In defense of padded rooms in schools

Mr. Principal, tear down this padded wall. This is a follow up on two school controversies this week.

Tuesday gym mats were removed from the walls of a quiet room at Garfield Elementary School in Olympia.

A mom was upset that her son, who doesn’t have special needs but was disrupting class, was sent to the time-out room which.

Melissa Gum says being placed in the small room with padded walls was humiliating and deeply hurt her son.

“Being an impressionable kid who watches TV, sees padded rooms, thinks crazy people go in padded rooms, so when you place him in a padded room, he instantly thinks you think he’s crazy,” Gum says.

One of my readers, who has a son with special needs, hopes other schools don’t remove padded walls and quiet rooms which can be life savers.

The Pierce County mom, who didn’t want me to use her name, says the first time she saw a padded room in her son’s elementary school she thought it looked “very, one flew over the coo coo’s nest.” But she says the rooms are important tool teachers need to manage students with behavioral issues.

“The only other option is to, as quickly as possible, take all of the other children out of the classroom. Then you have a raging child left in a classroom full of things that, at best they can do a lot of property damage, at worst they can really hurt themselves or somebody else,” she says.

Wednesday, I wrote a story about a father who put a recording device on his 10-year-old autistic boy and sent him to school. He overheard special education teachers and aides saying what he thought were cruel, insulting and disrespectful things in class.

“No one who treats children like that, who calls them vicious names, deserves to be a teacher,” says Stuart Chaifetz, who wants the school district in Cherry Hill, New Jersey to fire three educators.

While not defending the teachers at Horace Mann Elementary, consider the story from a different perspective – a teacher’s point of view.

“Until you have lived with a child who has intense needs, it’s really hard to understand how emotionally exhausted you get,” says a reader special needs son who’s 16. “I only have one child to manage, I can’t imagine a dealing with a classroom and children who need special attention.”

By LINDA THOMAS

Photo courtesy KING 5 News