Mass. school electric shocks students!

http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2006/06/15/ny_report_denounces_shock_use_at_school/?p1=MEWell_Pos1

N.Y. report denounces shock use at school

Says students are living in fear


New York education officials issued a scathing report yesterday on a Massachusetts school that punishes troubled and disabled students with electric shocks, finding that they can be shocked for simply nagging the teacher and that some are forced to wear shock devices in the bathtub or shower, posing an electrocution hazard.

The report, based in part on an inspection last month of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, portrayed a school in which most staff lack training to handle the students and seem more focused on punishing bad behavior than encouraging good acts.

The investigators said some forms of discipline, such as a device that delivers shocks at timed intervals, appear to violate federal safety regulations, and students live in an atmosphere of ``pervasive fears and anxieties."

-snip-

Two-thirds of Rotenberg's students are sent from New York. The inspectors said they had notified officials in Massachusetts and at the US Food and Drug Administration about possible violations of state and federal safety rules.
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america so loves its children

fire/imprison the torturers

and they have high school graduates administering electric shocks to 'students.' For $200,000 per year per student I damned well expect trained, certified professionals who actually attempt to work with these kids.

Threatening to shock a kid because he sneezed in class? :wtf:

Maybe I should send a resume ;-)

If most of their employees have only a high school diploma you can bet it's because they're cheap. All that money coming in is probably going to executives, investors, lawyers and insurance.

Back to the coal mine

negative reinforcment used, including techniques that are similar to those used by the CIA to interrogate prisoners, including aversive sensory stimuli, white noise, and waterboarding: http://www.judgerc.org/history.html

Giving the parent the option to supplement the reward treatment with physical aversives when rewards and educational procedures alone prove to be insufficiently effective. If treatment with the use of rewards, loss of privileges, fines, other non-physical aversives, and educational procedures, prove insufficiently effective by themselves, then the parent should be given the option of supplementing the student’s program with carefully administered physical aversives. In the 1970s and 1980’s, JRC employed physical aversives such as the pinch, spank, muscle squeeze, water spray, vapor spray (mixture of compressed air and water), ammonia capsule, unpleasant taste, and white noise. During the 1991-1993 period, JRC substituted a 2-second remote-controlled shock to the surface of the skin for all of these procedures. This procedure is called the GED (Graduated Electronic Decelerator).

At the time that JRC was starting (1971), a movement to limit the use of punishments in the raising of children was already well under way. In that year, for example, Sweden passed a law banning the use of punishment with children. (Interestingly, no punishment was specified for failing to obey the law). The use of punishments in the education and treatment of children is still, today, vigorously opposed in certain quarters and has even been banned in the regulation of certain state agencies. OCCS regulations, for example, explicitly ban the use of aversive procedures. Every year or so a bill is introduced in the Massachusetts state legislature to ban the use of aversives. (This bill has never passed, however.) Because of all this, JRC and its parents have had to battle fiercely over the years to create and preserve this important component of its treatment.


Video monitoring, 24/7 of staff performance. The best-laid behavioral programs in the world are to no avail if they are not carried out as designed by the direct care staff. Ever since JRC’s first residential program in 1975, we have used videos cameras in all rooms to monitor staff, and sometimes student, performance.

As a result, the State of MA tried to close down the facility, but a sympathetic state judge overturned the order. Hence the name of the institution.

This reminds me of the experiments carried out for the CIA Artichoke amd MK-ULTRA programs in Canada during the early 1960s by Dr. Ewing Cameron, then the President of the American Psychiatric Association.

This article resonates for me, as well. In 1983, I was a staff writer for a little weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, CA. I wrote a column with the title, "Santa Cruz in the Year 2002-2012". Set in the early 21th Century, I described how electro-shock and similiar techniques would be used to control "problem children". The series described that Monterrey Bay town after a GOP dictatorship had taken power in America. I wrote that the American computer industry would suffer a major crash in 2000 followed by a mass casualty attack and a Mid-East oil war.

I really don't know what to say, honestly....my jaw keeps hitting the keyboard making it impossible to type.

What are they using, modified bark collars?

Todd in Beerbratistan

It's the same basic thing.

Or maybe their kids.

Shock collars on KIDS?? In the shower??

:wow:

Our treatment of troubled and unwanted children is shameful.

and everyone seems to look the other way. :grr:

to do this to anyone is cruel as shit... Man what have we reduced ourselves to as a society in dealing with disabled and disturbed kids... Are we not above this type of approach... :wtf:

nt

USA! USA! USA!