Timeout: schools win in court.(the legal beat)

When a lawsuit charges a school with violating the Constitution by using timeouts to control a violent child, judicialization of education has arguably reached a new extreme. Yet federal appellate judges resisted intervention, and instead showed that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), when followed to the letter, may protect school officials from liability.

A mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Jennifer Couture, sued school officials, claiming that their use of a timeout room for her son ("M.C.") violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizures and Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. The defendants claimed qualified immunity, which requires courts to rule in favor of a government employee unless the conduct violates "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." A district court found for the plaintiff but was reversed by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2008.

M.C. in 2002 was six years old, profane, and violent. He hit furniture and threatened to kill students and teachers with hot oil. Having judged him "emotionally disturbed," school officials had placed him in a special education program and prepared an Individualized Education Plan in consultation with his mother, who signed it. Teachers were obliged to follow the plan and report to his mother daily. Among the techniques of "behavioral intervention" prescribed were supervised timeouts in a timeout room.

After a visit, Ms. Couture objected to the characteristics of the room: "very small" with "carpeting, but no padding on the walls. Nothing in it. ... It had a very dim light." In an administrative appeal to a hearing officer, she also complained of "inappropriate reliance upon timeouts and physical restraints." Defeated there, she complained to the district court under section 1983 of the U.S. Code, which individual litigants often use in an effort to show that state or local officials have deprived them of constitutional or federal statutory rights. The district court was troubled by the length of some of the timeouts and what seemed on occasion to be insufficient provocation on M.C.'s part, such as refusing to take his spelling test.

...