Elementary School Puts Kids In Padded "Time Out" Room

<snip>

HUDSON -- Some call the small padded room at the Farley Elementary School a "safe place" for children with severe behavioral issues. One mother called it a prison.

School administrators said the timeout room is a last resort for students who are about to harm teachers or themselves and is part of a small behavioral program that has earned praise from parents.

Stacey Zipp claims her 9-year-old son was locked in this room for hours. She said her son, Thomas Sypherd, had been sent there for infractions as small as throwing his lunch away or arguing with teachers.

Thomas originally had problems concentrating and behaving. After hours spent in the timeout room, day after day, week after week, she said, her son has become angry and violent. And his anger grew toward the staff the more he was put in the room.

"It's nervewracking," she said.

But school administrators said Sypherd never spent hours in that room.

"There has never been a kid in there longer than 20 minutes, ever," said Superintendent Sheldon Berman. "Most of the kids are rarely in any of the timeout spaces."

Sypherd is one of eight children in a school program for kids with behavioral problems. They go daily to a timeout area, a former teachers room, to work with any of the seven staff on hand. Students only go to the padded "timeout room," a partitioned area of the larger room, if they are in danger of harming themselves or others.

The door is left open when a child is in the timeout room, Berman said, and they are not left alone. The room is for children who are losing control and is an alternative to physically restraining them, administrators said.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=97662