Statewide Iowa — (RI) — The State Board of Education voted down proposed new rules this week for using restraints and seclusion rooms for students in a procedural move to allow them to make changes. There are still concerns about how to determine if behavior is serious enough to warrant punishment, how big seclusion rooms should be, and how long it should take to notify parents of the punishment. The board decided to vote down the rules so they can hold some more meeting statewide for input, and then make changes and allow for another public input period before final adoption.
The board heard public comments before the vote, including those from Winterset Superintendent Susie Meade, who favored keeping things the way they are.
Meade says the manual for such issues used to be a half-inch thick and now it is 60 pages.
ACLU lawyer, Daniel Zeno, says his group and others pushed for changes and he wants to see them move forward.
He says the rules don’t take anything away from teachers.
Zeno had a few suggestions for changes to some of the wording the proposed rules. Department of Ed Deputy Director Dave Tilly says they did their best to improve the rules — but says each district is different and there’s not a single solution.
He leads the Division of Learning and Results and says they can go out across the state and hear from more people on the changes.
Department of Education lawyer, Nicole Proesch says everyone has worked hard to come up with the revised rules.
Proesch says the Board of Education had to take the action it did to be able to revisit the rules and revise them without starting over again. They will now look at moving forward with the changes and the added public input process.
Photo courtesy Radio Iowa – Dave Tilly
