Special Educators' Use of Restraints, Seclusion Topic of Senate Hearing

In one of Kaye Otten’s early years as a teacher, she was granted emergency certification to teach special education in a Nebraska classroom where one of her 2nd grade students was large, aggressive, and always hungry as a result of a rare genetic disorder called Prader-Willi syndrome .

“He knew he could use his size to get what he wanted,” Ms. Otten recalled. “He would pull chunks of hair out of my head.”

The plan to help him calm down didn’t always work, leaving the untrained Ms. Otten and her colleagues to stop the student’s behavior by holding the boy or isolating him from other students, or both, in scenarios that repeated themselves multiple times that school year. But by the time the student was in 5th grade, Ms. Otten and her colleagues had to restrain the student...