Students Sent To `The Box' -- Discipline Method Is In Dispute

ILWACO, Pacific County - Fresh from the excitement of an earthquake drill, the 10 boys in a special elementary-school class for children with behavioral problems were all wound up.

One howled like a siren.

"You're not listening," teacher Rob Adams told him.

"I don't want to listen," the boy retorted.

At that, the boy was ordered to take a timeout. He marched to the back of the room and entered what administrators at Hilltop Elementary call the "resolution room." Students call it "the box."

The small, padded room - 7 feet high, 46 inches wide and 39 inches deep - is part of what makes the Structured Learning Center classroom different, and it's also what makes it controversial.

Critics call the resolution room nothing more than a cage for kids. School staff say it's a way to keep kids safe, and help them get back into regular classrooms.

"It's saving 10 kids who would've gotten caught in the system and suspended," Principal Penny Lane said, "and given the 328 other kids at Hilltop the chance to not have their education disrupted."

The special classroom is a pilot program about 5 months old.

While the resolution room is windowless, Adams said it is usually used with the door open. A student acting up spends five minutes in the box, timed from when he calms down.

Adams said the room is used an average of five times a day.

If a student "blows a gasket," as Adams called it, then he or one of the other two classroom staff will escort the boy to the room and hold down the metal bars that lock the door shut. It only stays locked as long as someone holds it that way.

The morning of the earthquake drill, one of the boys had to be shut in the box because he took a swing at someone, Adams said.

"We don't use it that often," he said. "It's our last option, when they become dangerous to themselves or others."

He said the longest a student had been contained in the box was 25 minutes.

Lane and Tom Akerlund, special-services director for Ocean Beach School District, say the timeout room is used judiciously and with the safety of students and staff in mind.

School Board member Ray Provo said he visited the classroom after hearing of concerns about the timeout box.

"It was a whole different ballgame than what I had heard about," he said.

Several school districts in Southwest Washington have similar arrangements including some kind of timeout room, said Jan Rheinhardsen of Educational Services District 112 in Vancouver.

Lane said Hilltop used the Structured Learning Center at Hough Elementary in Vancouver as a model, and its timeout room is about the same size.

Like the name suggests, the program is designed to give students structure - a steady routine, clear expectations and rewards for progress. Students get breakfast, lunch and bathroom breaks, but recess and all other privileges have to be earned. There are three staff for 10 students. Instruction is intensive.