Contrast the era of inpatient treatment to today where schools are asked to educate and include students whose behavioral needs exceed the boundaries of what schools can safely provide. Further, since it’s parents and not schools who decide whether their children will receive medication or psychiatric treatment, schools are often dealing with unmedicated psychiatric and behavioral disordered students in a non therapeutic setting.

This article addressed school shootings. But it didn’t mention staff and students who get hit, kicked, punched, scratched and bitten on a daily basis. When parents refuse self contained or therapeutic school settings, the students usually remain mainstreamed in regular public schools, until the student does something that leads to a harm threat assessment, and sometimes to the student being excluded from school.

While I feel sad for the students who’ve been excluded from school, I also feel sad for the millions of students who have lost hundreds of hours of instructional time and/ or feel afraid to go to school because of the out of control behavior of some of the students in their classrooms.

I believe in inclusion and have worked with hundreds of special education students who have learned and blossomed in regular education classes. However, it is way past time to stop asking schools to replace inpatient psychiatric hospitals and other therapeutic and behavior disordered settings. We need many more appropriate placements for students in need of therapeutic, or behavioral treatment settings. We need to understand that Special Education is in addition to, and not a substitute for, good psychiatric care, medication, and outside therapy. And we need to empower schools to allow them to make the hard decisions about when a student’s behavior is no longer manageable in a regular school setting. Our mandate should be to meet the special education needs of students regardless of whether they attend a regular, therapeutic or alternative school.