TURNERS FALLS — The walls and floor of Hillcrest Elementary School’s “calm down room” are now padded, and recommendations to improve its use and design from the nonprofit Disability Law Center are being implemented, Gill-Montague Superintendent Michael Sullivan has told the School Committee.
The room became the focus of complaints earlier this year after a handful of parents who were concerned the room was being used in a discriminatory manner for students with disabilities pulled their children from the school and complained to the Law Center.
One of those students was injured after hitting his head on the room’s bare concrete walls, school nurse reports obtained by during a Recorder investigation of calm-down rooms in the county’s schools showed.
The Recorder’s report found that many of the county’s schools use similar rooms, while others do not, opting for other methods of de-escalating students in crisis. For those that do have them, many have pads on the walls or other equipment on hand to protect aggressive or out-of-control students.
The Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization, did not find any “systemic signs of neglect or abuse” — the allegations at the core of the parents’ complaints — but did recommend changes to the room’s design, including removing an interior lock on the door and widening its window to improve visibility for staff outside the room, as well as issuing new policies for when and how the room should be used, improving the system through which parents are notified of its use, and keeping better records on its use.
Sullivan said the school has already implemented new policies and a log system, and will soon expand the window to cover the top half of the door. From now on, parents will be notified in writing whenever their child is placed in the room — a fix for another of the parents’ complaints.
“By and large, we’re already doing some things differently, and that’s as it should be,” he told the committee Tuesday. The log system, he said, was developed internally, and he hopes to make it available to other schools. Such systems, he noted, are not required by law. “This is new territory, and we feel like a lot of these things we could share in terms of best practice and procedures.”
Sullivan disagreed with the Law Center’s finding that the school’s staff had not always taken other measures to de-escalate students prior to using the room, noting that those practices are always implemented, but not always properly recorded or reported.
“The investigator, as far as I can tell, was making the assumption that when those steps weren’t put in writing, they didn’t happen,” Sullivan said. “When we talked to our staff, they said they do them all the time. It’s not being used as punishment; it’s one step in a continuum for when students become disregulated to help them become regulated.”
Sullivan said the lock was removed in February, and the door could never be locked from the outside. He told the committee it was originally installed as part of a building-wide security upgrade, but removing it was safer for the students, at least one of whom had briefly engaged the lock while in the room in the past.
He said a staff member is always present either inside the room or outside the door when a student is inside.
Beyond widening the window, he said the school will install a convex mirror in the corner of the ceiling opposite the door to further improve the ability to monitor students in the room. The padding was not recommended by the Law Center, but district officials told The Recorder in March that they’d be installed.
Sullivan told the committee both Sheffield Elementary School and the middle school’s therapeutic program also have calm-down rooms, and the policy and design changes will be implemented across the board.
New regulations governing the use of time-out rooms and physical restraint in schools were released in January, and Sullivan told the committee the district began training and implementing changes last summer, before they officially went into effect.
“We trained teachers about those in August,” he said.
Tom Relihan can be reached at: trelihan@recorder.com
Lisa Spear can be reached at: lspear@recorder.com