New Page 2

The Box

May 2, 2005

There is controversy in one local town over the way the public elementary school is disciplining students. At issue is the use of what officials call a time-out room. It’s a room one parent says is really more like an animal cage.

We've all heard of time-out. Your child misbehaves, so you sit him or her in a corner for a few minutes. But in one Massachusetts school, in the town of Hudson, time-out is something far more intense. Out-of-control kids in a special education program there are routinely put in a small padded room with plywood walls and a door that closes.

“It’s just wrong, they're torturing these children,” said parent Stacey Zipp. “My son says he might as well sleep in a dog cage, because that's what it's like. He's trapped in a little box; he just can't stand it. It's a box. It's terrible. It's completely terrible. I mean it's scary.”

Hudson school officials refused to let us in, but FOX Undercover obtained videotape of the time-out room inside Farley Elementary School.

Zipp's nine year-old son Thomas has spent hours and hours in the box.

“He didn't like his lunch one day—he threw his sandwich away—so they put him in the time-out room for two hours,” Zipp said. “He didn't want to do his work; he was put in the time-out room for two hours.”

FOX Undercover spoke with Dr. Ross Greene, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who wrote a book called “The Explosive Child.” We showed him the video of Hudson's time-out room.

“This is your classic padded cell. This is it. It doesn't have bars, it's got walls,” Greene said. “I don't think anything is to be accomplished by locking a kid in an enclosed room. I actually think it's more traumatizing than anything else. I don't think there's anything therapeutic about it.

“I wouldn't do this to my dog,” Greene added. “Not only do I think that it's inhumane, not only do I think it misses the point completely about what these kids need, it frequently doesn't fix the problem.”

Mary Larrivee, director of pupil services for the Hudson public schools, defended the time-out room.

Told that Dr. Greene said he wouldn't treat his own dog this way, Larrivee said, “He's entitled to his opinion, but we see that our children have made very good progress in this program.”

Larrivee said the time-out room is part of Hudson's learning center program for children with severe behavioral problems.

“If a student becomes very violent or a danger to himself or a danger to others, they may use the time-out room,” Larrivee said. “But it's always with very close supervision—at least one, usually two adults right there. There's a window and they can see the child. So the child is not secluded.”

Video obtained by FOX Undercover shows the window Larrivee referred to is actually a tiny peephole. Larrivee insisted the door on the time-out room is usually left open and that, on average, the most difficult kids end up in the time-out room only once a week.

“No student is never in the time-out room for more than 20 minutes, and the average is probably nine minutes,” Larrivee said. Asked if she could see any situation where the time-out room could be traumatic to a child, she added, “I think our staff is very skilled in how they use the intervention.”

But Zipp said the time-out room is making her son worse. She insisted that in her son’s case, the door is usually closed.

“He's afraid of closets,” Zipp said. “We had to move his room to the other side of the apartment where there were no closets in the bedroom because he was afraid of being trapped in there.”

Zipp has records from the school which show her son is placed in the time-out room regularly, sometimes more than once a day. And she showed FOX Undercover a journal entry in which a school staff member wrote: “Thomas had an extremely difficult day today. He was in the time-out room for two hours today.”

That is a lot longer than the 20-minute limit Mary Larrivee talked about. We asked Larrivee if two hours in the time-out room is acceptable.

“I'm not going to talk to you about an individual student,” she said. “If you want to talk to me more about the program and how it's there to support children, how students are making progress, I'm happy to do that.”

Pressed about the journal indicating a child was placed in the time-out room for two hours, Larrivee said: “I'm not going to talk about that student … you could have a student who may have an issue in the morning and another issue in the afternoon.”

Dr. Greene says the school's own records prove the time-out room isn't working. “I'm asking myself, okay, is it therapeutic? Is it fixing the problem that was landing him in the box in the first place?" Greene said. “Well, he's been in the box, from what I saw of the records, many dozens of times. I'll tell you what, I don't take antibiotics many dozens of times before I decide that they're not working.”

Dr. Greene says time-out rooms like the one in Hudson are more common than you might think. If you want to know if your child's school is using one, call the superintendent and ask.

So what's the alternative to the box?

Next, FOX Undercover will take you inside a Cambridge health care facility where children with severe behavioral problems are treated without the use of a time-out room. We'll reveal how that facility has learned to handle out-of-control kids without seclusion or physical restraint.

Many pages in WFXT, FOX25 web site feature links to other sites, some of which are operated by companies unrelated to WFXT, FOX25. WFXT, FOX25 has no control over the content or availability of any linked site.

Please read our Legal Notices and Internet Privacy Policy.

FOX Undercover's Mike Beaudet: uncovering the truth and getting results.

Do you have information about government corruption or waste? Do you know someone who's breaking the law and getting away with it? Contact FOX Undercover at 1-800-TV-FOX25 or e-mail us.