I know it’s tough for parents today who have to go and work so hard they can hardly hold their eyes open on the long way home every night after a 10 hour day to pay their mortgages and heat and food bills, but is that an excuse to literally abandon your children to a group of strangers who couldn’t give a damn about your offspring?
In this “brave New World” where it has become socially acceptable” to drag your kids off to a “day care” centre every morning even though they scream and act out their disagreement with being ripped out of their mother’s arms by a stranger who will make sure that “little one” will learn to be subservient, docile and quite literally, OBEDIENT, one way or another!
Now we learn that schools have installed “calming rooms” as they call them where a child who has disrupted a classroom can be hauled into, locked up and allowed to “chill out” before being allowed back into the “structured, peaceful, learning centre”.
Back in our day if we were disruptive and caught upsetting the classroom we were told to leave the room and sit in the chair in the hallway outside the classroom until that class was over.
You say this is harsh and a child shouldn’t be subjected to “public display” of shame because they did something wrong? Yet you would allow your child to be locked away in a padded room like someone consigned to and old fashioned Asylum?
If you do think this is quite right and the way to go, then one can only feel sorry for you when your child reaches their teen age years and turns out to be one helluva rebellious youth who hates adults and will surely turn on you like you turned on them when you “abandoned them to the fools we call modern teachers” today!
Barrie parents irate as school puts boy in “padded cell”
A Barrie mother says log books from her son’s school show he was disciplined by being sent to an empty, four-by-four foot room with grey padded walls and flooring three times without her knowledge or permission — something that would violate school board policy.
Hayley McBride’s 4-year-old son, Casper, showed her the room — officially called a “calming room” — on Tuesday at Portage View Public School in Barrie, where he attends junior kindergarten.
Casper took her to an unmarked door in a corner of the school during an impromptu tour. Inside was a small padded room about the size of a custodial closet, with yellow stains on the padding. She said it was completely silent inside, with only two balls — a red one and an orange one — as toys.
“They throw me in here,” Casper told his mother.
The only window is on the door and Casper isn’t tall enough to see out of it.
“I was absolutely appalled. I felt like we were in some sociology experiment,” McBride said.
Neither Peter Gumbrell, Simcoe County District School Board principal of special education, nor Portage View principal Peter McKenna would comment on why Casper may have been sent to the room without his mother’s knowledge or permission, citing privacy issues.
Gumbrell said calming rooms are part of a well-accepted and successful strategy to help students de-escalate themselves before they pose a risk to themselves and others, and they can be found in about half of the board’s schools.
“(The calming room is) not something we hide. It’s not a big secret,” McKenna said.
“I’m sure not every parent would maybe necessarily know that it exists. But the parents whose children would be accessing it would definitely know through the safety plan and through the (individual education plan).”
The Big Green Lie 
As a kid I saw one of those ,but I was luckily never put in one. As a teenager, this becomes horrifying in retrospect
[…] Did you know your children were being “locked up in padded cells”?……….do you care? […]
Seclusion or calming rooms are an obvious violation of the right to education, and that right is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as well as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities — both these conventions advocate rights based on participation and inclusion. Teaching practice and training therefore must ensure that teachers can manage their teaching day with appropriate child guidance and behaviour management techniques for all children. Schools, ministries and Boards must likewise ensure that resources are available at all times in schools where children with special needs are catered for.
Calming or seclusion rooms are not widely accepted as best practice in special education – in fact, the state of Ohio in the US has banned them and several other states have had suits filed against them by parents whose children were mistreated in these rooms. Where such a room exists, and where inadequate training of ALL staff in a school is undertaken, misuse of a calming room can occur. This misuse is heightened when parents are not properly informed about the presence and purported use of a calming or seclusion room. Very little long term research exists about the use of calming rooms (not time out areas, quiet areas) in schools or the impact on children, and schools are not compelled to use an ethics committee when setting up these calming rooms. Therefore, any school or school board that condones these rooms is putting children’s emotional safety at risk because the potential to misuse them when ill informed about their purpose and actual outcomes is always there. The Ontario Ministry of Education should be held repsonsible and forced to conduct an extensive inquiry into the existence, use and effects of such rooms in their schools. As a teacher educator for over 20 years, this is the most blatant example of poor educational practice and laziness in the school system that I have encountered.
K. Powell, Simcoe County
Thank You Kimberely for your thoughtful and professional feed back.
This is news to a lot of people and didn’t even know these rooms existed. The Toronto School Board is showing itself for what it really is. A group of very unprofessional people who are placed in responsible positions without professional qualifications.
We will continue to expose the flaws in this institution until it brought up to International standards!