From my experience talking with teachers and staff working in schools, it appears that the frequency of violent aggression from students in schools is rising. A recent report from the American Psychological Association supports this conclusion. (McMahon et al., 2024)
Anecdotally, most of the rise is among the youngest children along the K-12 spectrum. While many, but not all, of these younger students have a relatively limited capacity to injure someone, they can cause these formative student learning environments to feel chaotic and unsafe.
School staff is charged with maintaining a safe learning environment. This is a fraught and vexing challenge because the relevant laws and guidelines about responses to student violence are less than coherent. School staff in dangerous situations chiefly want to keep people safe, but they must simultaneously be concerned about “getting it wrong” amid complex real-world circumstances, and often confusing guidelines and instructions. The stakes are high all around.
There is no US federal law addressing seclusion and restraint in schools. The federal Department of Education most recently shared a resource document on seclusion and restraint in 2012. This document defines restraint as any “personal restriction” of movement, and that seclusion and restraint should only be used when there is “imminent danger of serious physical harm to self or others.” (p. 12)
I live and work in Massachusetts where there is law that governs seclusion and restraint, most recently amended in 2014. The law is not entirely coherent, and interpreted in many different ways by different individuals. I must have been party to hundreds of confusing group conversations where educators are trying to work out what constitutes a physical restraint, and when it is an appropriate response. I think their careful attention to these questions is laudable. I also think the conversations need not be so confusing, and that unclear laws and guidelines contribute majorly to the confusion.
Earlier this year I asked the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) if any discussion or process was occurring regarding updating and clarifying the law, and I was only redirected to their online resources dating back to 2014. So, apparently not.
The Massachusetts law includes “assault or imminent, serious, physical harm” in each mention of when a restraint may be appropriate. In trainings and discussions about physical restraint the assault part is forgotten or disregarded. According to Massachusetts law it is appropriate for a staff member to prevent a small child from hitting them, and a gentle deflection or hand on their fist appears to qualify as a restraint since it restricts the student’s freedom of movement.
In practice there is a lot of confusion. That confusion is combined with anxiety about scrutiny and potentially “getting it wrong” at both staff and administrative levels. The unfortunate impact of these factors is the underreporting of restraints. In short, when the rules are confusing and the stakes of making a mistake are high, the incentives are not aligned with accurate classification and reporting of restraints. This makes it all the harder to maintain data and track what is occurring in schools.
As a starting point for discussion I would like to propose a principle and a question for your consideration.
In some school roles, especially working with students with significant behavioral challenges, staff should be aware that they are likely, at times, to be the target of violence. However, making yourself available as a target of violence is not part of the job. That’s an important distinction, and hopefully clear enough to readers.
For example, a small child may be unlikely to seriously physically harm an adult through strikes with their arms and legs, but that does not mean that the staff must allow themselves to be struck, scratched, and bitten. If the staff member leaves the room and closes the door to prevent the student from hitting them, the staff member should not open the door if it seems near certain that the student will continue to hit the staff member at that point.
Similarly, we should not allow students to hit other students at school. Depending on the students and the circumstances there may not be an imminent threat of serious physical harm, but staff should not allow students to be assaulted at school and Massachusetts law supports intervention to prevent or stop assault. All interventions must use minimal force, and often don’t require any physical intervention, but in some circumstances preventing assault requires a minimal physical intervention.
Allow me to pause to acknowledge that this is an uncomfortable topic. As I write, I worry about a staff member using more force than necessary. We know that physical intervention from school staff can lead to serious problems. Unfortunately, once violence or the threat of violence is present, the available choices reflect the difficulty of the situation. If we don’t intervene we are allowing a dangerous situation. If we do intervene it is also a dangerous situation. One of the most salient questions at any given moment is, which choice is safer? The answer to this question involves weighing many factors, moment to moment.
The actual experience of maintaining safety with an escalated and violent student is not much like an example we might use for training or explanation. It is not a static set of circumstances we can easily explain and evaluate. Instead, an episode develops and requires an ongoing evaluation of how to keep the student, others, and yourself, as safe as possible.
My question regards the meaning of “brief physical contact to promote safety” in Massachusetts law. Is a deflection of a strike “brief physical contact to promote safety” or is it a restraint, restricting freedom of movement? How about a brief (as in less than 30 seconds) escort into a calm-down room? If the escort uses minimal force but is very brief, is it “brief physical contact to promote safety” or is it a restraint?
After 23 years working in this realm, as a reasonably bright person who is comfortable making sense of laws, I still do not have clear answers to this question and others. In talking to other similarly experienced people I hear the same confusion. Speaking to school culture at large, this is avoidance at its worst. Almost no one wants to look directly at the distress and address the thorny challenges. But safety is too important a topic to avoid and leave in a confusing and murky state. Physical safety is our first and most obvious responsibility as educators in loco parentis. We should be addressing this in the public. Relegating these issues and conversations to quiet and disconnected corners is doing nothing to help the development of better practices.
I gave this piece an ambitious title – Toward a Philosophy of Safety Management in Schools – and I hope it represents a small step in that direction.
References
Massachusetts 603 CMR 46.00 Prevention of Physical Restraint and Requirements IF Used
Michael Murray, LMHC, M.Ed 