Edmonton Public Schools adding 25 seclusion rooms despite promise to phase them out

June 27, 2024 Canuck

Advocates for students with disabilities are angry and frustrated by the Edmonton public school board’s plan to build 25 more seclusion rooms in the face of a promise to phase out the spaces.

By September, in the city’s 214 public schools, there could be 192 of the locking rooms. They are meant to be used only in a crisis when a student’s behaviour presents a risk to themselves or others.

The advocates say data released last month showing staff are putting students in seclusion involuntarily more than nine times on average each school day raises pressing questions about why so many crises are arising.

“Every day that this keeps happening, there’s kids who are going to be paying for this for the rest of their lives,” said Sarah Doll, who has two children on the autism spectrum.

Although neither of her children have been isolated, her eight-year-old son is moving to a specialized class next year in a school where a seclusion room is being constructed.

Use of seclusion and restraint in Alberta schools has been a flashpoint since 2018, when parents suing a school division east of Edmonton made public their son’s harrowing experience inside one of the rooms.

The then-NDP government in 2019 decided to ban the rooms. When the United Conservative Party government was elected in 2019, the education minister reversed the ban, instead introducing standards for use of seclusion and restraint in schools.

The province’s rules say school staff must only use seclusion and restraint as last resorts when a student’s behaviour puts themselves or other people at risk of harm. Staff should not use the practices to prevent property damage or as a punishment, and must monitor the student constantly. School authorities must also report monthly usage data to the government.

In a report published in May, Edmonton Public Schools says it had 167 active seclusion rooms in 80 of its schools. It said 25 of those schools never used the rooms.

In response to a CBC News freedom of information request about seclusion room usage, Alberta Education said schools reported a total of 263 seclusion rooms in April 2024.

It means Edmonton Public Schools has 63 per cent of the province’s seclusion rooms while enrolling about 14 per cent of Alberta K-12 students.

In response to a written question about the division’s reliance on the rooms, a spokesperson said every Alberta school division operates differently.

At least two staff in each school with a seclusion room must have specialized training, the spokesperson said.

Although students’ parents or guardians can opt in or out of staff using a seclusion room when a student is dysregulated, administrators told the board last month there are times when a student goes in without advance permission.

Secluded students on the rise

Although use oscillates from year to year, the number of students who are choosing to go into the rooms — for a quiet moment to regulate or do classwork — and the number of students who staff confined in the rooms are both rising over time.

A written response from the division says school principals decide each year whether they need active seclusion rooms based on the programs and students in the school.

Edmonton public is adding 45 more specialized classrooms next year for students with unique needs, including 38 for students on the autism spectrum. The division says although seclusion rooms will be constructed in 25 of them, it’s up to each principal whether they will affix specialized doors so the room can lock from the outside.

During the school board’s budget debate last month, trustee Saadiq Sumar unsuccessfully proposed that the board cancel any funding for new seclusion rooms.

Superintendent Darrel Robertson said at the May 24 meeting it is easier to build the rooms and decommission them if unneeded than to add them after the fact.

Edmonton Public Schools superintendent Darrel Robertson stands in front of a microphone by the front windows in the Centre for Education. Robertson has grey hair, and is wearing a blue shirt and dark suit jacket. — Darrel Robertson, superintendent of Edmonton Public Schools. (Craig Ryan/CBC)

Although more than 3,000 staff are actively certified in non-violent crisis intervention, and hundreds more took training courses in working with students with complex behaviour, Robertson said not enough division staff have the right skills to safely eliminate seclusion rooms.

“This is a resource that we do not want to use, but there are circumstances where we must use it to keep people safe,” he said. “We have folks getting hurt on the job every day.”

Three years ago, the board approved a motion to collect and report data annually on seclusion and restraint, “along with work on systemic changes so that these practices are no longer needed or used.”

There were 10 rooms decommissioned earlier this year, but the total numbers are growing.

Under questioning by trustees, Robertson said the division has no timeline for phasing out the rooms and no action plan to make it happen.

“I’m very concerned that they’re not committed to meeting that goal, that they believe that they’ll always need to use these rooms,” said Edmonton parent Doll.

Critics want timeline, plan

Trish Bowman, chief executive officer of Inclusion Alberta, says seclusion has no place in schools.

She finds Edmonton public’s seclusion room expansion plans alarming and disappointing.

Bowman is frustrated by a lack of granular data identifying which schools are most frequently using seclusion, and in which grades, as well as how many secluded students have a diagnosed disability.

Seclusion is supposed to be an emergency response that prompts a debriefing with parents and staff to ensure it doesn’t happen again, she said.

“If children are being placed multiple times, the practices aren’t working,” she said.

Inclusion Alberta’s director of community engagement, Philip Ney, says a student’s experience of being put in seclusion can leave them feeling fearful and unsafe, which can lead to more behavioural outbursts and cycles of increasing seclusion room use.

Research into the use of seclusion and solitary confinement in institutions has found risks of trauma, injury and death, Bowman says.

Both say there are effective alternatives to keeping students and staff safe that don’t involve locking anyone up.

The Vancouver School Board is among jurisdictions that disallows the use of seclusion rooms.

The Medicine Hat Catholic school board has also ruled out isolating students or preventing them from leaving a room.

In 2018, when it looked like the Alberta government was going to ban seclusion rooms, Medicine Hat Catholic associate superintendent Hugh Lehr and learning services co-ordinator Monica Braat began preparing for a new approach.

A minimum number of workers at each of the division’s nine schools must be trained in a program called Supporting Individuals through Valued Attachments (SIVA), and this year, all first-year teachers received that training. Access to health-care workers in school is also key, they said.

They describe a lengthy, ongoing process of staff building relationships with students to prevent “blow ups.”

If a student does pose a safety threat, staff move everyone out of the room until the risk has subsided, Lehr said.

“When you put hands on a child, you change that relationship forever,” Lehr said.

What small school divisions like Medicine Hat haven’t contended with, however, is the rapid growth hammering schools in Edmonton, Calgary, and their bedroom communities.

Lehr says that the cultural shift was manageable in a school system with 2,900 students with average class sizes of 25.

While seclusion room use isn’t limited to students with disabilities, many of the rooms are adjacent to classrooms hosting programs for students with behavioural challenges and/or intellectual disabilities.

In the last four years, the number of Edmonton public students diagnosed on the autism spectrum has jumped by 1,138 to 2,891. The proportion of all students on the spectrum has also grown to 2.5 per cent this year from 1.6 per cent in 2019.

Two sisters climbing up a wooden ladder are looking at each other in front of a field of sunflowers. Freya, the child on the left, has her blonde hair in a bun and is wearing a pink sweater and blue jeans. Prudence, on the right, has light brown hair with a black headband and is wearing a grey sweater and jeans. There is a puffy cloud on the right hand side of the sky. — Freya Nichol, 6, and her sister Prudence, 5, both have disabilities and attend Edmonton Public Schools. Freya is hard of hearing and uses assistive technology in her Grade 1 class. Prudence has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Their mother Holly has purposefully chosen not to send her children to a school that has a seclusion room in the building. (Submitted by Holly Nichol)

This growth makes the onus for change even more pressing, says Holly Nichol, a parent of two young children with disabilities.

A lack of timeline to phase out seclusion is a “massive red flag,” she says. Although Robertson told the board administrators are open to ideas for how to reduce the reliance on seclusion, Nichol sees a lack of willingness to reach out to jurisdictions that rarely or never use the practice.

“I think we are looking at a serious culture problem within the Edmonton Public School Board, and I think we are in desperate need of a serious shift of the attitude,” Nichol said.

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Canada News

Edmonton Public Schools adding 25 seclusion rooms despite promise to phase them out

Secluded students on the rise

Critics want timeline, plan

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