Earrings, Pancakes and Four-Point Boards

In that school, the male students were violent much more frequently than the female students, but when the female students were violent, they were much more vicious. For example, one particular female student was upset with their teacher. The teacher made the mistake of turning her back on the student. The student pounced. She jumped on the teacher’s back and grabbed both of her earrings. She ripped them both off, then proceeded to pull out clumps of the teacher’s hair. She was then knocked off of the teacher but in the process of restraining her, another student came to her aide. As staff rushed in to help, there were bodies flying everywhere. Another staff pancaked one second student to get her off her feat. The staff's ID badge went flying in her face as they both went down. Staff were all over the place and within a matter of moments. The hostile students were placed in their mechanical restraints. That is, they were wearing their padded jackets and were being held down until calm. The average student required between 4 and 6 staff in order to be restrained. The more wily students required more.

While people who had successfully committed murder were not allowed in the program, there was a student who was unsuccessful at it. She had been in a fight with another girl at a beach. She had beaten her unconscious, and left her to die face down in the water. The waves had flipped her over and someone had saved her with CPR. It was a miracle that she had survived. One would think that leaving a person to drown face down and knocked out in the ocean is the same thing as killing someone. Regardless, that technicality made her eligible for the program.

Most of the time, and for months at a time, she was an ideal student. She not only followed her program, but she helped new staff on the rules and set a good example for other students. For this school, she was a teacher’s pet. In that kind of school, that is dangerous. Considering the average employee worked there for 3 months, these employees had only seen her on her best behavior. She had sucked them into her confidence and had afforded herself time to attack her eventual next target.

I was not there when she snapped, but I was caught up in the aftermath. Apparently it was taking about 15 staff to hold down. Usually a student tired after a while, or calmed down and was no longer restrained. The average restraint was only for an hour or two. After 7 hours of resisting her restraints, the decision was made to put her onto a four point board in my room as I was completing paperwork.

She was to lie in a prone position with her ankles and wrists strapped to the corners of a long fiberglass board. The idea was to reduce the number of staff required in the restraint. In order to keep up her resistance, she tried cutting her wrists on the end of the board. One staff was assigned to each wrist. She then started biting her arms, so one staff was assigned to holding her head. At this point, only 3 staff were required instead of 15. In her efforts to do what she could, she began chewing up the insides of her cheeks and spitting clumps of blood on the staff. To be clear, I am not saying that she was spitting with blood in her saliva. She was spitting blood with little chunks of cheek on people. Luckily, I was out of range, but the image still haunts me. She went on fighting and refusing to eat and was eventually fed through an IV at a hospital. I really can’t imagine any of the male students going to that extreme. If you consider that, with the toughness of some of the female staff, it is a testament to the will power of women.