Experts question benefit of school time-out rooms

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081017/ap_ ... _out_rooms

DES MOINES, Iowa – After failing to finish a reading assignment, 8-year-old Isabel Loeffler was sent to the school's time-out room — a converted storage area under a staircase — where she was left alone for three hours. The autistic Iowa girl wet herself before she was finally allowed to leave. Appalled, her parents removed her from the school district and filed a lawsuit.

Some educators say time-out rooms are being used with increased frequency to discipline children with behavioral disorders. And the time outs are probably doing more harm than good, they add.

"It really is a form of abuse," said Ken Merrell, head of the Department for Special Education and Clinical Sciences at the University of Oregon. "It's going to do nothing to change the behavior. You're using it as an isolation booth."

Segregating children removes them from the positive aspect of the classroom and highlights that they're different from other children, said Stephen Camarata, director of the Kennedy Center for Behavioral Research at Vanderbilt University. And isolating an autistic child might be particularly counterproductive.

They have rooms for that now? When I was a kid, we were just made to stand in a corner or off to the side somewhere. Part of the punishment was being made to watch everybody else while we couldn't participate. And then there were the teachers who would draw a circle on the board and tell a troublemaker to put his nose in it for a while.

I'd personally rather be put in another room by myself, but I can see how it would be hard on some people.

The worst thing about these punishments is not knowing how long they're going to last or what they're supposed to accomplish. How long do I have to make a fool of myself to atone for making a fool of myself?

[quote="WurdBendur"How long do I have to make a fool of myself to atone for making a fool of myself?[/quote]

That is a really good way to put it.

This is partially why I don't particularly like the idea of too many accomodations for my son. Yeah, it sounds real nice to say that if your child needs a time out, then we will let them go to a quiet room. But in reality, it's more probably for the teacher's benefit than the child's. I just think that an idea that begins as beneficial to the child can be taken too far, and in some cases, totally abused.

If they're used properly, rather than as a means of punishment, I can see the good in time out rooms. I remember being put in a corner for some infraction, and because of that and reports from other people who suffered similar punishments, I believe that they depended on humilation to control behavior. As Wurdbenur said, what are you supposed to learn from that? The original idea of time out rooms, as I understood it, was to let a child calm down if they were upset or too wound up to stay in their seat and pay attention to their work.

At my son's preschool they have a time-out system that I actually approve of. There is an area in the room, usually a couch or corner covered in pillows, that kids can go to when they aren't willing to cooperate with the rest of the class. It lets them cool off, and they can re-join the class when they are ready to cooperate. I think it works well because they can still hear the students and teacher, and IMO it's not even really a punishment, just a way to correct the behavior.

IMO, whether time out rooms are beneficial or not depends largely on how they're used. If they're used only when truly necessary and for the shortest time possible to help a kid calm down, rather than using it as a punishment for very minor things (not finishing a reading assignment? Give me a f***ing break!! !), then I can see where it might have some good. But if they're used more as a punishment and/or a simple means of control, then abuse can definitely happen.

And I know this from personal experience. At school when I was about 5, I was locked into a pitch black storage closet for reasons I'm still not aware of to this day. I'm guessing for something behavioral. They never told me what I did wrong to deserve that, nevermind the fact that I was terrified of the dark at that age and was sleeping at night with a nightlight.

At another school between the ages of 10-12, I was frequently put in a time out room so small that there was barely enough room to even move, though there was a light. There were times I was put in there for aggressive behavior and whatnot, that part I can't really contest. But there were other times I was put in for nonviolent things like not following a teacher's directions, making inappropriate jokes, and mimicking what someone else said, among other things. Sometimes they would let me out as soon as my behavior was better, but most of the time they would leave me in longer, even though I had calmed down a while ago. In one of those instances I was left in for almost an hour; the teachers weren't in a particularly good mood that day, maybe that was part of it. How long I was left there often depended on what kind of mood the teachers were in that day, rather than how quickly my behavior improved.

I went to another school in my teenage years, and they also had a time out room, which I was put in sometimes. But unlike the other time out rooms, this one was not abusive. This one had a light (as it should) and a proper ventilation system, plus the room was bigger than the previous ones. Rarely was anyone put in for nonviolent behaviors, and most were let out soon after they calmed down. And after they let us out, they would often talk to us afterwards when we were calm, asking us what went wrong, how we felt about it, and tried to work out solutions with us, to get to the root of the problem to prevent it from happening again, rather than only using the time out room as a band-aid, so to speak.

Don't get me wrong, I am not at all saying that I liked the last time out room; I hated it just like the others. But I guess I'm trying to make a point based on my personal experiences, that the same behavioral method can be used to help someone, or to control and abuse someone, depending on how it's used. I've been in both types, so I know the difference from personal experience.