Let me ask you this: What if the very institutions designed to nurture and educate children were instead contributing to their long-term psychological scars? That’s the uncomfortable truth lurking behind Michigan’s ongoing battle over seclusion and restraint in schools. For decades, we’ve treated these practices as necessary evils—tools to manage chaos in classrooms. But what if we’ve been fundamentally wrong about that? I’ve spent years covering education policy, and nothing has struck me harder than the way this issue exposes the gap between our ideals and our actions when it comes to vulnerable students.
The numbers alone are staggering. Nearly 18,000 instances of seclusion or restraint occurred in Michigan schools last year, most involving students with disabilities. That’s not just a statistic—it’s a testament to a system that’s failed to adapt to modern understandings of trauma, learning, and human dignity. What makes this particularly fascinating is how the state’s own laws, now nearly a decade old, have been rendered obsolete by the very crises they were meant to prevent. It’s as if we’re still using 20th-century tools to fix 21st-century problems.
State Sen. Stephanie Chang’s proposed bill is more than just legislative action—it’s a cultural reckoning. By banning seclusion entirely and restricting restraint to true emergencies, she’s challenging a deeply ingrained mindset in schools: that control through force is the price of order. Personally, I think this is where the rubber meets the road. For too long, educators have been caught in a Catch-22, forced to choose between maintaining safety and upholding the humanity of their students. Chang’s plan demands we rethink what safety even means in a classroom. If we truly want to protect kids, we need to stop treating them like threats to be contained and start treating them like people in need of support.
But here’s where the conversation gets messy. Critics like Kirsten Myers argue that eliminating these practices outright risks leaving educators unprepared for genuine emergencies. And honestly, I can see their point. The problem isn’t just the existence of restraint—it’s the lack of training, resources, and systemic support that makes teachers feel like they have no alternatives. What many people don’t realize is that this isn’t just about policy; it’s about power dynamics. Schools have long operated under the assumption that authority figures know best. But what if the real issue is that we’ve never taught educators how to de-escalate without escalating?
Take the story of Sunday Koffron Taylor, who was dragged out of her first-grade classroom and secluded in the nurse’s office for struggling to read. Her trauma didn’t end with that single incident—it shaped her entire relationship with education. This isn’t just about a bad day in school; it’s about how our treatment of children in moments of crisis becomes a lifelong narrative. A detail that I find especially interesting is how often these incidents are justified as ‘necessary’ rather than examined as failures of systemic support. If we take a step back and think about it, how many of these so-called emergencies could have been prevented with better training, smaller class sizes, or trauma-informed curricula?
The federal government’s involvement adds another layer of complexity. While bipartisan legislation aims to outlaw seclusion nationwide, the data collection remains mired in inconsistencies. The latest federal report is six months late, and the quality of existing data is questionable. This raises a deeper question: Can we even measure progress if our metrics are flawed? I’m not sure. What I do know is that Michigan’s recent settlement with Montcalm Intermediate School District—forcing them to ban seclusion after a fatal restraint incident—shows how far we’ve come, but also how far we have to go.
At the heart of this debate is a fundamental shift in perspective. The EndSaR advocates aren’t asking educators to become passive observers; they’re demanding a transformation in how we view student behavior. Trauma-informed practices aren’t just buzzwords—they’re a paradigm shift. Imagine a school where teachers are trained to recognize the signs of distress before a crisis erupts, where classrooms are designed to minimize triggers, and where discipline is redefined as restoration rather than punishment. That’s the vision Chang’s bill is trying to actualize, though it’s a vision that will require more than just new laws.
This isn’t just about Michigan. It’s about the soul of American education. If we can’t protect the most vulnerable students from being physically restrained in the name of safety, what does that say about our values? I keep coming back to the words of Sunday Koffron Taylor: ‘It seems crazy’ that we’d still use these methods when we know so much about trauma. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the real challenge isn’t changing policy—it’s changing our collective consciousness. Until we stop seeing children as problems to be solved and start seeing them as people in need of compassion, we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes.
