8 year old wets herself in time out

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Experts question benefit of school time-out rooms

By MICHAEL J. CRUMB
Associated Press Writer



DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- After failing to finish a reading assignment, 8-year-old Isabel Loeffler was sent to the school's time-out room - a converted storage area under a staircase - where she was left alone for three hours.

The autistic Iowa girl wet herself before she was finally allowed to leave.

Appalled, her parents removed her from the school district and filed a lawsuit.

Some educators say time-out rooms are being used with increased frequency to discipline children with behavioral disorders. And the time outs are probably doing more harm than good, they add.

"It really is a form of abuse," said Ken Merrell, head of the Department for Special Education and Clinical Sciences at the University of Oregon. "It's going to do nothing to change the behavior. You're using it as an isolation booth."

Segregating children removes them from the positive aspect of the classroom and highlights that they're different from other children, said Stephen Camarata, director of the Kennedy Center for Behavioral Research at Vanderbilt University. And isolating an autistic child might be particularly counterproductive.

"They don't like being around other people so they might increase their negative behavior because they view it a reward," he said.

Though there is no data on the use of time-out rooms, Camarata speculates that they've become widespread as schools confronted a growing enrollment of children with behavior disorders.

"I believe it's because classrooms are much less flexible with more focus on compliance," he said.

The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund in Berkeley, Calif., receives calls from parents across the country who complain about time-out rooms, said Cheryl Theis, an education advocate for the organization.

"Parents call and say their child's disability has been exacerbated by this and are traumatized by this," she said.

Merrell said he's encountered time-out rooms he felt were unsafe.

"I once consulted with a school in another state and had a weekly appointment with a child to do some counseling and when I got there they told me he was in a time-out room," he said. "He was in a janitor's closet with no windows, no ventilation, open cans of paint, a mop bucket with disinfectant and he had been in there for over an hour."

Merrell, who has published nearly 100 studies and 10 books on teaching social and emotional skills, said time-out rooms can be used effectively but seldom are. The key, he said, is to combine the time outs with social skills training.

Patti Ralabate, a special education analyst with the National Education Association, said time-out rooms are common but should be used sparingly.

"And when they are used, all of the educators involved need to have appropriate professional development to see how this is used and how to use them appropriately," she said.

Ralabate said a time-out room can be effective if it is intended to provide a space for a child to calm down and reflect on their behavior.

"If it is used to isolate the child, punish the child for a behavior, then we would view it as not productive and not positive," she said.

In Iowa, Doug and Eva Loeffler started to notice changes in their daughter in December 2004, soon after she began school in the Des Moines suburb of Waukee. It prompted them to take Isabel to University Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City for evaluations.

"We laid awake at nights thinking we'd have to institutionalize her," Doug Loeffler said. "We went to three evaluations at the hospital and all of a sudden we find out she's being mistreated."

Loeffler said they weren't told in school evaluation reports that their daughter had been restrained and placed in a time-out room. During one incident in December 2005, Isabel wet herself because she was locked in the room for three hours and not allowed to use a restroom, he said.

Loeffler said the time-out room rules required that before she could be released, she must sit on the floor with her legs crossed without moving a muscle for at least five minutes.

"If she said something, grimaced at them, they would restart the clock and she was not capable of doing that," Loeffler said. "That's why it was three hours."

Loeffler said the couple homeschooled Isabel until he took a new job and the family moved last year to California. Isabel has shown signs of progress and is back in public school, he said.

David Wilkerson, superintendent of the Waukee school district, declined to speak about the accusations because of the pending lawsuit. But he said time-out rooms are a "pretty common practice" and that the district complies with the state's guidelines for such rooms.

Loeffler said he is pressing ahead with the lawsuit and hopes to draw attention to the need for nationwide standards for time-out rooms.

We are doomed as a nation.
The defectives will get all the attention, no discipline because their widdle feewlings will get hurt.
The normal and advanced kids will be literally 'on their own' as the teachers are forced to deal with the molly coddled and defective brats.
Of course, these normals will be the ones who will be taxed to support the incompetent defectives because, after all the 'schooling (so called)' they will be barely able to function, but will still be able to screw more defective bastards into existence: no one has the guts and common sense to sterilize them. (Thanks to the almighty gene which no one seems to believe in nowadays.)
Lawsuit? I hope someone tells the fucktards not to have any more kids: no more taxpayer resources are going to be thrown at their f-trophys.

I can't believe how many kids have these issues these days! We never had all this ADD crap in school.

I wish there had been a time out room when I taught. We could only put them in a chair in the back of the room, not facing the wall(God forbid they feel like their being punished).

I think this case was a bit extreme. She probably needed to be removed from the room and sent to the special ed room to calm down. I'll bet the parunts wanted to keep her in the regular classroom with the nonawwtistik kids, so they could be a behavioral role model to her. That's how most parunts were at my school. They don't realise what a disturbance their kids created with their noise making and weird behavior. They also don't realise that most regular classroom teachers have had zero training in dealing with their tards.

I'm sure these parunts will win their law suit and time out will be abolished at their school.

These brats should be euthanized, along with their parents, for such horseshit.

Abuse? PUHLEASE!!!! Unfortunately, there is some ass-clown judge and jury that will probably award these douche bags millions.

This brat needed a good whipping when she got hone...believe me, if I had gotten a "time out" and then went and peed my pants, my parents would have whipped my ass til I needed a pillow to sit down! It's just nothing more than a fucking temper tantrum--awwwwtistic my ass!

I hate this "mainstreaming" shit with a passion. All the defective brats do is fuck up the learning experience for the rest of the students. This should be outlawed! Brats do NOT have the right to mess up school for everyone else!

No wonder this country is so fucked-up!

I went to a small town elementary school from 2-4th grade that would put kyds in a coat closest at the back of the class for an hour at a time for EACH rule infraction. They still assigned the hand cramping "I will not pull Angie's ponytails" 500-1000 times assignments and they actually had a "dunce cap" which looked like an upside down road work cone and this was put on the heads of dunces and they had to sit FACING the corner. They also had a paddle with holes drilled into solid oak which was used immediately and in the hallways by teachers if it was a one swat infraction, and in the prinicipal's office for three wacks for a repeat offender by the male principal and he didn't play around. They also had "trash duty" for mild behavior problems which meant that during recess and sometimes during lunch, they had to pick up each scrap of paper, no matter how small, from the school grounds.

Back then, fun school field trips were rather frequent to places an hour or more away like parks, zoos, caverns, lakes, picnic areas, etc.....If someone acted like an asshole just prior to a trip then they were BANNED from going and had to sit in another teachers' class all day and do the assignments. The two worst offenders were two boys who were brothers and they now own the largest real estate/land development company in a 100 mile radius, so I don't guess all of that coat closest time out and swacks to their asses did them any permanent damage. It was rumored that when they got home after having been beaten with the board at school, that their dad would beat the shit out of them again with a tree limb.

THOSE were the days.

When I was in school, the defectives were kept well away from the normals, as is only right. We laughed about 'the short bus' and the weird-looking kids licking the windows of it as it went past our school, but that was all we knew of them. We weren't exposed to the endless horrors of their behaviour: the disruption, the bellowing, the non-abilities, 10 year olds having screaming meltdowns like 2 year olds, 12 year olds noisily shitting their pants out of anger at the teacher. No fucking way was that ever part of our lives as kids OR adults.

Time out rooms? No, how about every time dopey acts up, she's stood at the front of the class so that all the kids can point and laugh at her? That's how the Chinese schools keep kids under control -- by bringing unacceptable behaviour to the attention of their classmates, who mock them and spurn them and tell them why they're wrong. The kid himself, naturally in tears, voices how sorry he is and how he'll never do it again. Then the classmates clap for him and pat him on the shoulder and he is allowed to return to his desk and is accepted back into the group. China does NOT have child behavioural problems and NONE of them are on medication.

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"The death of creativity is a pram in the hallway"
- Cyril Connolly