New seclusion room to be built at Iowa City High

IOWA CITY — The Iowa City school board this week approved a classroom remodeling project at City High School that includes adding a seclusion room.

The $24,000 project will renovate existing cardio, laundry and custodial areas into two classrooms, with a seclusion room in one of the classrooms.

The district said the seclusion room was recommended in some of the individualized education plans created for special education students. The plan is created by teachers and administrators working with a student’s parent or guardian. About 9 percent of the students in the Iowa City district are in special education and have the plans.

The district in 2018 removed the portable 6-by-6-foot seclusion rooms it was using after a state investigation into their use.

“The district has committed and removed temporary seclusion spots,” Superintendent Matt Degner told the school board Tuesday. “The only time we consider the use of a seclusion room is if it’s part of a student’s (individualized education) plan.

“Parents are in this (plan) meeting, and a group of experts are saying this is a component of what a student may need to be successful in this school environment.”

Degner said the district is working hard to create individualized education plans that don’t include seclusion spaces.

“This is not a step to set that work back,” Degner said. “It’s trying to make sure that for those few students who have this written into their plans, we’re able to provide that education to them.”

27 uses last year

Iowa City removed the portable seclusion rooms after a 2017 state investigation determined the district was violating federal law because many parents didn't know about the rooms and because the rooms were being used more broadly than intended.

At the time, the district made other changes, including improved staff training and starting a new clinical psychiatry approach for high school students.

During the 2018-19 school year, the Iowa City district reported 1,400 instances of seclusion and restraint. In the 2020-21 school year, that number was down to 27 instances of seclusion and 69 cases of restraints.

About 49 percent of the students placed in seclusion were Black, according to data from 2017, the most recent data available from the Civil Rights Data Collection.

‘For safety’

Lisa Glenn, the district’s director of special education, said the district has followed through on its promise to remove portable seclusion rooms.

The seclusion room at City High will look like and be used as an office space when it’s not being used for seclusion. It will have a window to the rest of the classroom.

“We educate all students here in a public school system, and that means we have some students with extra needs,” Glenn said. “We don’t tell students ‘your needs are too extreme for us, your disability is too significant, we can’t serve you here.’ We don’t tell anyone that.”

A seclusion room is “for safety” when a student’s individualized education plan is not proving effective on that day for that student, Glenn said.

If a seclusion room is not available, the district would have to tell some students they couldn’t come to school, Glenn said.

‘Needs of student’

“All of us in this room know the history of seclusion and restraint and the failures we’ve made in the past as a district,” school board member Ruthina Malone said.

“We received emails and heard tonight about the failures of the district, and the question has to be when do we take into consideration the needs of the student that their safety requires a room like this?”

Malone said a public school district denied her brother an education because it would not provide him with a seclusion room. Because of that, he was unable to graduate from high school, she said.

“I can’t allow us to cast away students whose parents are asking us for this support,” Malone said. “But I also can’t allow us to use it as a punitive measure for students who are disruptive, because we know in the past that’s been our Black and brown students.”

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