ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – The St. Johns County School District secured a resolution agreement with the U.S. Department of Education‘s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on Monday after the federal agency raised compliance concerns with the district’s restraint practices on students with disabilities.
The OCR said it confirmed “high rates of restraint” for students with disabilities in the St. Johns County School District (SJCSD), specifically during the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years.
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“The district restrained 153 students with disabilities 1,711 times in the 2018-19 school year and restrained 132 students with disabilities 954 times during the 2017-18 school year. The district restrained one student for nearly 6 hours in one incident,” the OCR said.
In another instance, the agency discovered a student had been restrained 77 times, including 14 times in three and a half weeks, but a “meaningful discussion” never took place between the school district and the student‘s Individualized Education Plan team to discuss the restraint’s impact, which is a violation of Section 504 and Title II.
Disability Rights Florida says that in the state, individuals with developmental disability can only be restrained to control behaviors that create an emergency or crisis.
The nonprofit adds that restraints “must be discontinued as soon as the threat posed by the dangerous behavior has dissipated […] and may not be used to inflict pain to induce compliance” and elsewhere that physical restraint “may be used only to protect the safety of students, school personnel, or others and may not be used for student discipline or to correct student noncompliance.”
On Monday, the OCR noted that SJCSD had “drastically reduced its use of restraint since the initiation of this compliance review” and will be monitoring the district’s practices moving forward.
“St. Johns County School District has committed to steps necessary to ensure the protection of civil rights for students with disabilities when the district subjects them to restraint and to necessary corrective action for those students whom the district restrained in the past,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon.
Those commitments include:
- Convening with the IEP or Section 504 teams for the 132 students who were restrained during the 2017-18 school year and for the 153 students restrained during the 2018-19 school year to determine whether their current interventions and supports are sufficient, whether any changes are needed, and whether the students require compensatory services for denial of a FAPE or other instructional services missed as a result of restraint.
- Revising the district’s policy and manuals regarding restraint and seclusion.
- Implementing a monitoring program or revising its current program to assess the district’s use of restraint monthly, and report to OCR for approval on each use of restraint during the monitoring period.
- Providing training to staff and developing processes to maintain records to allow accurate reporting and to ensure the provision of a FAPE to the district’s students.
