Restraint Isn't Just About Preventing Harm to Others — It's About Student Safety Too
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how physical restraint can be necessary not just to prevent harm to others, but to prevent students from harming themselves by eloping.
Key Takeaways
- Elopement is a safety risk - Students who run out of classrooms and buildings can end up in traffic or other dangerous situations
- Restraint can be protective - In some cases, physically stopping a student from running into danger is the safest response
- Training matters - Staff who may need to use restraint must be properly trained in safe, appropriate techniques
Transcript
As a principal, it's very important to control where your students go on campus.
And if you have students who tend to elope, to run away, if you have runners, it's very important to be able to stop them.
And we hear a lot of restrictions these days on restraint, on physically restraining students or on blocking students or putting your hands on students in any way.
And there are, of course, trainings on how to restrain students safely.
It can be done safely.
But I hear so many constraints on restraint that I wonder how people think principals are supposed to keep their schools and their students, especially the students who run away, safe.
There are very, very real dangers to having students just run out of the classroom and run around the school.
you know they may be tearing things up and that's not necessarily a safety issue by itself but it could be you know bulletin boards can fall off of walls many of us have seen that happen and certainly students can leave the building and run out into traffic or leave campus and be unaccounted for so this is a huge safety issue even if the student is not attempting to harm themselves or harm others controlling where a student goes, especially a very young student who's very dysregulated, is very, very important.
And this kind of extremely high bar, this sky-high bar on restraining a student or using any kind of physical presence to control where a student goes, I think it's just wildly out of control.
I think we have to be careful.
We have to be trained.
We have to be reasonable.
But I think it's only a matter of time before all of these excessive prohibitions on using restraint result in somebody doing not enough to keep a student from running out into traffic and then the worst happening.
So I'm not an advocate for using excessive force, certainly, or using force just to, you know, to you know, protect property.
I think there is a time and a place to, you know, just kind of let things happen a little bit.
But we definitely, definitely, definitely need the ability to keep students safe and keep them from running away.
Let me know what you think.