By Chris Powell
A member of Enfield’s Board of Education is sore that the school system has eliminated a hundred staff positions as well as sports for many students but is increasing the number of school “seclusion rooms” at a cost of about $4,000 each. The rooms, whose walls are padded, are used for the emergency confinement and isolation of students who have episodes of incorrigibility and can’t be controlled — like the “rubber rooms” of mental hospitals.
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Six of Enfield’s 12 school buildings have “seclusion rooms” and there are 11 rooms in total, so some schools have more than one such room, presumably because the schools sometimes need to confine more than one child at a time.
This suggests an epidemic of incorrigibility.
The board member complaining about the seclusion rooms, Philip Kober, seems not to realize that maintaining order in a school is a prerequisite of education. But his complaint at least may remind Connecticut about the explosion of mental illness among its children and about state government’s insane expectation that schools should double as mental hospitals.
Connecticut very much needs such reminding, and Enfield School Superintendent Steven Moccio isn’t helping. He refused to tell the Journal Inquirer which schools have seclusion rooms and refused to allow the newspaper to view and photograph them, as if the schools aren’t public institutions and if public inspection would somehow endanger national security. Inspection of the rooms would facilitate raising an issue the superintendent wants to suppress.
Moccio’s unaccountability is another reminder that a big problem of public education in Connecticut is that it often isn’t really public at all but the private fiefdom of its administrators and teachers. Enfield’s school board should disabuse the superintendent of that notion and order him to open the seclusion rooms to inspection.
Enfield’s is hardly the only school system in Connecticut to have seclusion rooms or to have had them recently until controversy erupted, with parents not wanting their incorrigible children to be treated as incorrigible.
So some schools now have their own mental health clinics, and last year the state Department of Children and Families opened four regional psychiatric crisis centers for children, locating them in Hartford, New Haven, New London, and Waterbury. Necessary as these clinics may be, they are still only remedial. They don’t look to the causes of the problem.
Educators in Connecticut like to blame the recent virus epidemic for everything that ails the schools, but the epidemic is long over and student performance began its decline much earlier. The breakdown of the family under the pernicious incentives of the welfare system may have something to do with mental illness in children, along with, more recently, the strains put on the working class by severe inflation even as the Biden-Harris administration has been telling people that they never had it so good economically and they should disregard the evidence of their own lives.
But these explanations for the child mental illness epidemic are just educated guesses. State government should seek to know what is causing the explosion of mental illness among the young.
Knowing requires a formal inquiry by the General Assembly: a committee directed to find out, public hearings with testimony from expert witnesses and ordinary people whose children developed mental health problems, and then a considered judgment on what can be done about the causes.
Of course discerning the causes would be a lot harder than doing what state government usually does with problems: throwing ever more money at mere remediation that doesn’t solve the problem. Discerning causes also might risk controversy if government policy and parental irresponsibility were implicated. Would the governor and state legislators be prepared to change policies that contribute to mental illness among children if those policies have accrued their own constituencies?
Or would they prefer not to know where all the disturbed children are coming from and instead satisfy themselves with tours of the nice new psychiatric clinics and rubber rooms?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 