Posted on 09/19/2019 1:25:44 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd
SAN ANTONIO — A mother is outraged after her 7-year-old son was handcuffed by San Antonio ISD police at his elementary school, in an incident caught on video.
The child's mother, Maria Herrera Arias, said that her son, who has autism, had a breakdown in class on Monday. Arias said as her son got more agitated, the teacher called for the SAISD crisis officers to respond. She said the school tried calling the father, but miscalled.
"They were finally able to get a hold of dad. Dad immediately headed over there," Arias said. "Once dad was there the police were already there. So he was trying to tell them, 'Release him to me, I'll take him home.' They said, 'No, he was going to emergency detention.'"
The child's father started recording. His video shows his son in handcuffs, and he can be heard crying as he's taken to an SAISD Police vehicle.
Arias said the district police took her child to a behavioral hospital where he was released to his father.
"It was handled totally wrong and I just want to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else again," Arias said.
She said Hirsch Elementary School has known about her child's developmental disorder. She said she has also tried to enroll her son into schools for autism, but she can't afford it.
"My hope is that they treat children with disabilities with that least compassion and understanding to the situation that they're in," Arias said. "For me, the handcuffs are a big no. You should never handcuff a kid. Even as an adult, when you get handcuffed, you get scared. There's other resources out there."
A spokesperson with SAISD released the following response to KENS5:
"While I can not provide information on a specific child, due to privacy laws, I can share that there are times when children are in crisis and need to be transported to receive medical attention. Handcuffing may be part of the process, if it's determined that it is necessary to keep the child safe. This is not a disciplinary measure; it is a process to ensure students in crisis receive medical care."
They should not be mainstreamed but public schools need to have them in specialized classrooms with adequate staff. We could afford more help for our own kids if the schools weren’t full of illegals and anchors.
Handcuffs for the dimwit teachers? Yes.
homeschool? That seems to be popular here. and then the parents could take care of their own kid.
I agree. The idea of mainstreaming even the worst of these kids with the rest of them means that all the rest of the kids will learn almost nothing the whole school term.
There are a lot of people here that just can’t understand what living with someone who has mental issues means.
I see so many people swearing to me that a paranoid schizophrenic should be allowed all the guns he wants and no one should be afraid they are going to get killed in the middle of the night during a paranoid delusion.
The definition of "autistic" has been expanded so far that large numbers of children who would have been considered normal 40 years ago, are now labled "autistic".
I suspect I might have been labeled "autistic" back them. I was very focused, did not develop good social skills early, got bored easily...
Maybe labeled Asberger's today.
“Autistic children should not be sent to a public school that is not equipped to handle them.”
I would drop the first word. Then the statement is true for all kids be they blind, deaf, etc. The school needs to determine which kids it can handle in a regular classroom and which it can’t. Then figure out how to handle the remainders. As marktwain noted, autistic includes a broad band of behavior. Think of labeling both blind kids and kids with glasses, blind.
As I side note, I think it would be better to split schools by sex. They are different enough that separation would be better for both.
NO! A seven year old diagnosed with autism does not belong in a regular school system.
After the dad arrived, there also was no need to take the child away in handcuffs.......The dad was there to settle him down and take him home...............But they never allowed him to do that did they?
I notice that there's never a Hells Angel or Scary Looking Gang kid in attendance when the autistic child has an episode......
Your comment is ignorant to the core and a disgrace............
the answer is that most regular people can not afford this so why are people surprised that the kids are stuck in regular class......
by the way, they are not little brats....if they knew a way to get out of these panic modes by themselves they would....
“What the hell is “emergency Detention?!””
They are taking him to a children’s Nervous Hospital probably from anywhere from 3 days to a week. The docs will pump him full of drugs to calm him down. This is how it’s done when dealing with the public schools and special needs kids that go berserk in class.
Absolutely. Toughest codes are with little kids. They are vicious.
Severely mentally ill kids do not belong in a classroom, they need to be in a county home cared for by competent and compassionate people.
“NO! A seven year old diagnosed with autism does not belong in a regular school system.”
I very much agree with you. Have heard about too many stories of autistic kids having breakdowns and the police called, and the handcuffs come out.
Makes me wonder, if the school itself and the structure of it is what sets the autistic kid off? Think about it, that is just not the proper environment for them. Their parents push for them to be mainstreamed and be there but sounds to me that is what is not is best for the kid.
They gonna come at you with claws out.
I'm not sure that's the case but rather the school system or community is not able to properly accommodate them.......
I have several friends with adult children with severe autism and I can not imagine one of them actually being enrolled in a public school........Even one dealing with disabilities such as theirs.
My daughter was in a special needs preschool when she was 3 years old because she couldn’t talk. At the time, we only knew that she could have a brain injury because of an illness at home.
First, the school said she had select mutism and was choosing not to talk. They asked me to make it hard for her to open her lunch, and they would only open it for her if she asked.
Then I came to pick her up after school, and they lost her at recess. They told me that they couldn’t find her so they took the other kids inside and the janitor was outside. (Many years later when she finally learned to talk, she told me she was playing hide and seek and was hiding under the slide. When she came out, no one was there.)
She never went back to that school.
Also, she did have a brain injury, and she had apraxia of speech which is a speech disorder that the brain doesn’t send the right signals to the muscles for speech. With proper speech therapy, most can learn to talk but it takes a lot of time and effort.
Autism is a spectrum. Some can handle regular school, and some can’t.
Was also going to add that the regular preschool handled my special needs daughter wonderfully. They were actually used to 3 year olds that didn’t talk. They treated her like a regular preschooler.
She graduated college Magna Cum Laude with a statistics degree. I’m glad I ignored what public school officials recommended for her. I feel sorry for kids whose parents trust the public school officials.
I’m not an advocate of home schooling. And these kids have special needs
And the school called the wrong number.
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