School board agenda for Tuesday, June 13

I’m late posting this week because I was on the road. Some of the topics on the board’s agenda tonight:

We’ll meet in an exempt (non-public) session to discuss the renewal and extension of the superintendent’s contract, as well as any possible changes in the contract language. This meeting is one step in the annual cycle of reviewing the superintendent’s contract. (More information on that process here.)

At our board meeting, we’ll discuss the report of the task force considering the district’s use of seclusion enclosures. (See posts here and here.) Two weeks ago, the state Department of Education issued a decision on a complaint about the district’s use of those enclosures; the task force apparently completed its report before that decision was issued.  News coverage of the state’s decision is here. Additional information on the use of seclusion enclosures is here.

We’ll also vote on whether to reapprove (and possibly amend) some of the district’s policies, including policies on good conduct, corporal punishment, student records access, the responsibilities of the superintendent, and on community comment at board meetings. This review is part of a scheduled cycle of policy reviews.

At our work session, we’ll discuss setting the district’s legislative priorities for next year.

We’ll also review a report from the administration’s transportation committee about busing in the district. The committee makes recommendations that include (1) increasing “attendance support” transportation at the elementary level, and (2) adding morning and evening activities busing at Northwest and North Central junior highs. One controversial point is the lack of any activities busing recommendation at the high school level for students in the Kirkwood neighborhood, who are now assigned to Liberty High, which cannot be reached from that neighborhood by public transportation. Related information here.

We’ll discuss the possibility of supporting a Future Farmers of America chapter in the district.

As usual, our work session also includes agenda items for the district’s bond proposal and facilities master plan.

All that and more! The full agendas are here and here. Please chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

Follow-up: Seclusion enclosures

At our last work session, the board agreed that the administration should form a committee to determine best practices and consider potentially improving or eliminating the district’s use of seclusion enclosures. The committee will include parents, teachers, and interested community members. It will report back to the board within a month or two.

I think that was the best result we could have expected from the discussion at the work session on the topic. Speaking as just one board member, I don’t see the board as having delegated the decisionmaking on this issue to the committee. An administrative committee can be a great help in researching the issue and in doing the drafting of a potential policy, but it’s also true that, since committee members are appointed by the administration, a committee is not necessarily representative of the larger community. The board should review committee recommendations with an open mind but should not simply rubber-stamp them.

Meanwhile, a local lawyer has brought a complaint against the district at the State Department of Education, alleging that the district’s use of seclusion enclosures violates federal laws and regulations. You can read the complaint here.

When I posted about this topic in October, several commenters asked for a list of district schools that have seclusion enclosures. The complaint contains such a list as its Exhibit 1 on pages 7 and 8 of the PDF.

One more update: Yesterday, the federal government issued new, non-binding “significant guidance” on the use of restraint and seclusion in school, which I assume will be part of what informs the district’s discussion of “best practices.”

Dismantle the boxes

Several schools in our district contain enclosures known variously as (depending on who you ask) “time-out rooms,” “seclusion enclosures,” “isolation boxes,” or “solitary confinement cells.” The nature of these enclosures varies from school to school, but some of them are made of unfinished plywood, are about six feet by six feet, and are built right into the larger classroom. Some of them appear to be poorly lit to the point of being outright dark inside. The photos above show enclosures at Grant Wood Elementary School.

A child can be confined in such an enclosure as part of the school’s behavior management practices. When the enclosure is built right into the larger classroom, children in the class watch as a child in put into the enclosure. The child in the enclosure can hear the class activity going on outside, and the other kids in the classroom can hear a child’s cries coming from inside the enclosure.

There are state-enacted rules regulating when and how the enclosures can be used, though there have been questions about whether our district has complied with the rules. The Gazette had an in-depth set of articles about the enclosures in September; you can read them here, here, and here. The Daily Iowan reports on the issue today here.

I know there are difficult situations when a child may pose a risk of harm to self or others and that the district needs to have a way of dealing with those situations. There is a lot to discuss about how best to handle those situations. But it doesn’t take an extended inquiry to see that the district can do better by its students than these plywood boxes. The district needs to discontinue using them and dismantle them, in favor of creating more humane spaces and practices for dealing with difficult behavior.