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Monday, June 08, 2009
Mother Fights for Fair Treatment of Disabled
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Journal Staff Writer
Bev Nelson's 17-year-old son, Matt, sits in a high school classroom where he is usually outnumbered by his teachers.
He is a student body of one, a young man with autism relegated to the odd isolation of intensive teaching attention and absolutely zero peer socialization.
"He's alone," she says. "He has no friends, no give and take."
But these are the good school days.
Nelson has seen worse.
As a freshman with other classmates at Sandia High School in 2006, Nelson says her son was physically restrained on the floor, his arm twisted behind his back, punched in the gut and kicked with the cowboy-booted feet of an obviously frustrated and under-trained educational assistant Frank Stevens after Matt became agitated by the screaming of another student during PE.
"How do you like that?" witnesses say they heard Stevens yell between the obscenities.
It hadn't been the first time Matt had suffered such unrestrained restraining at school, but Nelson was determined it was going to be the last.
She filed a lawsuit against Stevens and the Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education (it recently settled).
She saw to it that Stevens faced criminal charges. (Stevens, who at age 73 must have seemed frail next to the big teen, was charged with misdemeanor battery, received a deferred sentence, ordered into anger management and told to stay out of trouble for six months, both of which he apparently did.)
"They felt sorry for Frank," she says. "I felt railroaded."
Most importantly, she fought APS for her son's right to a safe and suitable education.
Hence, the solo class at APS' Sierra Alternative School.
"At least he won't be hurt anymore," she says.
But other students like Matt may not be as safe. The abusive use of restraint and seclusion on special education students nationwide during the past two decades was the focus of a harrowing report by the U.S. General Accountability Office for the House Committee on Education and Labor.
The GAO report, released last month, found hundreds of allegations of violent acts — from sitting on students to duct taping them to chairs or locking them in "timeout" rooms for hours — that traumatized already fragile and defenseless children and, in some cases, killed them.
"These are the kids who can speak up the least for themselves," says Tara Ford, co-director of Pegasus Legal Services for Children in Albuquerque. The firm has handled a number of similar abuse cases across New Mexico, including Matt's. "To be labeled a special needs kid is to be labeled as different or bad, and it almost seems to give permission for such abuse."
Weeks before the release of the GAO report, Ford's agency sent out public records requests to the 89 school districts in New Mexico seeking their policies on the use of restraint and seclusion. Eighty-one districts, including APS, responded.
Ford says it was clear that, though most districts gave lip service to policies as set forth by the state Public Education Department, there was no uniform adherence to them.
Moreover, state policy was little more than guidelines with no legal consequences for failure to follow them.
The state Education Department, Ford says, "is now on notice that deficient policies at both state and district levels regarding the use of restraint and seclusion is currently placing New Mexico students at high risk of serious physical and emotional harm."
Ford submitted her findings on May 8 to state Education Secretary Veronica Garcia, requesting that the department conduct its own survey of district restraint and seclusion policies and procedures.
She also requested that Garcia convene a task force to develop statutes — not just toothless guidelines — on the proper use of restraint and seclusion in time for the next Legislature.
Ford also sent copies of the letter to 22 lawmakers, advocates and agencies, including Lt. Gov. Diane Denish; Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall; Reps. Martin Heinrich, Ben Ray Luján Jr. and Harry Teague; child-advocates Peter Cubra and Maureen Sanders; and education-astute Rep. Rick Miera.
The silence, so far, has been deafening.
The only noise came from Garcia herself, who crowed in a news release about how her department is "leading many states in providing guidance, training and procedural safeguards for students with disabilities."
Which must have surprised the family of the 8-year-old mentally ill girl in Hobbs who sued her school district over accusations that she was often locked up in a timeout room for upward of six hours with no potty or meal breaks.
Or the family in Albuquerque who says their autistic first-grader had his arms and legs pulled like putty by four school staff members to carry him out of class 17 times.
Or Nelson and her son.
So Ford wrote another letter, this one asking U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to demand accountability from New Mexico's educators.
We'll see what happens.
As for Matt, his mother grieves that her son, a whiz at the computer and keyboards, has to be isolated to get an education.
His behavior has improved tremendously since coming to Sierra, but she says he will likely never recover from the damage done at Sandia.
"He couldn't communicate what terrible things were being done to him," she says. "But he could speak through his behaviors."
And she can speak, too.
"This is my fight," she says.
It should also be ours.
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg.
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