Fw: Calm Down or Else -- Often Unsure How to Handle Behavior Disorders, Schools Turn to Forcible Restraint - NYTimes.com

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“Tim was screaming down the hall. He ran past me and began to double his fist to punch the locker. At this point I scooped my arm underneath his and directed him into my room.”

After the boy continued to struggle, this teacher and another “laid him onto the mat, where he was held approximately 20 minutes,” the log said.

Tim, now 15, graduated from the school last year and in June completed his first year of high school, excelling in a variety of mainstream classes without incident. In a telephone interview, he said he no longer thought much about the takedowns. “I just think now that they were idiots to do that,” he said. “I remember telling my mom to pray to God that they wouldn’t keep doing it, and wishing the other kids would see what was happening.”

When a school has a so-called zero tolerance approach to bad behavior, it often does makes a public spectacle of controlling a child’s behavior, said several parents interviewed for this article.

Kathy Sexton, who lives near Dallas, had to pick up her 11-year-old son, , who has a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, at the police station, after school staff members had the boy hauled away in handcuffs for cursing at a teacher.

“I didn’t hear about it for hours and had to go get him at jail,” Ms. Sexton said in a phone interview. “He was hysterical, obviously, and he’s had his ups and downs since then. It’s hard to know what a thing like that does to a child that age.”

Several companies offer programs to teach so-called de-escalation techniques to school staff, and a scattering of schools have developed model programs to pre-empt confrontations, and defuse them when they happen. But experts say that until policymakers and schools adopt standards, on exactly which techniques are allowed and when, children with behavior problems will in many districts run the risk of being forcibly brought into line.

Dr. , the Nebraska professor, illustrates the challenges by citing two recent cases in Iowa. In one, the parents of an 11-year-old who died while being held down called for a ban on restraints; in the other, parents charged that a school failed their son by not restraining him. The boy ran away and drowned.

“It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Dr. said, “and it reflects the level of confusion there is about this whole issue.”

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