Oct 24, 2018, Sherwood Park (AB) News: Minister appoints group to review seclusion rooms https://www.sherwoodparknews.com/news/local-news/minister-appoints-group-to-review-seclusion-rooms A new eight-member working group will make recommendations to Alberta’s education minister by December on how seclusion is used in schools. The group of parents, health professionals and teachers are tasked with drafting new guidelines and identifying best practices on how schools should use isolation rooms, restraint and timeouts. “It’s my view that seclusion rooms should only be used as a last resort and with student safety as the top priority,” Minister David Eggen said in a written statement last Friday…. Eggen had said that he wanted to see changes “within weeks” to the existing guidelines. The issue of confining students came to the fore in September, when a Sherwood Park student and his parents sued the Elk Island Public Schools board and staff at Clover Bar School on Main Street. The family alleges that staff locked a 12-year-old boy with autism naked in an isolation room for at least 45 minutes, where he became covered in feces…. More than 600 people responded to the survey, Inclusion Alberta CEO Trish Boyman said last Friday — a number she found “alarming.” Some families said children were put into seclusion daily or weekly, she said. Most often, the children were between the ages of five and 10, and the stories came from school districts all over the province, Bowman said.
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Childhood Lost
Children today are noticeably different from previous generations, and the proof is in the news coverage we see every day. This site shows you what’s happening in schools around the world. Children are increasingly disabled and chronically ill, and the education system has to accommodate them. Things we've long associated with autism, like sensory issues, repetitive behaviors, anxiety and lack of social skills, are now problems affecting mainstream students. Blame is predictably placed on bad parenting (otherwise known as trauma from home).
Addressing mental health needs is as important as academics for modern educators. This is an unrecognized disaster. The stories here are about children who can’t learn or behave like children have always been expected to. What childhood has become is a chilling portent for the future of mankind.
Anne Dachel, Media editor, Age of Autism
http://www.ageofautism.com/media/
(John Dachel, Tech. assist.)
What will happen in another 4 years? How can we go on like this? This is a national (and international) problem of monumental proportions. We have an entire new class of children who cannot be accommodated by the system: many are manifestly neurologically impaired. Meanwhile, the government and the medical profession sleep on regardless.
John Stone,
UK media editor, Age of Autism
The generation of American children born after 1990 are arguably the sickest generation in the history of our country.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
It seemed to me that with rising autism prevalence, you’d also see rising autism costs to society, and it turns out, the costs are catastrophic.
They calculated that in 2015 autism cost the United States $268 billion and they projected that if autism continues at its current rate, we’re looking at one trillion dollars a year in autism costs by 2025, so within five years.
Toby Rogers, PhD, Political economist
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