“It was like being in a prison camp,” Teres said. The experience was traumatizing for Archer, who was sometimes sent to a time out room for refusing a teacher’s instruction, Teres said. The district, Monroe 2-Orleans BOCES, said it never locked time out rooms. Locking time out rooms is prohibited by state regulations. She said she witnessed aides holding the doors of the time out rooms shut and, on one occasion, an aide quickly unclicked the lock on a time out room while Archer was inside. When she arrived, her son Archer and other students in the time out rooms often were screaming and crying. The school, which catered to students with disabilities, had multiple time out rooms side by side, each with bare concrete walls, she said. Sarah Teres remembers being called by her son’s Rochester-area school to pick him up from the time out room on a regular basis when he was in fifth and sixth grade. In one school district, students were held in the rooms more than 1,600 times in the 2018-19 school year. Thousands of pages of school records obtained by the Times Union show that some districts put students in time out rooms hundreds of times per year. Neither the state nor federal education department collects data on how often schools use time out rooms. The Times Union uncovered other cases where educators isolated distraught children in bathrooms, electrical closets and other unsafe places. They’re meant to be a space where students in distress can calm themselves, while keeping their peers and staff members safe. Time out rooms often have walls lined with padded gym mats and a small window in the door so adults can see inside.
The rooms are sometimes abused by educators who improperly seclude children inside and prevent them from leaving.
The practice is permitted by state regulation but controversial, and it's subject to very little outside oversight, the Times Union found in a year-long investigation.
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