Both chambers of the Maine Legislature advanced a version of a bill that would make it easier for school staff to restrain and seclude students, weakening a law passed in 2021 restricting the use of practices that experts say cause lasting trauma.
Maine has historically led the country in its use of these practices, which include physically immobilizing students and placing them in small rooms, with educators predominantly using them on students with disabilities. Restraint and seclusion practices have been used more than 22,000 times in Maine in some years, and the real number is even higher, since many large districts do not submit their data to the state despite reporting being required by the 2021 law.
This year, citing increased issues with student behavior, some teachers and administrators pushed to relax the restrictions.
Despite disability rights advocates sounding the alarm at the public hearing for the bill, lawmakers in both the Maine House of Representatives and the Senate voted to pass LD 1248.
“While most states are looking at bills this session that provide greater protections for students and more resources for educators, Maine is one of the few states that is looking to roll back protections for students,” said Ben Jones, director of legal and policy initiatives for Lives in the Balance, a Maine-based national nonprofit that offers training for schools on how to move away from restraint and seclusion.“It is a serious disappointment.”
Under Maine law, restraint and seclusion are only supposed to be used in case of emergencies, where the student’s behavior poses “imminent risk of serious physical injury” to themselves or others. The original proposal changed that to risk of injury after some educators said they interpreted the law to mean they couldn’t use these practices to prevent a potentially dangerous situation unless a teacher could be injured severely enough to seek outside medical care.
“Staff are being hit, they’re being bit, but it doesn’t meet the threshold of serious imminent danger, because a 5-year-old isn’t going to [cause] an injury that requires medical care,” said Gardiner-area Superintendent Patricia Hopkins during the April 23 public hearing.
The amended version of the bill defines “serious physical injury” to mean “any impairment of the physical condition of a person, whether self-inflicted or inflicted by someone else, that requires a medical practitioner, including, but not limited to, a school nurse, to evaluate or treat the person.” This definition was already included in Chapter 33, the Maine Department of Education rules governing restraint and seclusion.
Another aspect of the bill allows educators to move students without their consent without having to document the incident as a restraint.
Atlee Reilly of Disability Rights Maine told lawmakers at the work session for LD 1248 that if the bill passes, schools will no longer have to report these kinds of incidents where staff forcibly move students, which he explained will likely mean the number of documented restraints could decrease.
“What we’re going to do is take a whole class of stuff — like the physical management of students that I think most people would look at and say, that child’s being restrained — and say it’s no longer restraint,” Reilly said.
He added, “It doesn’t mean that people are going to be putting their hands on kids less.”
Jones said these changes “were conjured up by schools’ lawyers who will surely use the new language as legal cover to protect schools, not kids.”
