School or prison

...or is there really a difference? I don't actually see one, involuntary confinement, loss of freedom, extreme boredom... death...

Children forced into cell-like school seclusion rooms

• Story Highlights
• Mentally disabled, autistic kids injured, traumatized in school seclusion rooms
  
• 13-year-old Georgia boy hanged himself in room with cord teacher gave him
  
• Autistic Iowa girl confined in school storage closet where she pulled out her hair
  

By Ashley Fantz
CNN

MURRAYVILLE, Georgia (CNN) -- A few weeks before 13-year-old Jonathan King killed himself, he told his parents that his teachers had put him in "time-out."

The room where Jonathan King hanged himself is shown after his death. It is no longer used, a school official said.

"We thought that meant go sit in the corner and be quiet for a few minutes," Tina King said, tears washing her face as she remembered the child she called "our baby ... a good kid."

But time-out in the boy's north Georgia special education school was spent in something akin to a prison cell -- a concrete room latched from the outside, its tiny window obscured by a piece of paper.

Called a seclusion room, it's where in November 2004, Jonathan hanged himself with a cord a teacher gave him to hold up his pants. Watch Jonathan's parents on their son's death »

An attorney representing the school has denied any wrongdoing.

Seclusion rooms, sometimes called time-out rooms, are used across the nation, generally for special needs children. Critics say that along with the death of Jonathan, many mentally disabled and autistic children have been injured or traumatized...

...Disability Rights California, a federally funded watchdog group, found that teachers dragged children into seclusion rooms they could not leave. In one case, they found a retarded 8-year-old had been locked alone in a seclusion room in a northeast California elementary school for at least 31 days in a year.

"What we found outrageous was that we went to the schools and asked to see the rooms and were denied," said Leslie Morrison, a psychiatric nurse and attorney who led the 2007 investigation that substantiated at least six cases of abuse involving seclusion in public schools.

"It took a lot of fighting to eventually get in to see where these children were held."

CNN asked every school official interviewed if a reporter could visit a seclusion room and was denied every time.

Please go to CNN and read the whole ghastly thing here.