Saturday, November 28, 2009

ACTION ALERT: Michigan Restraint & Seclusion Press Conference

Forwarded message from a parent advocate:

Michigan residents, it's time to act now! On Wednesday, December 2, 2009, there will be a press conference in the Capital Building Room 426, Lansing, at 11:00 am to support Rep. Kennedy, who plans to introduce a bill to stop seclusion and restraint in public schools. The last legislation that was introduced as the Children's Health Act of 2000 regulates the use of restraint and seclusion in certain hospitals, health care facilities, residential non-medical facilities, and other programs that serve children under Medicaid or Medicare. These regulations do not cover schools, even though schools bill Medicaid for billions of dollars each year.

Michigan's voluntary policy isn't working. Only 22 of 57 Independent School Districts (ISD's) collect data on the use of restraint and seclusion as recommended under the policy and those ISD's reported over 3,200 incidents last year.

Mandatory changes are needed. This is what we need to ask for.

For more information, contact Mark McWilliams, Michigan Protection & Advocacy Service, Inc (MPAS), at (715) 487-1755 or toll free at 1-800-288-5923.

1 comment:

Ange said...

Is this referring to the 2006 policy adopted by the board of ed (http://nomoseclusion.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-progress-researching-michigan-board.html)? is this an actual policy (with no teeth) or a model policy that schools can choose to adopt or not (like what Missouri is doing). Just trying to get my facts straight, if you have any answers...trying to collect info from other states where the policies are already failing (like kansas and Michigan) to show legislators so that they understand having a model policy or anything w/o teeth is not enough.