This commentary is by Mark Tucker of Danville. He is former superintendent of Caledonia Central Supervisory Union.
A VTDigger commentary by Brian Dalla Mura takes the Vermont Supreme Court to task for agreeing that reports of restraint and seclusion in schools — so-called “Rule 4500 reporting” — are not subject to public disclosure, and by extension, Superintendent Brooke Olsen-Farrell for complying with that decision. The Court’s decision, Mr. Dalla Mura says, is an affront to transparency in a system that is fundamentally flawed.
I don’t know Mr. Dalla Mura, and I cannot comment on his lived experience. However, Mr. Dalla Mura has grabbed a giant paintbrush that he uses to paint an incredibly uninformed indictment about the use of restraint in schools and the Rule 4500 reporting process, based on facts not in evidence. He claims that:
- “Rule 4500 enables underreporting, fosters misrepresentation and shields schools from scrutiny.” I don’t know why Mr. Dalla Mura believes this to be true. Rule 4500 reporting is by its nature a self-reporting system — how else could it work, short of placing an external monitor in every school district? The fact of self-reporting by itself does not mean the system doesn’t work, and Mr. Dalla Mura stops short with a simple declarative indictment that he insists applies widely across the state. If there are cases of underreporting, that is a problem, but to claim that this is true everywhere does disservice to those districts that take their reporting responsibilities seriously.
- “No educator or district willingly self-reports violations of the rule.” This has not been my experience as a special educator, special services director and Superintendent. At each step of my career, I worked with a number of students who presented with behavioral challenges, without ever resorting to restraint as an intervention. As a director, I insisted that the special educators I supervised adhered to their obligations for reporting, and extended that expectation to the principals I supervised later in my career. (As an aside, this is easy to do when your philosophy on restraint limits its use — read on.)
- “[He has] personally witnessed hundreds of falsified reports that downplayed incidents or omitted them entirely.” Really? Where? In one school? Across his career? Hundreds? This claim seems hyperbolic, at best.
- “No external body routinely investigates patterns or enforces consequences (for violation of restraint/seclusion regulations).” The Agency of Education has that responsibility and the Agency follows it. I haven’t worked where Mr. Dalla Mura has, but every year we sent data to the AOE on the total number of restraints in the districts I served, and in one year when they deemed the number was high, I had follow-up from and extensive conversations with AOE on best practices for reducing the number of restraints. Later in my career, in a couple of extreme situations where the restraint period exceeded a threshold number of minutes, I escalated those cases to AOE when they occurred, because that is a mandate imposed on Vermont Superintendents by the Rule 4500 reporting system. In short, we followed the rules.
Our operational practice in every school I worked in or administered always focused on reducing the use of restraint. Restraint was understood to be a last-resort practice to be used only in cases where there was an imminent risk of physical harm to a student or staff member. In my career, despite being trained in the protocols, I never restrained a student.
Later, as the responsible administrator I reviewed every one of these reports that came from a district school; and where required I forwarded them to AOE. Where concerns arose about frequency, we addressed them by adjusting our behavior practices with the students to reduce and eliminate the need for restraint in the first place.
I read the (conflicting) District and Supreme Court rulings on the case at hand. This case had to do with the question of whether Rule 4500 reports are public records. The case in no way was about restraint practices themselves and the policies imposed on its use in schools. In response, Mr. Dalla Mura has indicted the entire reporting system itself, and by extension every school district in Vermont, with declarative statements unsupported by evidence.
Maybe it is true that in his corner of the world, the use of restraint has been abused and underreported, but in my experience that is not true. Students who come to school with significant behavior issues are already part of a marginalized population in their school community; the public disclosure of behavior records, with the inherent possibility of student identification, will only add to the marginalization — nondisclosure is for the student’s benefit, not the district’s.
There is little in the court record here beyond the fact that someone asked for confidential records to be released, and that request was denied — in the opinion of the Supreme Court — in accordance with the law. Superintendents are required, at risk of licensing action by AOE, to scrupulously follow statutes related to an incredibly broad range of operational practices. Blaming Ms. Olsen-Farrell for following Vermont and federal statute related to the protection of student records is unfair and does nothing to address any underlying concerns about the use of restraint in Vermont schools.
Frustrations with the continued use of restraint with students are valid, in so much as ideally it would never be needed. School districts should be continually working on improving behavior interventions such that the use of restraint is extinguished — and in my experience, this work is ongoing. Nothing in Mr. Marra’s letter addresses ways to reduce the use of restraint; I guess he feels that public disclosure of the reports themselves will somehow solve the problem. But it is not helpful to the debate that the problem is exaggerated, as it is here, by painting all school districts as failing in their duties to students.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Mark Tucker: A response to Brian Dalla Mura’s commentary on the recent Vermont Supreme Court Decision.