harm.
In DRNC’s report, DRNC lists schools that contract with a vendor that only teaches standing holds, but the school nevertheless does floor holds. This is a problem because the school obviously needs to use floor holds to maintain safety, yet contracts for a program that does not teach floor holds, and is therefore insufficient to meet the school’s needs. This is a failure to train issue.
All the law on this subject points to the same conclusion — which is that it is the duty of the facility/school providing the services, treatment or education to determine and decide what is necessary to maintain a safe environment. If DRNC or anyone else is saying anything different, then they are misrepresenting the law and the duty of the school or facility. DRNC does not have the ability to indemnify a facility or school from liability if the school fails to protect and/or fails to train in the necessary competencies that the school, not DRNC, feels is necessary to maintain an environment conducive to learning and effective to maintain safety.
Currently 90% of states do NOT ban prone restraint in schools. Only 2 states ban the use of prone restraint in schools: (1) Pennsylvania, and (2) Iowa. As a result of the ban in Pennsylvania, many schools have had to reject students as the schools could not maintain a safe environment. There have been several school and other programs that have shut their doors to students because they could not maintain a safe environment given the restrictive regulations. These students are currently being placed in programs out of state.
School Resource Officers (SRO) are being attacked more frequently as a result because teachers do not feel safe intervening, and law enforcement is called more frequently. SROs are also requesting to carry tasers and handguns to maintain a safe environment. So PA’s ban on prone restraint did absolutely nothing to create a safer environment for either teachers or students, and in fact did just the opposite and simply added to the increased use of law enforcement and the school to prison pipeline and criminalization of the student. (See, PA: Restrictive Regulations Promote Additional Police Intervention — Another Student Tasered http://kdka.com/school/Monessen.basketball.brawl.2.1463654.html).
Neither DRNC nor NDRN nor Protection & Advocacy have the necessary expertise to be advocating for the positions they are advocating for. Further these positions are not supported by the available statistics, data or scientific evidence. Their advocacy reporting is based on isolated incidents taken out of context of the overall issue of behavior management and school safety and play on people’s emotional response rather than factual, scientific or legal evidence.
We also have issue that DRNC is seemingly endorsing a particular vendor or practice. If DRNC is funded by taxpayer money, then this endorsement we believe is inappropriate. There is a Constitutional standard for what is appropriate and non-appropriate intervention. This standard is created by God and Law, not DRNC or a particular vendor.
In conclusion we would just like to say that we do not think DRNC’s use of coercion, embarrassment tactics, harassment and threats to schools, districts, personnel and teachers who do not agree with their position regarding the use of restraint and seclusion is a proper use of taxpayer monies. DRNC should not be allowed to use guerilla warfare to embarrass or harass districts into compliance with DRNC’s policies when the school is in compliance with local, state and Federal law. DRNC’s mission is not to coerce schools or other facilities or entities into adopting DRNC’s policies or beliefs. DRNC’s mission as an advocate for the disabled is simply to insure that the rights of the disabled as prescribed by law are preserved and maintained.
If DRNC wants to lobby for different laws, they are free to do so, but they are not free to coerce policy agreements as a condition for not being investigated or harassed.
OMAHA, Neb. — A Council Bluffs high school teacher has been jailed on accusations that she put a special needs student in a choke hold.
According to court documents, witnesses said it isn’t the first time the teacher has done it.
Donna M. Thomas, 53, turned herself into police on Tuesday after the Pottawattamie County Attorney filed criminal charges.
According to court documents obtained by KETV NewsWatch 7, Thomas has more than 21 years of teaching experience in Iowa. But in this case, Council Bluffs police said she went too far in restraining a Thomas Jefferson High School student.
The father of the 15-year-old boy, who has autism, reported the incident to police in November after he said he was alerted by a school worker.
According to a court affidavit, the school paraprofessional called the father to tell him she had “witnessed Donna Thomas become overly aggressive with the child.”
The paraprofessional said in the affidavit, “There were two or three occasions when I saw her head-lock him … she pinned him. I’m like, what is she doing? I was even in shock.”
Another witnesses in the affidavit described the restraint as a choke hold.
Police asked the witness if Thomas was aggravated during the time the alleged incident happened.
“Oh yeah,” the witness said, according to the affidavit.
Police asked the witness if Thomas was angry at the same.
“Yeah,” the witness replied.
The witness told police that the teacher was “breaking certain boundaries and rules. By putting a child in a headlock, that is breaking rules.”
Police Sgt. Chad Meyers said the reports suggested the boy was being picked on, and that a line was crossed.
“Maybe that the physical restraint techniques went a little bit far,” Meyers said.
Council Bluffs school officials said they couldn’t comment on the issue because it’s a personnel matter. They did say that Thomas has been on paid administrative leave since November.
As one article commentator put it:
Iowa put a legislative restriction on reasonable intervention. The Iowa legislature is not authorized by either State law or the U.S. Constitution to limit a person’s right to defend themselves or another by any means reasonable regardless of the mental condition of the actor. That’s why there’s the 5th and 14th amendments — you know the ones “all men are created equal.” If the physical intervention training provided to this teacher was insufficient to maintain safety during foreseeable circumstances, and as a result the teacher had to resort to a choke hold because, for instance, she (1) was not trained; (2) was not trained in a reasonable method of intervention effective to maintain safety; or (3) told (by the legislature or the school) that she could not use a method more reasonable or less restrictive than a choke hold when there is a reasonable and/or less restrictive method than a choke hold that would have been both reasonable and effective to maintain safety — the school (and even the State), not the teacher, may well be the one liable. See Supreme Court Ruling in Canton v. Harris. Full Story.
Tags: choke hold, IOWA, school
Two front page articles in today’s New York Times are of particular significance addressing both quality of care and expenditure.
1. “Revising Book on Disorders of the Mind” by Benedict Carey, reveals that the bipolar diagnosis for children and the prescribing of toxic antipsychotics for children will be delegitimized in the revised diagnostic manual in psychiatry, the DSM-5.
http://www.nytimes. com/2010/ 02/10/health/ 10psych.html
The foremost revision to psychiatry’s diagnostic manual (in the forthcoming DSM-V) overturns current American psychiatric practice of loosely “diagnosing” children with bipolar and then mis-prescribing toxic antipsychotics for children. These practices have been aggressively promoted by leading child psychiatrists, most notably by Dr. Joseph Biederman of Harvard / Massachusetts General Hospital .
Under the revised DSM-V diagnostic criteria, “Far fewer children would get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.”
This revision is clearly the result of documented evidence brought to public attention. The evidence shows that children have become casualties of psychiatry’s commercially driven, drug-centered, clinical practices. Adding fuel were the revelations about those psychiatrists’ financial ties to psychotropic drug manufacturers.
”‘The treatment of bipolar disorder is meds first, meds second and meds third,” said Dr. Jack McClellan, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington who is not working on the manual. ‘Whereas if these kids have a behavior disorder, then behavioral treatment should be considered the primary treatment’.”
Children have been misdiagnosed, then targeted for abusive prescribing of toxic drugs, endorsed by American child psychiatrists at leading academic institutions and the American Psychiatric Association. “The misdiagnosis led many children to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes.”
Leading psychiatrists now admit that most of unruly children were misdiagnosed as bipolar: “One significant change would be adding a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, a recommendation that grew out of recent findings that many wildly aggressive, irritable children who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not have it.”
“Some diagnoses of bipolar disorder have been in children as young as 2, and there have been widespread reports that doctors promoting the diagnosis received consulting and speaking fees from the makers of the drugs.”
Of note, psychiatry’s leadership – those who are largely responsible for the meteoric rise in the labeling of normal children as “bipolar” – who led the way by lending the appearance of legitimacy to the illegitimate prescribing antipsychotics for young children – which rank among industry’s most damage-producing drugs – are retreating from their stance.
Even Dr. David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist at Columbia, a strong proponent of using psychoactive drugs for children; the psychiatrist responsible for the design and promotion of TeenScreen – a mental screening dragnet designed to increase the number of school children labeled with mental disorders requiring immediate intervention; has now conceded that the current practice of labeling misbehaving children as bipolar has been wrong.
A second important revision would retreat from the practice of presuming that children’s misbehavior signaled “risk syndromes” for severe incapacitating mental illness which justified interventions with toxic pharmaceuticals:
“I completely understand the idea of trying to catch something early, but imagine the human tragedies that follow the mislabeling of 70% of children as severely mentally ill, who are then exposed to extremely toxic drugs that induce diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and a host of other severe adverse effects. Adding insult to injury, US taxpayers have been saddled with the cost of drugs that undermine the health of children who then require life-long care for drug-induced (iatrogenic) chronic diseases.
http://www.nytimes. com/2010/ 02/10/health/ policy/10care. html?ref= todayspaper
see also www.ahrp.org
Tags: behavioral treatment, bipolar
Ex-Youth Aide in Tennessee says false claims of abuse ruined his life.
Unfortunately this is not an isolated occurance, nor is Tennessee the only state engaging in this practice.
County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania. Facilities are experiencing staff hesitancy in confronting inappropriate behaviors as staff report fear of retaliation from licensing representatives should the confrontation result in aggressive behavior by the resident and a subsequent restraint should occur. Accused PA Department of Public Welfare with filing unsubstantiated charges against staff that were ultimately dismissed. This situation has resulted in resident youth willing to push limits further and thus increase the potential of harm to other residents and staff. Bargaining unit representatives have encouraged staff to pursue criminal charges on youth who become assaultive.
D.C. and Maryland have also been accused of retaliatory conduct towards employees including unsubstantiated abuse and neglect charges.
NE. Currently a child care worker has filed an action against Nebraska for a wrongful abuse accusation.
NY. OCFS employees have charged that OCFS is improperly using its protective and child enforcement arm to falsely accuse and retaliate against employees.
TN. In 2002 a youth aide was accused of sexual abuse by three female juveniles. Dockery insisted the allegations were false, but he was ultimately indicted on 14 counts of sexual battery, official oppression and official misconduct. Before the case went through the legal process, Dockery was fired. But when the case did go to trial. Judge Steve Dozier dismissed all the charges and expunged them from Dockery’s record.
Arrest still shows up. Despite having his name cleared, Dockery said the last eight years have been hell. He has been unable to find a job working with children, as he had done for 10 years, because he said the arrest still shows up on background checks.
Without regular pay, Dockery has bounced around living with friends and family and even spending almost an entire year living out of his car. His precarious situation has prevented him from being able to see his children, who live with their mother in Chicago.
“They took away my life, my entire life,” said Dockery, who has recently asked the Department of Justice to look at his case.
Tags: false abuse charges, false indication charges, false indictment, juvenile justice, youth aide
With around eight million hits for online videos of teenage girls fist fighting, Whit Johnson reports on the new trend of disputes between young girls becoming more violent.
Below is a video of two teens fighting with a crowd cheering them on.
In the CBS report on girls fighting and posting the fight on the internet, Whit Johnson shows a fight between two youths in Louisiana with two adults standing and watching the altercation. The parent’s inactivity and passive bystanding has resulted in police bringing the adults up on felony cruelty to minor charges. Which illustrates the point that there is just as much liability and damage in underreacting as there is in overreacting.
See CBS Report on “Girls Fighting”
Tags: girl fighting, girls fighting in school, utube videos of girls fighting
ANOTHER STUDENT TASERED – What exactly do you expect the police to do?
In a fight that made national news at a basketball game at a Pittsburgh High School, law enforcement were called to stop the violence which resulted in several arrests and one student getting tasered.
In Pennsylvania, school staff are discouraged from intervening resulting in an increase of school resource officers and law enforement on school premises. Prior to the restrictive Pennsylvania regulations limiting teacher’s use of effective physical intervention methods, teachers intervened more often in student on student altercations and were able to address the behavior in its early stages rather than allowing the behavior to escalate resulting in additional law enforcement and the corresponding criminalization of the child to maintain the peace.
If schools and the public are not happy about the repercussions of an intervention policy that ties the hands of teachers to intervene effectively in favor of law enforcement intervention, there are three options:
1. Untie teacher’s hands and make law enforcement intervention a last resort
2. Keep teacher’s hands tied, but train law enforcement (if they are willing) in youth appropriate interventions i.e. verbal de-escalation and/or non-pain inducing physical intervention, or
3. Keep things as they are and be unhappy.
In NY, ACLU filed a law suit against NYPD for using excessive force on students and the improper criminalization of the student. Contrast this with an incident in MN.
In MN, a student was defiant to law enforcement and got tasered. When questioned about the appropriateness of the use of a taser on a student, the MN police chief backed his officers 100% and said the use of a taser was appropriate under the circumstances presented, and that it prevented the use of more pain inducing intervention like the baton.
So to all the people advocating to tie teacher’s and staff’s hands — now you can witness first hand some of the consequences –increased use of law enforcement and tasers to maintain safety. Story.
Tags: school fight leads to arrest, school fight one student tasered, student tasered in Philadelphia
Experts agree that prone restraint of an agitated person cannot possibly lead to sudden death due to hypoxia.
Due to the controversial nature of a sudden in custody restraint death, numerous case and retrospective studies, incident reports, and monographs have been published since the 1980s in order to bring awareness of the subject matter. While these studies have assisted in heightening the awareness on the topic, they do not provide scientific evidence of the cause of death. Only nine experimental scientific studies have been conducted on the subject in an effort to explain the cause of a sudden restraint custodial death. Consequently, a systematic analysis of these studies was performed to evaluate their findings. This analysis is presented so that law enforcement officers may have a greater understanding of how to apply the science to incidents of use of force in sudden in custody restraint deaths.
Research shows that a sudden in-custody restraint death is a statically rare event.
Findings of the Physiological Experimental Studies
Nine published scientific experiments on restraint asphyxia were assessed, and two were conducted in the UK. Of these studies, five researched hogtying and positional asphyxia; 1 study examined responses of subjects exposed to pepper spray and being hogtied; and three studies examined weight force, restraint, and asphyxia. A total of 135 subjects participated in these studies and 98 were male. The average age was 31.
Of these research experiments the Reay et al. (1988) study can be classified as “flawed or junk science.” Reay et al. reported that after exercise and being placed prone in the hogtied position, the risk of positional asphyxia increased. However, as more sophisticated research by other researchers was conducted, Reay (1998) retracted his original conclusions on positional asphyxia acknowledging that hogtying is physiological neutral (see also Price v. County of San Diego, CA, 1998). The Roeggla et al. (1997) study methods were also flawed. The authors made conclusions about ventilatory changes in the restraint position that are not validated by the data presented. While the subjects were placed in a variety of positions exercise or struggle as a component was not designed into the experiment. Without the component exercise conclusions of the study cannot be supported regarding the effects on ventilation. They reported no significant effects to any cardiopulmonary parameters and the study demonstrated no ventilation compromise, hypoxemia or hypercapnia with the restraint position to suggest an increased risk of asphyxiation.
Further, the Krauskopf et al. (2008) study design had several flaws. The researchers also failed to exercise the subjects, or have the subjects struggle before or during the exercise. Moreover, the subjects lay unrestrained on a mattress with their arms draped out over the mattress in a normal fashion while weights were placed on their lower back for an unspecified period of time. The study findings did not demonstrate hypoxia or hyercapnia, and the researchers concluded that cardiovascular parameters were uninfluenced by weight force application.
Findings of the remaining experimental six studies contribute to clarifying the science behind restraint physiology (Chan et al. 1997; Schmidt and Snowden, 1999; Parkes, 2000; Chan et al, 2002; Chan et al. 2004; Michalewciz et al. 2007). Despite the obvious and apparent limitations associated with laboratory experiments with human subjects, these studies followed rigorous experimental methodological design, used randomization of respondents with trial applications, used appropriate statistical analysis and probability values, medically pre-screened participants, required subjects to exercise or struggle prior to restraint, and followed appropriate human subject research protocols.
The studies do not support the contention that ventilation is significantly comprised, regardless of being placed prone and restrained; being restrained hogtied or placed in a prone position, with or without weight on the back; or restrained, hogtied, and exposed to pepper spray. From a medical perspective, these studies reveal that there is no evidence that the hogtied position, in and of itself plays a risk factor for asphyxia. Collectively, the studies conclude that the prone restraint position, nor the hogtied restrained position, with or without weight force, contributed to abnormal pulmonary function, hypoxemia (deficient oxygenation of the blood), hypoventilation (decreased lung ventilation), or hypercapnia (excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in the blood) sufficient to cause asphyxia. Moreover, the findings are supported by prior work on exercise physiology which indicates that arterial oxygenation improves rather than decreases with moderate exercise in healthy people (Levitzy, 1995; Wasserman, et al. 1994).
The physiological science of restraint not only clarifies that the restraint position or restraint procedures fail to support a sudden death from ventilatory compromise but also reveal that other more significant factors are more likely to contribute to a sudden violent restraint death. Other factors such as excited delirium, drug intoxication, mental illness, stress, trauma, and catecholamine hyperstimulation, are considered to be factors playing the most significant role in these sudden deaths (Ross, 1998; Ruttenber, et al., 1997; Wetli, 2006, 2005; Laposata, 1993; Karch, 2008; DiMaio and DiMaio, 2006). Moreover, other studies show that a significant number of individuals who suddenly die after restraint have an abnormally enlarged heart, linked to chronic drug abuse, and have internal organ deficiencies (Herd, 1991; Karch, 2008; Karch and Green, 1995; Karch and Stevens, 1999; Laposata, 1991, 2006).
The basic tenets of exercise physiology support the conclusions of the six published scientific experiments. Appling the fundamental tenets of exercise physiology Glatter and Karch (2004) and DiMaio and DiMaio (2006) conclude that merely restraining an agitated person cannot possibly lead to significant hypoxia unless, there is some preexisting problems with central cardiac output, peripheral oxygen extraction, or oxygen utilization. They concluded that positional asphyxia in and of itself cannot cause this outcome and there is no evidence that physical activity causes life threatening episodes of hypoxia, no matter how strenuous the activity.
The above was written by: Dr. Darrell L. Ross (date published 1-27-2010)
Go to the next page for supporting references Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: hypoxia, in custody sudden death, positional asphyxia, prone restraint, restraint asphyxiation, suddent death
WA.Caught on Tape: Girls Fight While 3 Security Guards Watch
Three security guards watched a group of teens punch, kick and rob a 15-year-old girl in the downtown Seattle Metro bus tunnel without intervening. Security video shows the guards call for help on their radios, but they don’t go to the aid of the girl even as she is being kicked in the head. A dispute involving a group of 10 teens apparently started inside a department store the evening of Jan. 28 and moved to the bus tunnel at Westlake Station, where the girl was attacked
Take the quiz:
Does this girl deserve to be (a) beaten or (b) rescued?
Tags: caught on tape security guard watches girl beaten, seattle washington girl fight