This is one of the rooms at Winlock Elementary School where students in the special education class receive one-on-one instruction.
This is one of the rooms where students in the special education program at Winlock Elementary School receive one-on-one instruction.
What educators at Winlock Miller Elementary School refer to as an “independent learning environment,” one mother sees as an isolation room.
“I guess it started out as a normal room,” said Candida Jadin, mother of third grade student West Lee. “I guess it started out as, he had his own desk, it was for independent learning and then the more he was trapped in there, he had to earn recesses.”
West Lee, 8, also had to earn the right to use a desk and chair at one point, according to school records, and did not have access to furniture until he did.
Jadin said her son, who she is now homeschooling, still has nightmares about the room, and has been clinically diagnosed with an anxiety disorder he didn’t previously show signs of.
“Many times he said, ‘call my mom,’” Jadin said. “They thought that was what he wanted, so they didn’t.”
West Lee has been diagnosed with a “social/emotional” disorder and has dyslexia, his mother told The Chronicle. When he reached third grade, the school placed him in its special education program. Jadin said her son, who performs at a fourth grade math level, became frustrated when he couldn’t keep up with the reading in class.
“The second grade class had pretty well gotten used to the way he was because when he would shut down, the head would go down, the hood would go up and under the table he would go,” Jadin said. “So by third grade they were ignoring him. He didn’t feel shame, he didn’t know what that was. He wasn’t acting out to get attention and the class ignored him. They would just go about their thing. As the curriculum increased, the agitation grew and the way the school handled it led directly to his behavioral issues at the school.”
Jadin volunteered as a teacher’s aid during her son’s second grade year, but the third-grade teacher told her the expectations were higher for third-grade students.
Jadin said the school began isolating her son in late November 2017. When her son’s teachers described the room to her, they called it an “independent learning environment.” Jadin had major surgery on her neck in early December and relied heavily on her parents to watch her children while she recovered.
“They do not use the word ‘lockdown,’ they use ‘independent learning room,’ which is a joke,” Jadin said.
According to West Lee’s Individual Education Program, commonly called an IEP, Jadin never gave permission for the district to isolate or restrain her son.
Winlock’s IEP has an option that states, “The parent and the school district have agreed that this student requires advanced educational planning that may involve the use of isolation, restraint, or a restraint device. Refer to the Emergency Response Protocol addendum to this IEP.”
Jadin never checked that box.
Superintendent Richard Serns said isolation isn’t used as punishment, and that the district doesn’t consider individual instruction as isolation.
“We are not a large enough district to have specialized classrooms for different types of behavior needs,” Serns said. “Some larger districts will have behavior rooms. So among all students that are receiving services for either special ed, or ELL (English language learners) or anything like that, the goal is to try to have them in the general ed classroom as much as possible. Within that goal, there is sometimes interventions that take place right in the general ed classroom that the special ed teacher, or a specialist may work with a general ed teacher to work on de-escalation techniques and so forth.”
If those techniques don’t work, Serns said students receive “individualized instruction.”
“From time to time, there will be what they call ‘individualized instruction,’ where a student may be placed in a room by themselves to receive services with either a teacher or a paraeducator,” Serns said. “So they’re not there because of discipline and they’re not there necessarily because they’re even having a behavior issue at the time. So they don’t consider that as restraint or isolation.”
Educators at the school kept daily logs of West Lee’s progress. A note dated Dec. 6, 2017 stated, “Currently — he does not have privileges for recess, desk and chair, group work. As he has safe days he can earn furniture and tools. As he completes given tasks/assignments, he can earn group time w/ class.”
Due to the casual nature of the handwritten note, there were no periods. The periods in the quote were inserted by The Chronicle.
Jadin didn’t see the room until January 2018.
“They would give him a few moments and if he did not completely, 100 percent comply to what they wanted, to the room he went,” Jadin said. “He started out with a desk and then they took it all away and told him that if he complied to their expectations he could earn furniture back, which included chair, desk. When my mom went to go pick him up on the 11th (of December), he was under a tent, under this fort.”
When asked if a parent signs an IEP that says they give consent for their child to be in an “individualized” program, Serns said, “I don’t know the answer for that.”
“There’s always communication with parents,” Serns said. “So there is isolation, I mean the program and instruction needs to be discussed with the parents. Actual IEPs are typically once a year. Sometimes they’re adjusted in between, but if there’s modifications, the teachers told me that they always communicate with the parent and have that interaction about what’s going on. ‘This happened for this period of time, this is how we dealt with it’ and so forth.”
The official notice about an “independent learning environment” from the school came on Dec. 6, 2017. However, Jadin said staff notes indicate the school was using the room prior to that and the letter stated staff previously attempted to provide a “Safe Room.” She believes the isolation began in November and that by December her son was in the room from 8 a.m. until 2:55 p.m.
On Dec. 18, 2017, West Lee was suspended for threatening to stab a teacher who put him in the room. A note from the educators’ daily logs states “10:20 — threat to kill” and “10:55 — threating (sic) to stab.”
“It was a knee-jerk thing,” Jadin said. “He was angry and did not want to be put back in isolation.”
Jadin saw the room for the first time in January after she recovered from surgery. She decided to homeschool her son.
“I actually pulled my son from school for a week because I said I was going to homeschool him,” Jadin said. “I went in there with the affidavit to homeschool. I was ready and that’s when the principal, the teacher, the special ed teacher, the English teacher, all of these people sat around the room and they told me ‘no, no, no, no West Lee still needs to socialize. Let’s do half days until 12:30 and then you can come home and teach him English.”
Jadin and her children moved from the Winlock district in March for reasons unrelated to the school district. She received a letter that her daughter could finish the year, but not West Lee. Jadin is currently homeschooling him.
