Fulton County School Scandal|The death of Aaron Hatcher

July 28, 2011 - PRLog -- Everyone within the school system is mandated to play a part in protecting our children. Creating a safe learning environment, identifying pupils who are suffering or at risk of harm and then taking appropriate action to insure children are safe at home and at school. These should be some of the actions taken by elected and voluntary members of the school administrations. I realize many of you may say, it is; but in all actuality, it isn’t.

I’m neither a child protection specialist nor a trained social worker. I am; however, a mother, daughter, friend, activist and business owner who has stumbled across the scandalous disregard of two Fulton county schools that failed to protect a disabled child.

I am not saying there is no one within the Fulton county school district that has empathy. There are people who care passionately about the rights of disabled children. Most professionals who choose to work with disabled children do their best to protect them from harm; but they’re up against the system, and the system just isn’t geared up to meet the needs of disabled youth.

The most recent major research project in the United States by Patricia Sullivan and John Knutson, found that disabled children were over three times more likely to be abused or neglected than able-bodied children. Three times. This should be ringing alarm bells right through the Departments of Health and Education, but it isn’t.

In regards to the safeguarding of our children, neither the US Education Department nor the US Department of Health and Human Services seldom mention incapacitated youth, these children are rarely more than a footnote in important guidance papers.

Part of the trouble is that we simply don’t have information about the level of maltreatment of disabled children. These statistics are lacking because the Department of Health does not require Child Protection Registers to identify whether children they list have disabilities. If this was done, at least we would know how many children with disabilities are on the register, in what way they were abused and what action was taken. Until this happens, we will not know the scale of the problem.

A report from the Government Accountability Office released an article in 2009 that stated, children with disabilities are being secluded from classmates and restrained against their will to control their behavior — interventions that have led to harm and, in rare cases, deaths. In many cases, the restraints happen even when students aren’t physically aggressive or dangerous.

In one case, a New York school confined a 9-year-old with learning disabilities to a “small, dirty room” 75 times in six months for whistling, slouching and hand-waving. In another, a Florida teacher’s aide gagged and duct-taped five misbehaving children to their desks; and police say a 14-year-old boy died when a special-education teacher in Texas lay on top of the student when he would not stay seated. Police ruled it a homicide, but a grand jury rejected criminal charges.

The findings from the GAO, Congress’ investigative arm, stop short of attaching a hard number to how many children are subjected to the practices, but investigators say they found “hundreds of allegations” of abuse involving restraint or seclusion at schools from 1990 to 2009; in Texas and California, they say, public schools recorded a combined 33,095 instances in the past school year alone.

The report details 10 children’s cases, four of which ended in death. Unlike in hospitals or residential treatment centers, there’s no federal system to regulate such practices in schools — and teachers are often inadequately trained, GAO says.

Only seven states even require that educators get training before they’re allowed to restrict children, and only five states have banned “prone restraint,” which ended in the death of the Texas student.

“A child’s fate should not depend on what state they live in,” says U.S. Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat who requested the report.

It would be nice if that was not the case, however, in the Hatcher family it was. Below is a devastating story that spanned three years, 2 schools, and one school district. It is this story that has pushed me to take a more aggressive approach in bringing more awareness with the hopes of helping all children.

Read more:
http://eotmblog.com/2011/07/maltreatment-of-disabled-chil...

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