Is Jeff Grisamore really the champion of those that are affected by autism or does he use them as stepping stones in his political career? What is he doing to stop restraint, seclusion, or abuse? What is he doing to make sure that they are receiving the education and services that they are entitled to?
Public schoolchildren across the country were physically restrained or isolated in rooms they couldn’t leave at least 267,000 times in the 2011-2012 school year, despite a near-consensus that such practices are dangerous and have no therapeutic benefit. Many states have little regulation or oversight of such practices. This map shows where your state stands. Data compiled as of January 2014. Related:Violent and Legal: The Shocking Ways School Kids are Being Pinned Down, Isolated Against Their Will
Students were subject to restraint and seclusion hundreds of thousands of times in one school year, a new analysis finds, and that’s likely just the tip of the iceberg.
During the 2011-2012 school year, there were more than 267,000 instances of restraint and seclusion reported by the nation’s schools. The figure is believed to be low, however.
The numbers come from an analysis by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which crunched data collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
Among students who were restrained, three-quarters had disabilities, federal officials said when they first released the data in March. Such children also represented 58 percent of those placed in seclusion rooms or some other form of involuntary confinement at school, the agency indicated.
Though the Education Department sought to gather data on the use of restraint and seclusion in every public school across the country, only a third of districts reported using the techniques even once, ProPublica found.
What’s more, schools in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles — the country’s three largest districts — reported no instances, leading to questions about possible underreporting by schools.
Numerous reports from advocacy groups, lawmakers and government investigators have cited cases of injury and even death resulting from the use of restraint and seclusion. Currently, however, a patchwork of state rules govern the practices.
Efforts in Congress in recent years to establish nationwide standards limiting the use of restraint and seclusion in schools have stalled. While favored by disability advocates, groups representing school administrators have fought proposals to restrict the practices and insist that restraint and seclusion are only used as a last resort.
Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed the student transfer bill Tuesday as promised, saying it diverted public money to private schools and exacerbated hardships faced by students in struggling districts and their families.
Nixon also called out leaders in the Francis Howell School District for a board decision last week, saying it was wrong to "turn its back" on about 350 students accepted last year but now sent back to failing Normandy schools. He urged other districts not to do the same.
"To overcome the complex problems affecting struggling school districts, we all need to be part of the solution," Nixon said. "We may be comprised of many communities, but we are one state... To turn our back on a single child is to turn our back on our own future."
Nixon said the bill removed the requirement in the current law that says unaccredited districts must pay for transportation for students who want to transfer. He also had problems with the bill permitting receiving school districts to charge a discounted tuition rate in exchange for a pass on accountability.
But Senate leaders stood by the bill, calling the Governor's veto a setback for Missouri's most vulnerable children, and chastising Nixon for what they said was disinterest in helping draft a solution.
“The governor has provided no solutions during this process, offering only a fear-based public relations strategy and rhetoric,” said Maria Chappelle-Nadal, D-University City, and a co-sponsor of the bill. "This bipartisan bill gave real solutions to real students. My disappointment is in knowing yet another few years’ worth of students has been deemed expendable in this political fight.”
The Legislature convenes for the annual veto session on Sept. 10, when it could decide whether to override the veto.
In the last week of the session, the House passed the bill 89-66 and the Senate passed it 28-3. The Senate’s vote was strong enough to overturn a veto. But the House was 20 votes short of a potential override.
The veto comes as the Missouri State Board of Education is set to takeover the Normandy School District on July 1. Nixon has hopes for the board's plan to improve academics and finances in Normandy and said today he did not think calling a special session of the Legislature would lead to a solution.
He said although the Legislature failed to address the issue in a responsible way, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has stepped in with a "reasonable and workable path," getting input from parents, teachers and community leaders.
After decades of failure on state accountability standards, a state Supreme Court decision last summer triggered the exodus of more than 2,000 students from Normandy and Riverview Gardens, the other unaccredited district in the region. The transfers cost Normandy and Riverview Gardens about $1.5 million in monthly tuition and transportation bills.
Normandy chose to bus students to Francis Howell, a district in St. Charles County with some schools more than 22 miles away. The district brought in more than $3.4 million in revenue from transfer student tuition.
When the state takes over and Normandy becomes a new entity on July 1, Missouri education officials determined that the new Normandy Schools Collaborative would not have an accreditation status, bringing it out from under the law that had pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy, with Riverview Gardens not far behind. Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro said she had hoped the students who had transferred for 2013-14 and wanted to stay in their new schools would be allowed to do so.
But with no accreditation status, the current law no longer requires Francis Howell to accept Normandy students, and the School Board voted 5-0 in closed session last week go back to its previous policy of not accepting nonresident students, except in certain circumstances.
Other districts with have a combined total of about 650 students who want to return this year are deciding whether to accept a lowered tuition rate for Riverview Gardens students, who are still entitled to transfer under the law, and also to do the same for any Normandy students they had in their schools last year that want to return for 2014-15.
A spokesman for the Hazelwood School District this week said the district plans to follow the state education department's guidelines for student transfers, including a lowered tuition rate for Riverview Gardens. Hazelwood has a total of 170 student transfers who have said they want to come back, mostly from Riverview Gardens. Kirkwood School District Superintendent Tom Williams said he will recommend to the School Board that they retain the eligible Normandy students who want to stay.
Missourians' incomes grew more slowly than the national average during the first quarter, but government transfer payments accounted for all of the gap.
Personal income grew by 0.6 percent in Missouri in the first quarter, versus 0.8 percent in the U.S. Missourians' earnings — wages, salaries and business income — actually grew a bit faster than the national average. Transfer receipts, including Social Security and other government programs, grew just one-fourth as fast in Missouri (0.4 percent) as in the nation (1.7 percent).
That may be because of the Missouri Legislature's decision to opt out of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Nationally, the Commerce Department says, Medicaid accounted for $22.3 billion of the $41.1 billion increase in first-quarter transfer receipts.
Missouri's personal income growth has now trailed the nation's for five quarters in a row.
Nice restaurants in Jefferson City should be sad to see the Missouri Legislative session end. They’ve received tens of thousands of dollars worth of business from lobbyists courting Missouri’s legislators over dinners and drinks.
Who were the legislators taken out for expensive meals? Well, in many cases, we don’t really know.
“You look at Missouri, and we have the worst ethics laws in the country. That’s not an exaggeration.” Jason Kander, Missouri’s Secretary of State, said. “We are the only state in the entire country to allow lawmakers to accept unlimited personal gifts from lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions from anyone.”
Missouri is one of the few states without restrictions on lobbying. It’s one of the reasons we're always near the bottom of the pack in ethics rankings.
People who defend the system say Missouri is a reporting state, not a restricting state. The logic goes that our no-limits system is fine, because it's easy to find out who is giving and who is receiving.
But that’s not really the case. According to our analysis, for the first three months of this year, lobbyists spent more than $450,000 for gifts like drinks, dinners and basketball tickets. Out of that, more than 75 percent of the gifts were to groups instead of individual legislators, which ends up hiding who the real recipients are.
For example, let’s say you’re a legislator, and being taken out for an expensive meal by a lobbyist. Having your name show up on a disclosure looks bad -- nobody wants to be on those. A better alternative could be having the meal go to a group instead. A group could be a lot of different things: it could be your party, it could be the entire House or Senate, or it could be one of the committees you serve on. But most importantly, what it does is leave your name off the list.
Here's a few examples of what we're talking about. All of these gifts could have been disclosed as personal gifts, which name the legislators. But they weren't.
Credit Screenshot from data received from the Misouri Ethics Commission.
The Missouri Ethics Commission is the governmental body charged with keeping track of these lobbyist gifts. The organization's director, Stacey Heislen, says this is all completely acceptable, as long as all members of the group are invited.
'What We’re Allowed To Look At'
The one thing that’s supposed to separate a group expenditure from an individual is the invitation to all the members. But in practice, the Missouri Ethics Commission doesn’t even ask for proof that every member was actually invited.
I asked her if that was problematic -- that our system makes no distinction between 20 legislators partaking in $1,000 meal and one or two legislators partaking in a $1,000 meal, and that it doesn’t even name those legislators.
“We just work within the parameters that we have in the statute," Heislen said. "That’s what we’re allowed to look at, and that’s the authority that we have."
Heislen can only use the rules the General Assembly comes up with. But Kander says those rules need to be revised.
“Allowing lawmakers to hide behind committees - that in some cases have no real duties - in order to avoid disclosing which legislators are receiving gifts is certainly violating the spirit of the law,” Kander said.
He says legislators will always find ways of working around complete disclosure, and that the only course of action is to eliminate lobbyist gifts altogether.
An Institutional Problem
“I come at this from a different perspective. I used to be a lobbyist," Rory Ellinger, a House Democrat from University City. "(I) Never spent a dime though, we didn’t have any money,” he said, laughing.
Ellinger started out as a lobbyist in the 70s, and says the problem isn’t lobbyists themselves -- they provide expertise and experience, especially in Missouri’s term-limited system. He says the only problem is when money and gifts are involved, and that the problem is compounded when it’s so easy to hide your name from the disclosure.
Ellinger is one of the co-sponsors of a bill in the House that would have capped lobbyist gifts at $1,000 per legislator.
That bill never even received a hearing in the Republican-controlled House.
“The Republicans inherited the system that the Democrats left. They haven’t made it better or worse," Ellinger said. "This is an institutional problem that both sides have to face.”
So far, Democrats have accepted $40,000 in personal gifts, Republicans: $62,000.
“It is difficult to get a legislative body or anybody, really to police themselves," Kander said. "It’s a difficult thing to do, but it’s necessary.”
