FLORIDA TESTIMONY---July, 2007 My 8 year old son is on the Autism Spectrum and is in a public school in Florida. My son is very well behaved and is in a mainstream classroom with ESE pull out. He get's overwhelmed on occasion due to his sensory issues. When he gets overwhelmed he puts his head down on his desk or goes into the bathroom. He has never been aggressive, but he has now started fighting back out of complete fear after they grab him. He has become an inconvenience (they call it noncompliant) and has been restrained 4 times in less than a 2 month period. My son has never been a danger to himself or anyone else. The staff is not appropriately trained to assist or educate children on the spectrum. My son suffered a cervical strain, busted lip, bleeding under the skin from excessive force on his arms, neck, face & torso. No one has been held responsible for this as of yet.......Why are public schools allowed to legally abuse our children? If I did this to my son I would be in jail.

My pediatrician removed him from school and the school refused homebound services. He will be going to a private school next year. I have him seeing a therapist. The Florida P & A have been helping me to make some sort of change in the Florida school district. The FBA procedure policy they use is 12 years old. I am giving a brief testimony but there is a lot to this story.

MORE TESTIMONIES CALIFORNIA - We are the parents of an autistic child and have been throught a lot with him. Our son suffers from PTSD diagnosed by his pediatrician due to the suggested ABA by the professionals at his school. After he received this diagnosis we at each and every IEP have included a doctors note stating no restraining due to what he has experienced. Well we are pushed at every meeting to authorize the restraining or guided therapy. One brand new behaviorist threw in and with each NO from his dad and I the pressure gets more intense to the point that he will be suspended or they will go ahead and restraint him. And because they do not document when they have, I would find out several weeks later from my son when he can verbalize it. We have been told to give the team thirty days of pure restraining and it will "break off any negative behaviors." Behaviors only demonstrated in school mind you, and we are constantly being told that "he has no demands on him" so that's why he doesn't have issues at home which is far from the truth.

Number one, they do not live here and number two we have to put more intense demands on him so he can do well out in the world. Once he was restrained and suffered a sprained shoulder, we went to the police and they said they could not do anything about it because he had " special needs."

The officer was named ....I will never forget that day when his Dad and I were so sick and helpless...... Telling this story is very difficult. The worst of it was when I disenrolled him from this particular school the day after the director not only held my son to the point of spraining his shoulder, but he also scratched his face and broke his glasses. The director lied to us and then turned around and reported us to DCFS.

These things happen all the time and parents do not speak out. We loved him, cried ourselves to sleep, and prayed a lot, still do.

The DCFS was a retaliation from the school and we were cleared and apologized to by DCFS. This was during December, in fact it was the seventeenth. What a Christmas that year. From that point, we home schooled him for 8 months until our local elementary said they had a great placement for him and it started all over again. I am convinced whether it is a non-public or public school, they have a hidden agenda and it hurts our kids. Thank you for allowing us to share some of our story. (Reported July 2005)

TESTIMONIES---THEY CALL THIS INFORMED CONSENT? MASSACHUSETTS-- Parent Testimony : "I have a 9 year old daughter who is in a Sped school. They asked me to sign a paper for permission to remove my daughter from the class when she exhibits aggressive behaviors. I signed the paper thinking they would place her in one of their many empty classrooms with an aide until she calmed down. But after the meeting and the signing of the paper I asked what room would they put her in. Her teacher told me to follow her. We walked into my daughters classroom. I was confused, but the she took me to a closet in the room I did not know existed. She said they are waiting for pads to be put in. This space was so small and I was a wreck. No way my daughter will ever be placed in there. (Reported March 2003)

MASSACHUSETTS: Parent Testimony--- "My son has in the past also been subject to aversives. He was locked in a padded closet while attending a private school for children with autism. It was a long hard fight to get them to stop doing it, but I was finally able to have him moved to another class where there was no time out room. I also insisted that they stop all behavior modification techniques and start treating him with some compassion.---- I will admit my son learned some things through behavior modification and restraint. He learned to be afraid of his teachers, he learned he wasn't worthy of respect, he learned to become violent and aggressive. He was quite, not surprisingly so, traumatized by the experiences." (Reported April 2003)

I WANT TO HELP THE KIDS IN NEW JERSEY PENNSYLVANIA ---SLP Testimony----"Emails were forwarded to all legislators on the list in support of Matthew's Law. I also let them know of the atrocities I have witnessed this year: children strapped into chairs or squirted in the face with water to increase attending skills, a child's feet tied to his desk to keep him from using kicking as a means to communicate "I need a break" and teachers who think "Might makes right!" and learning should be a battle." (Reported March 2003)

WHY DO RESPONSIBLE PROFESSIONALS AND PARENTS WANT NJ LAW CHANGED? RESTRAINT-----Restraint is being used in treatment facilities and schools nationwide on the developmentally disabled. Parents are frequently given NO CHOICE despite the fact that behavioral philosophies and treatment methods are not the only way to educate the cognitively disabled. Use of restraint frequently is necessary only due to the CREATED NECESSITY of using it. A contrived situation CREATED by the professionals that claim that an OVERCONTROLLING, BOOT IN THE FACE environment is the healthiest for the slow, the weak, and the delayed. This is of course NOT TRUE, and NOT TRUTH. This of course implies that some people are either blind to the truth or just plain satisfied with lying. ----------------------------------------------Is this just a white lie? A RESOUNDING NO! In fact, the question raised is one of deepest import since it is a question of what America is going to do with the large population of disabled children that are growing up now. VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE and aversives and restraint are the embodiment of violence in a treatment philosophy.

AVERSIVES: THE HORROR STORY OF AMERICA Aversives are not discipline, which is teaching right from wrong by means of words and actions. Discipline as parents practice is aimed at a child's developing free will and personality. Parental discipline is from the heart and meant to give beloved children a good conscience and out of this a good life.

Aversives are directed at the body and the instincts of the body. If a dog is hit, it will cringe and obey its master. In this same way, aversives used on the human body will make it cringe and PERHAPS obey. PERHAPS because the human has FREE WILL and a personality. He/she is a PERSON. ---- Aversives work on the same behavioral conditioning principles that the U.S. armed services utilize in training soldiers.

AVERSIVES CAN DO TERRIBLE HARM---WHY NO INFORMED CONSENT? Historically the armed services had screened out people with psychiatic histories because they knew that the rigors of aversive situations and conditioning presented a danger to these individuals. But if you are a cognitively disabled child in some treatment centers and schools, you will not be screened out from these things being used on you.

NJ DIVISION CIRCULAR 34 WHY are level l and level ll aversives used WITHOUT INFORMED CONSENT? Why is it written in this NJ document that ONLY level lll aversives require informed consent? By the time the child is recommended for level IIl aversives, the parents have already been deprived of their inviolable rights as parents to protect their child. Level l and Level II are very dangerous for some children. They may also violate a families freedom of religious formation of their children which is protected in the constitution.

BOOT IN THE FACE BEHAVIORISM MAKES GOOD CHILDREN VIOLENT Over the last 5 years, at CIBRA we have received many many emails from parents who have had their children abused and even killed in schools and treatment facilities. The one thing that stands out like a sore thumb is this: As pre-civil rights black communities experienced, no one is ever held responsible for these things done to the cognitively disabled. The child is always guilty unless somehow proven innocent. The law gives educators and treatment professionals almost complete immunity. Mostly it is the U.S. and state governments that hold a sort of absolute power over the lives of the disabled and their parents.