“Jessica,” the adoptive mother of a third grade student, was shocked when she discovered that her daughter had spent over 100 hours locked in a room alone at her North Carolina public school.
School staff locked the child in a room by herself after she flipped markers in the air, lay on the floor and tilted her chair back, Jessica told me in 2024. Jessica’s daughter has a nonverbal learning disability, mild attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder.
Jessica’s situation is one of dozens that I document in my 2026 book, “No Restraint: Disabled Children and Institutionalized Violence in America’s Schools.” This book is part of my research on how families of children with disabilities navigate public schools that use restraint and seclusion to discipline students.
Restraint in this context means reducing a student’s ability to move their body freely, whether it is someone physically holding a student back or using bungee cords to constrain them, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Seclusion means a student is physically prevented from leaving a room until they are calm.
Not all public schools have seclusion rooms. And seclusion rooms can look different in various schools. Some schools refer to them as quiet rooms or a timeout box. In some schools, a seclusion room has a door with an outside lock. In other schools, a staff member holds the door shut.
Restraint and seclusion are intended to be used in situations where a child is a danger to themselves or others. Some teachers argue that seclusion rooms are necessary to protect them when students become violent.
But parents like Jessica told me school staff routinely used these tactics to punish students for nonviolent, minor offenses.
Understanding restraint and seclusion
Approximately 100,000 students are restrained and secluded in public schools each year, according to the Department of Education’s most recent data, from 2020.
Students with disabilities make up 13% of the school-age population in the U.S. but constitute nearly 80% of those who were restrained and secluded in public schools. Widespread underreporting of this method of discipline is common.
There is no federal law that regulates seclusion and restraint in public schools.
That said, 44 states have laws that limit the use of restraint and seclusion to emergency situations or ban it altogether. Minnesota, for example, bans the use of seclusion for children who are in third grade or younger.
And 41 of these same states have laws that schools must notify parents each time their child is restrained or secluded.
Various news organizations, such as ChalkBeat, have found that schools in North Carolina, Michigan and Illinois have violated restraint and seclusion laws.
In some cases, schools use terms such as “quiet room” and “timeout” to circumvent laws that mandate reporting restraint and seclusion to parents and government agencies.
Talking directly with parents
I interviewed 50 parents of children with disabilities from urban, suburban and rural public schools across 15 states, including North Carolina, Michigan, Illinois, Texas, Utah and Massachusetts, between 2021 and 2024.
I recruited parents by posting a flyer on social media and contacting disability advocates in multiple states. I was interested in speaking with families whose children had been restrained and secluded at school. Some of the families were struggling financially, while others were affluent. I used fake names in my book to protect their identities.
All of the parents I spoke with had children who were restrained and secluded at school at least once, with some experiencing the punishment more than 30 times.
Children could be restrained and secluded for violent behavior. But this punishment was also meted out for relatively minor infractions: singing loudly in class, repeatedly leaving their seat, and eating snow. In some cases, after being restrained and secluded, children began hitting school staff, which led to additional time in the seclusion room.
Oscar Romero Ruiz/iStock
Punishing with restraint and seclusion
The Department of Education has said that restraint and seclusion “should never be used as punishment or discipline … as a means of coercion or retaliation, or as a convenience.”
However, most of the parents I interviewed told me that school staff were using restraint and seclusion as punishment.
A few parents I spoke with called the police or child protective services after their children were locked in seclusion rooms. Thirty-eight of the 50 parents I spoke with spent between US$2,000 and $300,000 on lawsuits against the schools.
In return, some school staff allegedly used intimidation tactics to stop parents from speaking out about their child’s seclusion, parents told me.
For example, two Michigan parents named “Amy” and “John” told me in 2024 that school staff restrained their 11-year-old son, “Michael,” in 2023 after he pushed a boy who was bullying him. Michael had been diagnosed with ADHD and pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, or PANDAS, a disorder that can cause intense anxiety and mood swings.
School staff physically held Michael back. A teacher then allegedly dragged Michael to a seclusion room and locked him inside with another boy. Moments later, a second altercation occurred between the two boys in the room.
After learning about this incident in 2023, Amy and John withdrew Michael and sued the school.
After they spent $90,000 on a lawsuit, John said, the school requested a gag order to prevent them from speaking about their child’s experience. School administrators also offered John and Amy a $15,000 settlement.
John and Amy decided to stand their ground in court. As the lawsuit continued, school staff retaliated and called CPS on the family.
“There is a saying in the special needs community: ‘It isn’t if CPS gets called on you, it’s when.’ And it’s all because the school is using them as a tool to either push people out of the school or to intimidate them into behaving correctly,” John said.
When I contacted the school in 2024, administrators did not respond to comment on the lawsuit.
In Jessica’s case, she also hired an attorney and filed a federal lawsuit.
Jessica told me school staff concealed evidence of the more than 20 instances between 2018 and 2020 that they locked her daughter in a seclusion room.
When I spoke with Jessica in 2024, she told me that school administrators tried to fire her husband, who was employed by the district at the time of their lawsuit. In this case, Jessica shared how a judge intervened to prevent her husband from being fired.
Searching for meaningful solutions
Within the past few years, there have been calls for Congress to pass the Keeping All Students Safe Act.
After a failed attempt to pass this legislation in 2021, U.S. Rep. Donald Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, reintroduced the Keeping All Students Safe Act to Congress in December 2025. The bill remains in the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
This legislation would protect children from harmful restraint and seclusion practices by ensuring that school staff are properly trained on this practice. The bill would limit the use of restraint and seclusion to emergency situations. And it would mandate that parents are notified every time their child is restrained or secluded at school.
Regardless of federal legislation, I think that parents play an important role in understanding how school restraint and seclusion affect families. Also, researchers and policymakers cannot fully understand how retaliation influences parents’ schooling decisions if parents are not included in this discussion.
