Scream Rooms Getting Educators in Hot Water

Update 10/28/2015: A girl tossed across the room like a rag-doll, nearly breaking her neck, by a school police officer in Richland County, SC, USA. Incidents like that are often the result of NO GOOD place to place a disobedient student in that circumstance;

CNN Story: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/29/us/south-carolina-school-arrest-videos/index.html

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Take a read at some recent local coverage of this issue here.  Here. And here.

I am really surprised that someone might actually lose a job over the use of the "time-out" rooms at Farm Hill School in Middletown. I see these rooms as necessary and I'm surprised they are not in every school. Even high school kids could use a place to cool off and do their homework in solitary. 

When I was a boy I was wild and uncontrollable, and I have disturbed my share of teaching and learning classroom time for others, in my adventures in public schools. At ten years old I had knocked out a school teacher and had to be placed in a school for students with behavioral problems in another county. It was called the Mark Twain School, in Montgomery County, Maryland, (closed in 2008) and it incorporated all that was known about teaching to bad behaviors. "Quiet" rooms were at the entrance areas to each school, the middle school where I was, and the grade and high schools in that one building. The Quiet Rooms were two rooms near the secretary's desk, off a main hallway paced by a teacher or an assistant principal. Like the Middletown room portrayed on television news, they were barren concrete block plain painted walls, with room enough to pace, with a school desk to sit and do school work. Back in the 1970s I deserved to be yanked out of class and asked to spend some hours in the Quiet Rooms, and the kids in my class especially deserved for me to be yanked out. Separating me from the classroom was about what's' fair to them, not about what was fair to me. The rules were simple in the rooms "chill out." Doors were never locked. Punishment for coming out is more time in.

It is way overboard to chastise an educator for the innovation of the safe and timely use of these rooms. I would trust most well intentioned educators, in choosing what is best for the entire classroom, in so choosing to utilize these necessary rooms for Hellions like me to sit and chill. These rooms actually save taxpayer money and time! When the disruptive influence is away from classroom, normalcy convenes and that's what we pay for and expect to see!