Family Who Sued New York to Let Their Disabled Son Go to Public School
This story was produced by the Teacher Project, an teaching reporting fellowship at Columbia Journalism School.
When the public school in Norwalk, Connecticut, wanted to send Barbara Profit's children to a private school for kids with disabilities, the female parent warily agreed. She had hoped to continue them in public schoolhouse, merely knew her 2 kids, ages ix and five, needed extra support.
Her son Tyllis has autism, while her youngest child Shirley has multiple disabilities, including schizophrenia. Both had ambitious outbursts in school, sometimes including hitting and kick. In 2011, the district told her it didn't have the resources to meet the kids' needs, so information technology would pay to put them in a private schoolhouse instead.
But the longer her kids spent at the new programme, called Loftier Route, the more alarmed Profit felt. Several times a month, i or both of her children would be physically restrained by school staff after an aggressive outburst, or locked in a closet-sized seclusion room. It happened most often to Shirley. In the spring of 2015, the nine-year-old girl was put into an isolation room 15 times in a single month. During the aforementioned fourth dimension period, staff physically restrained Shirley vi times, holding her on the ground or with her artillery backside her dorsum.
"Information technology'due south just devastating to come across all these restraints," said Profit.
Shirley and Tyllis' state of affairs is emblematic of a disturbing tendency across the state. When children with disabilities tin't get the education they need in their schoolhouse district, federal law requires the school to offer them "private placement" – essentially, putting them in individual school at taxpayers' expense. Many children benefit greatly. Even so, scores of these private schools restrain and beleaguer children hundreds or even thousands of times per year, an investigation by The Teacher Project and the Us TODAY Network found. One private schoolhouse for students with autism in Virginia, for example, reported most 4,000 restraint and seclusion incidents in a unmarried year.
Exactly how many children receive this kind of treatment, however, is unknown. Most states don't require private schools to report any information about restraint and seclusion – even if they get millions of dollars each year from the public schoolhouse district.
"I don't think everyone pays much attention to what these schools are doing, and they're spending a lot of public coin doing it," said Andrew Feinstein, a special-education attorney in Mystic, Connecticut.
At that place's a good reason to showtime paying attending.
The death of George Floyd after a constabulary restraint this bound sparked massive civil rights protests and brought on a renewed attention to racial disparities across the country, including in schools. Nonetheless the nation's Role of Civil Rights at the Department of Educational activity does not keep any data on how often private schools restrain students with disabilities. This lack of information makes it well-nigh impossible to track what is happening to those students, specially students of color. A Teacher Projection analysis found that in Connecticut, one of the few states that does track this data, Black and Hispanic students in private special pedagogy schools are twice equally likely to be restrained every bit White students.
Disparities in special educational activity:Two boys with the same disability tried to go help. The rich educatee got it quickly. The poor student did non.
Profit, who is Black, felt like the private schoolhouse treated her daughter "but like a police officer would have. They would agree her down, put her down on the floor, like the constabulary would do."
In a first-of-its-kind effort, the Teacher Project and the U.s. TODAY Network reached out to all 50 states for data on restraint and seclusion in special-education private schools. Just ten states and Washington, D.C., were able to provide consummate information.
Yet fifty-fifty the limited information available shows a stark trend: Private schools often account for the majority of restraint and seclusion incidents in an unabridged state, even though they enroll a tiny fraction of the children.
In recent years, for case, Massachusetts reported over xix,000 restraints in just 105 individual special-education schools, compared with around 9,000 in all of its public schools. In Connecticut, nigh half of all restraint and seclusion incidents reported in the entire state came from private schools that serve less than 4% of all students with disabilities. In California, two-thirds of all cases happened at private schools that served less than i% of the country'due south schoolchildren.
Private schoolhouse leaders say restraint and seclusion tin can be necessary to keep kids from harming themselves or others. They point out they oft take kids with the well-nigh challenging behaviors, the ones that the public schools can't — or won't — serve. Just many parents and advocates say too many individual schools are dangerously overusing the physical interventions, and sometimes hurting kids in the process.
"The thought of united states of america literally paying our tax dollars to institutions that are affirmatively harming kids … is unacceptable," said Annie Acosta, a public policy director at the Arc, a disability-rights advocacy network.
Profit says that she would never have agreed to let her kids exist placed exterior of the public schoolhouse organisation if she knew how bailiwick worked at High Road.
"That was the worst fault I ever made," she said.
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A concluding resort?
In that location's far more than data available on restraint and seclusion in public schools than individual schools. For nearly a decade, the Department of Education'due south Office of Civil Rights has published the number of annual incidents for every public school. The data confirms a disturbing disparity in who is restrained: Merely xv% of public school students are Blackness, merely 25% of students who are restrained or secluded are Blackness.
However, attempts to create similar national reporting requirements for private schools have faltered in Congress. Some states accept passed their own laws roofing public, and sometimes private, schools. At least iv states — California, Virginia, New Hampshire and Maryland — take in the by 5 years started asking private schools to report restraint and seclusion information.
Documents in this investigation:Read the information that is available
Connecticut is one of the few states that'due south relatively transparent about restraint and seclusion in private schools, publishing the data for most private schools online. All the same Barbara Profit knew zip about the data when she agreed to transfer her kids to High Road nine years agone.
"I went forth with information technology considering at the time I didn't know much about the school system, the manner I know now," she said.
Her family's story shows what it'southward similar for children when restraint and seclusion go near unchecked at a private school.
Turn a profit, 57, adopted Shirley Gay and her older brother, Tyllis, when they were infants. Shirley, xiv, has struggled with mental illness since she was a infant. In add-on to schizophrenia, she has been diagnosed with mild intellectual delays and oppositional defiant disorder, which makes her quick to acrimony. She had to be put into a psychiatric hospital in preschool, an experience her mother said was deeply traumatic for such a young child. Hospital records say the little girl suffered from frightening hallucinations and sometimes hit family members.
Although Shirley is a challenging child, she has a lot of strengths, Profit says. She's friendly and curious, eager to chat with adults and ask questions. She'south a stylish dresser and has a new hairdo every week. She loves to sing and dance, peculiarly in church; her favorite song is the gospel tune "Take Me to the Male monarch."
In 2011, at the urging of the schoolhouse district, the siblings enrolled in High Road Academy of Wallingford. (They switched to High Road'southward Norwalk campus, closer to home, in 2013.) Every kid in those campuses is placed by a public school, and the company sees itself equally an extension of the public schoolhouse system. Connecticut taxpayers paid a picayune over $12 million in tuition and transportation expenses to High Road schools in 2018-19, according to data from a public records request.
For the first couple years at High Route, when the siblings were at the Wallingford campus, they did well. An evaluation from the school's psychologist said Shirley "is very well liked past the staff for her charming demeanor" and that the school's highly-structured environment gave her "a lot of comfort."
Just in 2d course, Shirley started getting more broken-hearted and acting out because her family was moving to a new business firm. And school staff started restraining her more and more. Barbara Profit kept hundreds of pages of incident reports the school sent to notify her when Shirley was restrained or secluded, describing each incident in detail.
When Shirley was eight, for instance, a staff member sent her to the school'south "time-out" room for existence "off-task." When she refused to walk to the room, the teacher told her she'd exist physically escorted at that place. She started to run, so staff members put her into a standing restraint: an adult looped their arms through hers to create a body lock.
"They put your arm like this," Shirley explained years later, sticking her artillery out behind her, "tie your arm behind your back and squeeze it tight. And it hurts your bones."
When she started biting and boot in the standing restraint, Shirley was pinned in a seated position on the floor. After that, staff put her in the seclusion room.
That was one of the kickoff of many such incidents, and it merely grew worse when she moved to the High Road Norwalk campus for third grade. (The schoolhouse has since been renamed Loftier Route School of Fairfield County.)
Officials at Catapult Learning, the visitor that owns High Road and dozens of other schools beyond the country, say they cannot comment on the experiences of specific students because of educational privacy laws. Still, school officials emphasized restraints where multiple adults hold a child on the flooring, every bit Shirley sometimes experienced, are "non routine." It's much more common, they said, for a unmarried staff member to agree a child's arm to terminate them from hitting themselves. Fifty-fifty such a light touch is however classified as a restraint.
"These are highly trained professionals that are accustomed to working with students that have significant needs," said Jeff Cohen, CEO of Catapult Learning. Restraint, he said, is "a final resort in all instances" after staff have tried other ways to de-escalate a situation.
If it'south a concluding resort, it's resorted to hundreds of times a year. The Loftier Route School of Norwalk said it restrained a child or put one in seclusion 565 times in 2017-18, the about contempo year information is available. The schoolhouse only enrolls around xxx to 40 children.
Anthony Davis, now 15, was ane of Shirley's classmates at High Route. He remembers seeing restraints happen "every day." He attended the school in 5th and sixth grade because he had trouble controlling his anger, merely what he experienced, he says, just fabricated the anger worse. "Nobody wants to be touched. When I got touched, I got really aroused, and sometimes I would attempt to fight back," he said.
Sometimes, instead of feeling angry, he just felt helpless. He remembers how he stood in the hallway and watched ane of his classmates cry during a restraint.
"I felt bad, but I knew I couldn't do cypher almost it," he said.
Staff at Loftier Road are trained in a nationally used technique called "Handle with Care," meant to reduce the risk of injuries. Nether Connecticut constabulary, the seclusion rooms must take unbreakable windows and a special door that tin can merely lock when a staff member is property downwardly the handle. This is and so they tin can't walk abroad from the room with a child locked inside.
But even with training, kids still get hurt.
One mean solar day, in June 2014, Shirley got in problem for spitting nutrient at a teacher. School and medical records show what happened next. She refused to walk to the seclusion room, so two staff members took hold of her and walked her there. She struggled against the staff members "with exact and physical aggression," co-ordinate to the school's report. Shirley was 8 years old at the time, stood iii'10" and weighed 44 pounds. She was put into a continuing restraint. So, she went limp.
Shirley was unresponsive for five minutes before she came to, according to what a school aide later told doctors. The schoolhouse called an ambulance that took her to the emergency room. Doctors wrote she'd had a seizure.
All Shirley remembers is: "They were holding me down. And it was too much for me, it was too much, and and so I passed out."
The schoolhouse'southward report failed to mention the trip to the emergency room. It said Shirley "appeared to autumn asleep" and checked a box indicating there were no injuries. But Shirley's chest hurt so badly, she had to go to the hospital once more five days later.
After this event, High Road staff restrained and secluded Shirley more and more. The seclusion rooms where Shirley was held were virtually the size of a closet, with windows on the door and a fluorescent light overhead. When a reporter visited last year, although the rest of the schoolhouse was make clean and bright, the walls of an isolation room were streaked with scratches and blackness marks. The door was scrawled with obscene graffiti. Shirley hated the rooms. Being held in that location "made me scared," she recalled.
Sometimes, staff put Shirley into the seclusion rooms for dangerous behavior, like trying to climb out of a window or hitting her teachers. Other times, the danger was less obvious, like when she threatened to throw h2o at a teacher's face up or punched coats hanging on a wall.
Loftier Road staff left Shirley in the seclusion rooms even when it put her into greater distress. One time, in November 2015, she went to one after disrupting form and pushing a teacher. She became upset in the room and started to beg: "Become me out of here, please open the door." She cried out, "I desire my mother." She was kept in the room for 25 minutes.
'I would always scream for help'
Equally early on as 2014, Profit met with staff at High Road to discuss why Shirley was beingness restrained and secluded and then frequently. The schoolhouse's social workers and behavioral experts tried to address the problem and discover the root cause of Shirley's assailment, according to the school's notes. Shirley says the restraints and seclusions themselves were part of what made her so on edge and quick to lash out.
"I didn't want to exist in the time-out room, and I didn't want to be in that school," she said.
"Nobody likes to be locked in a room against their volition," her classmate Anthony agreed. "I always bugged out, because I hate beingness in small spaces. I would always scream for help."
He said he could often hear other children screaming in the isolation rooms too. Focusing in form was difficult.
Profit doesn't empathise why Shirley kept getting restrained and put into the seclusion room, when it triggered such intense fear and anxiety.
"You lot know that it's going to stay with them because they're frightened, and information technology's going to mess with their heed," she said. "And you still sit at that place and keep doing it to them, over and over and over all twenty-four hours? That's abuse."
In total, over five years, Loftier Road staff restrained Shirley at to the lowest degree 96 times and put her in seclusion 146 times. At to the lowest degree 25 of those restraints were prone, pregnant she was face-downwards on the ground. Prone restraints are so dangerous that Connecticut banned the practice after July 2015. The school said information technology rarely used face-down restraints and stopped using them afterward that engagement. Her brother was restrained 11 times and isolated 35 times over the same period.
It's non surprising that Shirley got into a cycle of restraint and seclusion, says Lori Desautels, a professor of educational neuroscience at Butler University and a former special-education teacher. Restraint activates the torso's stress-response system, putting the child in a flying-or-fight mode that escalates the situation. Seclusion is particularly harmful, she said, because children acquire how to regulate their emotions by following the cues of adults around them. If children are left alone at the height of their emotional crisis, they will never learn healthy ways to calm down.
"When we isolate kids, what we're doing is we are literally damaging their neurobiological responses," she said. "And we are compromising the stress response system and damaging brain tissue."
The schools' perspective
Private schools like High Road bespeak out they ofttimes serve students with serious psychological problems and aggressive behavior that the public schools can't address. In Connecticut, i-third of all students who are put into private placement in the state have a diagnosis of emotional disturbance. The sole purpose of restraint and seclusion, these schools say, is to keep students and teachers safe.
Some of High Road'south families say the schools take been a lifesaver. Brenda Dionne says her son Cameron, who has been diagnosed with emotional disturbance, is far happier at present at the High Road School of Wallingford than he was at his old public school; there, she would ofttimes show up at schoolhouse to find her child in handcuffs. "Information technology's been an ongoing boxing since kindergarten, so we're very grateful to Loftier Road, and their staff is amazing," she said.
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Another school that defends restraint and seclusion is the Faison Center in Richmond, Virginia, which enrolls effectually 190 students with autism. In a single schoolhouse year, 2017-eighteen, Faison documented 968 incidents of restraint and 2,988 of seclusion.
Faison officials say they report more than other schools considering they track every single incident, even if information technology lasts simply a few seconds. All the same, these numbers are loftier even compared with other special education schools: Faison reported putting kids into isolation 10 times every bit much as any other private special education schoolhouse licensed in the state of Virginia.
At Faison, the most intense type of restraint involves at least four and up to eight adults holding a pupil face-up on the ground, while another staff fellow member monitors. The large number of adults is necessary to hold down the student's artillery, legs and head, said Eli Newcomb, director of teaching. He said information technology is safer this way, because "more people ways they're going to utilize less force."
Sarah Ratner has a son at Faison who is nonverbal and has autism. She knows her son has been restrained and secluded at the school, but she trusts it was for his own safety. "No one wants their child to exist restrained or in a safe separation, just at that place are times he would actually, really hurt himself without that intervention," she said.
When told the school had almost 4,000 incidents in a year, she said, "Looking at those numbers without a context is completely unfair to this schoolhouse and is not at all what all the parents I know here would say. This school takes in students that no other school volition keep because of recurrent beliefs problems."
Officials from High Road and Faison point out they are beingness transparent nearly what other schools proceed in the dark. A report concluding year from the Government Accountability Part chided many of the nation'southward largest schoolhouse districts, including New York Urban center and the unabridged land of Hawaii, for falsely challenge they had no restraint or seclusion.
"Nosotros have very seriously the responsibility to study these incidents," said Cohen, of High Road parent Catapult Learning. "A lot of school systems merely aren't reporting at all."
Private schools say banning seclusion, equally Democrats in Congress take sought to do, would have unintended consequences. Afterward Illinois passed an emergency ban on seclusion and some types of restraints, the Chicago Tribune reported some private schools said they would send children dwelling considering they could non guarantee their safety.
"If those procedures are banned, there are students who are going to find difficulty maintaining schoolhouse placements," said Danielle Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Private Special Education Centers. "We are concerned about things like the increased involvement of police force enforcement and other agencies who aren't necessarily trained to support students with these behavioral needs."
Activists who don't believe in the utilize of restraint, still, don't concur with that reasoning. They indicate out some schools with equally challenging students don't employ restraints at all — schools like Centennial in Pennsylvania, which serves students that have repeatedly failed or been kicked out of other schools due to beliefs problems. Centennial went from over 1,000 restraints a year to zero subsequently information technology shut downwardly its seclusion room and overhauled the behavior management system to focus on avoiding restraints.
How they did information technology:'The most violent' special education school ended restraint and seclusion
"When people say, 'We have to do this because these are really tough kids,' I don't buy that," said Leslie Margolis, a lawyer for Inability Rights Maryland. "I don't buy that when I hear stories of other places that have all just eliminated the utilize of restraint."
In Maryland, individual special-didactics schools deemed for half of all reported restraint and seclusion incidents in both 2018 and 2019. Margolis argued individual schools are supposed to have more expertise and preparation than public schools and therefore should be able to detect alternatives that work.
"It'due south blaming the person with a disability for the fact that people are using a traumatic, potentially deadly intervention with them," she said, "rather than looking back and request, 'What tin can nosotros, equally staff, do differently?'"
A state that counted restraints – until it didn't
Despite the high numbers at schools like Faison and Loftier Route, nearly states take been reluctant — or never even considered — monitoring private schools' use of restraint and seclusion. California, where around 12,000 special education students accept been placed by the state in "nonpublic schools," used to require all schools to report use of restraint and seclusion.
However in 2013, California lawmakers repealed those requirements in an effort to cutting costs for districts. That was effectually the same time Anthony Corona started being restrained for his challenging behaviors at San Bernardino'due south Bright Futures University, according to legal documents.
Anthony was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, and the San Bernardino School District referred him to the publicly-funded, privately-run Vivid Futures when he was eight, in 2006. Bright Futures operates several campuses across Riverside and San Bernardino counties that serve students with autism and emotional disturbance. The school gets about $140 a mean solar day in public coin per student, according to a 2017 contract.
Within a couple of years of starting at Bright Futures, Rosalia Muñoz said her grandson started coming home with the wrong clothes, missing shoes or minor scratches. When she called to need an caption, staff would say Anthony had soiled himself or gotten into a fight. They never received reports of restraints, the kind Shirley's family received from High Road.
Rosalia Muñoz and Anthony's aunt, Gloria Muñoz, said they nonetheless kept Anthony at Bright Futures because he ever seemed excited to become to schoolhouse. "He didn't speak, so he couldn't tell us what he liked and what he didn't like," Muñoz said. "Just as soon equally you mentioned school, he'd low-cal up."
Family members say they never could take imagined what would happen to Anthony on a bus ride home from Brilliant Futures in December 2016.
Anthony, 18 at the time, began acting out on the bus, where he spent more than 2 hours a day harnessed to his seat, according to police records. Luis Bonilla, the bus commuter, told police that Anthony's seat harness was becoming loose, so he pulled over and helped 2 aides restrain the teen. Bonilla says he held Anthony'southward upper torso so that the teen's head was placed between his legs.
Anthony started yelling, "I'thousand done, I'yard washed," and Bonilla released him. But he resumed the restraint when Anthony connected to struggle. A few minutes later, the teen'due south body went limp.
Bonilla tried to perform CPR, without success. Anthony was declared dead of asphyxiation at a nearby hospital.
"If they would've just walked away, he would've calmed down," said Gloria Muñoz. The family is at present suing Bright Futures for assault, battery and wrongful death.
Anthony'south family members said they were never notified of any incident of restraint during the 11 years he attended the school. Nevertheless they've now realized that Anthony was restrained approximately xx times, said Dale Nowicki, Muñoz'south lawyer, who discovered the incidents while reviewing police and school records for the family'south lawsuit.
Nowicki said the records of restraints go back to 2014, but there could accept been fifty-fifty more "due to a lack of schoolhouse reporting and their lack of communicating whatsoever problems to the family."
The records show Anthony had been restrained in a like way on the bus merely a week before his decease. Anthony'southward grandmother said Vivid Futures never reached out to the family unit for suggestions on how to calm Anthony downwards.
"We never had to restrain him or telephone call the constabulary," Muñoz said. "We only gave him fourth dimension outs. Or sometimes he would need a hug, and then he'd at-home down."
Bright Futures President Betti Colucci declined to annotate on Anthony'south instance, due to pending litigation, but said the school'southward restraint rate is "comparable" to that of other schools serving like populations.
While it's impossible to say what would take happened to Anthony if the reporting requirements hadn't been repealed in 2013, his family unit members say the greater transparency could have alerted them to Bright Futures' tactics well before his expiry — when in that location was still time to intervene on his behalf.
Between 2015 and 2018, 21 out of 22 formal complaints in California about restraints and seclusions involved non-public schools like Bright Futures.
To improve understand the frequency of these incidents, lawmakers reinstated reporting requirements for private schools in 2018.
Anthony'southward aunt, Gloria Muñoz, said the country besides should require schools with high rates of restraint to communicate actively with parents.
"I call back if they had done that, Anthony would all the same be here," said Muñoz. "Communicating with the parents is number one. In that location's a lot of nonverbal children who tin't speak for themselves."
Families make their complaints public
Nevertheless even when families practise speak up for their children, it doesn't always lead to change.
In May 2016, Barbara Profit and two other families went to a coming together of the Norwalk Board of Educational activity and publicly accused the school of child corruption. They said their kids were coming home from High Road with bruises and scratches, according to local media reports and Board of Pedagogy minutes.
Anthony Davis' family was there. His grandmother said her grandson was held in seclusion so long he urinated on himself. "I didn't pee on myself on purpose," Anthony recently told a reporter. "I just couldn't agree it anymore. They did that to a lot of kids."
Regina Russell, Anthony Davis's mom, said she was angry that the school could restrain her son with no consequences. If she had sent her son to school later on similar treatment at home, "then you guys would call DCF on me," she said in a recent interview, referring to the Section of Children and Families.
All of the families who complained that nighttime were African-American. Brenda Penn-Williams, the president of the Norwalk NAACP and Profit's friend, believes race factors into who is restrained in her state.
"Just like what they did to George Floyd, they accept a knee on our necks," she said.
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Anthony, however, said he did non notice racial discrimination at High Road. "Everybody basically got restrained there," he said.
In the week later on Barbara Turn a profit took her complaints public, Shirley was restrained 5 times at school. She got suspended at the end of that week and never went dorsum. Anthony left Loftier Road every bit well.
In response to the parents' concerns, the state Department of Instruction launched an investigation of what happened at High Route. The final report establish no testify the schoolhouse "abused or intentionally caused damage to any of the students" or inappropriately used restraint or seclusion. Investigators as well reviewed injury reports that Loftier Road itself had submitted to the state Department of Education and plant "no serious injuries (beyond basic first assist)" to the students whose families had complained.
The report says investigators interviewed parents, but Profit said they never spoke to her. Otherwise, they would have known most Shirley's trip to the emergency room. (Russell said she could non recollect if investigators spoke to her.) Similar investigations from the police, child protective services, Norwalk'due south Board of Education and Connecticut'southward Office of the Kid Advocate were too closed.
Feinstein, the special-education lawyer, said he'south not surprised the state education investigation found no prove of wrongdoing at Loftier Road. "Our state department is the burial ground for whatsoever serious investigation," he said.
In 2019, an evaluation squad from the Connecticut Section of Education visited the Norwalk campus every bit office of the re-approval process that happens every five years. The ensuing evaluation written report made no mention of previous allegations and no recommendations regarding reducing restraint or seclusion. It warmly commended the school for making "meaning efforts to infuse trauma-informed care and mindfulness practices with a behavior oriented model."
Shirley, Tyllis, and Anthony are all back in public school in Norwalk. Turn a profit says even years later, her kids nevertheless show signs of trauma from what happened at Loftier Road. Shirley can't stand up being alone. Even when she takes a bath, she leaves the door open a crack to experience safe. She yearns for attention, simply she'southward also mistrustful and quick to acrimony. Her brain, Profit says, is still in fight-or-flight mode.
Anthony, however, said he was surprised to see how differently his old classmate Shirley acted when he saw her again in loftier school. When she was at Loftier Route, "she would always have a mean face, because she was just so aroused at that place." In public schoolhouse, he finally saw her cheerful, friendly side. "She'd actually have a grinning on her face up."
Shirley agreed that she's been doing better in public school. In an interview before the coronavirus pandemic closed schools, she listed off the things that made her happy: "I take friends, I take fine art, I have music." And, she added: "They don't have time-out rooms there. Thank God."
Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/07/25/disability-special-education-private-school-restraint/4737971002/
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