Calm Down or Else

By Benedict Carey
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/health/15restraint.html?em&ex=1216353600&en=6d55f52176b0a005&ei=5087%0A

Carey's article is definitely a nightmare for any parent--especially parents of children with mental disabilities. He talks about public school lack of resources and properly trained staff to deal with children with mental disabilities whose disruptive actions, which, in several cases, turned into a deadly encounter.

Carey leads off not with a story but describes the situation that parents see, "The children return home from school confused, scared, and sometimes with bruises on their wrists, arms or face." This is scary and all, but where Carey truly sucks the reader in is the second paragraph where he quotes the parent of a child with Asperger's Syndrome, saying his son thought his special ed teachers were going to kill him.

Carey interviews several different parents of children who have been injured by special ed teachers attempting to restrain their kid during a breakdown. He also interviews principals and other faculity from schools who mainly say that lack of funding and a flood of parents pushing their kids with mental disabilities into public schools are the cause of the sad stories we're hearing about.

But Carey truly nails his objectivity in his ending quote from a professor of special education at the University of Nebraska who notes the catch-22 of the entire situation by citing the example of two sets of Iowa parents who both recently sued their children's schools for the death of their children, one couple said their child was killed because he was restrained while acting out, and the other couple said their child had run off and drowned because he was not restrained enough.