From The Texas Tribune:
“In early September, about two weeks after school started, Daniela and Alfredo Santos got a call from Midland Independent School District’s Special Education Director Lynda Rhodes.
The Midland school district was investigating reports of abuse at the school that involved their 4-year-old daughter and her classmates, all of whom have special needs and live with disabilities. The students’ instructors had allegedly restrained them to their chairs for longer than they should have, district officials told them.
The unsettling scenes were caught on camera and revealed details district officials omitted in earlier phone calls, the parents said, declining to elaborate further due to a non-disclosure agreement the district made them sign before viewing the video.
…In Texas, schools must report when an instructor restrains a student.
Advocates for children with disabilities, using state data, have found instances of school districts underreporting the use of physical restraints. Often, educators resort to restraining students when it is unnecessary, advocates said. And while state law requires cameras in such classrooms, footage is not allowed to be reviewed in real time.
‘That’s a big gap in the law,’ said Colleen Potts, a supervising attorney at Disability Rights Texas. ‘It’s really difficult for these parents to access that video footage for the purpose that the law was really intended.’
…When Daniela and Alfredo Santos asked to see footage of the alleged abuse, the district refused to show them without having them sign non-disclosure agreements first.
Desperate, the families signed.
…Potts, the disability attorney, said an NDA of this kind was ‘unheard of.’
‘The non-disclosure agreement is really not appropriate,’ she said. ‘You can’t just not report abuse because you sign an NDA.’”
Read the full article on The Texas Tribune website.