Hunter
01/20/20
The Cedar Rapids Gazette reports that the Iowa City and Cedar Rapids community school districts won’t release information regarding the use of seclusion rooms.
In a report Sunday, the paper says both school districts say the reports are confidential records that can’t be made public, even if specific student information is blacked out.
It reverses a 2016 decision to release the redacted reports to the Gazette. That year, reports showed that students were put into seclusion mostly for violent behavior, but there were instances when kids were secluded for infractions like refusing to trace in pencil, stepping out of line at recess, or pouting.
Cedar Rapids Elementary students were held in the controversial seclusion rooms or physically restrained 237 times in just the first month of the school year. That averages out to more than ten times a day and over four times as many incidents as in the first month of the 2015-16 school year.
Iowa City school officials aren’t releasing any statistics on how many students were restrained in the first month of the school year. They did remove seclusion rooms before the 2018-19 school year and made other changes to reduce the need for seclusion or restraint. But refusing to release the statistics keeps the public from knowing if the measures accomplished their intended results.
The Gazette quotes Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom Of Information Council, who says that districts regularly release aggregated or redacted data, removing name, grade and school so there’s no confidentiality being broken.
