Transport Restraints or Nun-Chucks?

Sometimes our perspective on a situation is not shared with everyone. To understand where I am coming from, I had one coworker who had not worked there for long. The job did not fit her well at all. She never reacted to anything, so it was the equivalent of not having a staff. She was the one who accidentally shocked me. She failed to grab a student’s head when he bit my arm (the student with the burning cow). Her exploits are also described in the following story involving being trapped between two beds and a hard case. For this incident, I wasn’t there in the room, which could have also contributed to my view on it.

It all went down on my lunch break. I went to the staff break room. I didn’t bring a lunch, I never did. I had my usual, 3 cups of hot chocolate. Eventually, they started charging 40 cents for each cup, so I stopped drinking it. On my way back to the classroom, I stopped by the monitoring department to drop off some paperwork. The monitoring department was in charge of watching all the camera feeds from the classrooms. They also controlled all of the traffic in the hallways. While I was there, I noticed a commotion in one of the small conference rooms. It was toward the end of the school day, and the monitors had told the staff in the small conference rooms to prepare the students for transport.

The student in the conference room was not particularly violent. He was mostly talk. In fact, he rarely stopped talking. He talked so much that his first week in the program put him a million points in the hole (he lost 50 points per talk-out). He had so many behaviors that I started calling behaviors on him when I was sleeping. That really bothered my wife. In order to curb his behaviors once the point system failed, he had a plan that had him earning a 5 minute break for every 1 minute of work. He passed that behavior contract twice a day, on a good day. When he was removed from my classroom, there was an eerie silence. Everyone in the class had grown accustomed to the constant noise in the room. In other words, this kid was all talk.

The staff had removed the leg restraints from his bag. Instead of following proper procedure and facing the same direction as the student, the staff faced the student and bent over in front of him as she started her attempt to get him ready for transport. The student then kicked the restraints out of her hands. She backed up, covering her head. He sprang to his feet, grabbed the transport restraints and started swinging them above his head like they were nun chucks. At this point, I left the monitoring department in a hurry to aid my coworker. I did see the tape later, but while I was on my way, the staff member crouched into the corner in fear of getting hit. The student then turned out the lights. We ran in and hit the switch. The student was still standing in the middle of the room and he was laughing. The staff was still in the corner. Maybe it was the issues I had with the staff, or just the sight of the student and the absurdity of the situation, but it was difficult to refrain from laughing as the student was being restrained until he was safe and his restraints were put on correctly.