The Special School District of St. Louis County will open the 2026-27 school year without seclusion and without supine restraint. It didn't arrive there through a policy debate — it arrived there because federal investigators added up numbers the district had been writing down all along.
On July 22, SSD announced it is eliminating seclusion and supine restraint across all of its schools, programs, partner districts, and contracted partner settings, effective for this school year, along with new expectations for training, documenting, monitoring, and reporting. That announcement came five months after the Justice Department found the district's seclusion and restraint practices violate Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Here is the part every special education leader should sit with. The Department didn't discover a hidden practice. It read the district's records.
The findings were arithmetic on existing documentation
Over the two-year investigative period, DOJ found the district secluded more than 300 students almost 4,000 times and restrained nearly 150 students 777 times. One school enrolling fewer than 100 students used seclusion 1,667 times — and every student who attended that school was secluded or restrained at least once. At another school, a single student spent 101 hours in seclusion in one year. That's 17 school days.
Read those numbers as a director rather than as a headline. Every one of them was recorded contemporaneously by staff who believed they were doing the required paperwork. Each incident, on its own, came with a form and a reason. The violation wasn't visible in any single form. It only became visible when someone stacked two years of them and divided.