On May 20, 2024, teachers and administrators at Hazardville Memorial School in Enfield called the police on a five-year-old in kindergarten.

The call to 911 was placed at 9:57 am. By that time, teachers and special education instructors had been handling a situation with five-year-old Cody (fake name) for about an hour. That morning, Cody had kicked a classmate, at which point teachers evacuated the classroom, called in the school’s crisis intervention team, and secluded Cody in the classroom with adults restraining him from kicking or hitting.

On police body camera footage, Cody can be seen being held by a crisis team member on the ground in the classroom with probably ten other teachers and administrators monitoring the situation, but Cody’s parents had not yet been called. Dave (fake name), Cody’s father, didn’t get the phone call that his son was being restrained until roughly seventy minutes after the incident began and he immediately left work to come to the school. 

This particular incident with Cody was one of thirty-nine restraints or seclusions of the boy between October 2, 2023, and May 20, 2024. At five years old, Cody is small, hardly a real physical danger, and easily restrained by the teachers. He was later diagnosed with autism, which causes his emotional dysregulation and can lead to outbursts. Dave alleges that during an earlier incident, he found that staff had been isolating Cody in a “windowless, solid-core doored, single stall bathroom that’s inside a little storage space between classrooms.”

“Every alarm bell in my head is going off that he is being physically assaulted and abused in this school,” Dave said. “They had no justifiable acts to pin him to the ground in that room, they had no justifiable cause to extract him from his room where he was perfectly safe for an hour, and drag him a hundred something feet down a hallway and throw him in a room that did not meet the safety standards that even the Town of Enfield has listed in their policies.”

Fearing that things were getting worse for his son instead of better, and seeing staff allegedly violate protocols and regulations regarding restraining and secluding a child, Dave filed charges against school staff members with Enfield Police. The police, however, determined staff had followed policy and procedure and dropped the case. Dave then filed a complaint with the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE). 

He alleged the Enfield school district was violating state statutes regarding special education by withdrawing services for his son leading to more and worsening incidents, not informing him that Cody was being restrained and secluded until seventy minutes after the incident began, holding him in a room that did not meet state standards for a seclusion room, and that the district was not holding the proper Planning and Placement Team (PPT) review meetings after the incidents to determine what needed to be done to create a better situation and outcome for Cody.

In fact, the district had been downsizing, approving a budget that would result in laying off about 130 staff members and had pulled back on paraprofessionals who provide additional support for students who may have special education needs, including for Cody, who previously had a one-to-one paraprofessional. 

The paraprofessional was removed in March 2024 because the district said Cody showed improvement, but the immediate effect was a rapid escalation of incidents resulting in restraint and seclusion, according to the conclusions reached by SDE’s investigation. Whereas prior incidents had been relatively minor, and seclusion was largely avoided, following removal of the paraprofessional, there were multiple incidents over just a couple days. Clearly, things had taken a negative turn, but there appeared to be little being done to try to right the ship.

“When his para support was pulled away, we were given promises that if it wasn’t working, we’d come back to the table and put it back in place,” Dave said during an interview. “What ended up happening was it was an immediate negative escalation pattern. When you actually look at the incident occurrence and duration, it’s a clear spike. It went straight up.”

“We did everything we could, we advocated as much as we could, and it just kept escalating and escalating and the staff just refused to listen,” Dave said. “I was getting called out of work in the middle of the day to go deal with it because I was the only one who could calm him down because they just didn’t. They refused for two months to reinstate para support.”

Dave says they moved forward with medication intervention to “take the edge off” of Cody, but calls what happened to Cody repeatedly that year – with multiple adults holding him down in classrooms not designed to hold emotionally dysregulated children or children experiencing crisis – “abuse,” that did more to trigger Cody than help him.

“You have to understand, the kicking at that point was probably more of a trauma response for him,” Dave said. “He kicks and then he knows as soon as he hears the words ‘support needed’ his fight or flight is now completely triggered, so even if you were able to catch whatever triggered him to begin with and divert it up front, if you couldn’t catch it early, if you weren’t watching him, it would just escalate and then there would be five people rushing a door and at that point he is now in complete fight or flight. At that point, if you have a five-year-old who is already escalated, he’s not going to calm down.”

In direct opposition to the police findings, CSDE officials found that Enfield school staff violated multiple statutes and regulations by not properly following Cody’s Individual Education Plan (IEP), not convening PPT meetings following incidents that required such meetings, did not engage in proper de-escalation techniques, and secluded Cody in a room that “does not meet the statutory requirement for a room where a Student can be secluded.”

“The precipitating incident for all 38 occurrences involved physical aggression to other students or to staff. Therefore, it may be concluded that staff used restraints and seclusions as emergency interventions to prevent immediate or imminent injury to others,” the SDE wrote in their conclusions. “The evidence taken as a whole in this case, however, calls into question whether the restraints were not used as discipline, convenience, or used as a substitute for a less restrictive alternative.” 

Dave, however, says that despite the state’s policy of issuing “a final written decision” within sixty days, it took fifteen months for him to receive the report and it was given to him only after he compelled them to do so by threatening legal action.

In 2024, the Enfield school district began to add additional seclusion rooms for students – known as “blue rooms” – which, according to state regulation, must have a window with a view to the outside, and are sometimes padded for safety, although it is not required. The school system already had eleven blue rooms, which cost roughly $4,000 to create, in six of its twelve buildings, according to CT Insider. But the move was not without criticism.

“I remain dissatisfied with the prioritization of seclusion/blue rooms in our wider budgetary picture, especially following a time where programs and personnel were abruptly reduced due to a fiscal shortage,” Enfield Board of Education member Philip Kober wrote to Inside Investigator. “While I recognize the use of these rooms is for emergency situations and to ensure the safety of students and staff, I would like to see a moratorium on any expansions to them as well as with any related expenditures. Having them exist and be used in the educational buildings of our youngest learners does not sit well with me and I hope one day we can reduce or remove them.”

However, given the student trends emerging in Connecticut and the ever-escalating costs of education and special education, the idea that blue rooms and the need for restraining young students will disappear may be a long way off. Restraint and seclusion of students in schools is a touchy subject – even for state officials, who are very cautious in commenting. 

It is a subject that garners ample criticism from organizations representing children and those with disabilities who allege the practice is harmful, and a subject that frustrates school administrators as special education costs and usage increase, placing more of a burden on both state and local taxpayers. 

There appear to be few, if any, solutions being proposed aside of more money and more staff and more facilities. And while all that comes at a cost, the increasing number of students being restrained and secluded in schools may also come with a social cost not easily defined. It is not just a Connecticut issue; it’s a national issue.

“As a former Corrections Officer, there is an uncanny likeness between the blue rooms I’ve stepped in and some confinement areas within a state prison,” Kober said.

Those in their 40s or older who attended grade school in Connecticut may not remember blue rooms or having so many children with disabilities in their classes that it required paraeducators and specialists, says Tom Cosker of Disability Rights Connecticut (DRCT). The reason can be traced back to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which was passed in 1975, essentially deinstitutionalizing special education students and keeping them in public schools in their districts.

“They were in separate schools, or at least more so than they are now,” Cosker said. “IDEA, at that point, said let’s educate these students with their peers, let’s do our best we can do to educate these students with their peers. In the 60s and 70s it was segregated, institutionalized.”

IDEA required districts to provide a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) to individuals with disabilities, instituted IEPs, and enshrined the idea of providing the least restrictive environment for students with disabilities. It also came with federal grant funding to help provide those services. The result, according to the federal government, is roughly 66 percent of students with disabilities spending 80 percent or more of their school day with the general education student population.

“Since 1975, we have progressed from excluding nearly 1.8 million children with disabilities from public schools to providing special education and related services designed to meet their individual needs to more than 8 million children with disabilities in 2022-23,” the U.S. Department of Education’s IDEA website says.

Indeed, one of the conclusions reached by CSDE in Cody’s case is that Enfield failed to provide him a Free Appropriate Public Education by not revising his IEP in light of his deteriorating behaviors and the fact that he was not meeting the education goals outlined in his plan.

“Given that the available progress reports indicate that the Student was not making the expected progress within one year on his individualized behavior and social/emotional goals and objectives, coupled with the number of incidents of emergency use of restraint and seclusion, and the lack of revisions to the Student’s IEP despite these factors, the Student’s IEP was not appropriate in light of the Student’s circumstances and therefore did not provide the Student FAPE,” the CSDE wrote

However, with this new student population being incorporated into the general education population of a typical public school, states had to create laws and regulations around educating and intervening on behalf of special education students, and as students with emotional disabilities acted out, laws were drafted defining under what circumstances they could be physically restrained and secluded into specialized rooms.

Under the latest iteration of Connecticut’s laws and regulations surrounding restraint and seclusion that was passed in 2018, restraining and secluding a student is essentially illegal unless it constitutes an “emergency” situation – namely that the student is a danger to themselves or others. The changes also prohibited seclusion as being part of a student’s IEP and replaced it as part of a behavioral intervention plan (BIP) with an “exclusionary time out.” 

An exclusionary time out is a “temporary, continuously monitored separation of a student from an ongoing activity in a non-locked setting, for the purpose of calming such student or deescalating such student’s behavior,” according to a CSDE presentation. The exclusionary time out becomes a “seclusion” when the student is not allowed to leave because they represent a danger.

Under the definition of what constitutes a room that can be used for seclusion, it must be properly ventilated, be free of any objects that can cause harm, allow the student a view to space beyond the seclusion room, have the appropriate locking mechanism, and have a window through which staff can constantly monitor the student.

Some schools have gone further, outfitting their blue rooms to allow the student a safer space to calm down, including padded walls, bean bags on which to sit, lower lighting and occupational therapy activities to help them deescalate. 

Only staff trained in de-escalation, and physical restraint and seclusion procedure can restrain a student and remove them to seclusion. Furthermore, each school must have a crisis intervention team, with the proper training, to respond to any situation that may require restraint and seclusion.

The definitions of what constitutes restraint and seclusion are subject to change. A 2023 omnibus special education bill updated definitions, including removing the term “exclusionary” from “exclusionary time out,” required boards of education to develop policies around time outs for students, and prohibited the use of time outs as a form of discipline. Similarly, the use of physical restraint can no longer be included in an IEP and may not use restraint “that is contraindicated based on a student’s disability, healthcare needs, or medical or psychiatric condition.”

There’s a very fine line between what constitutes a need for restraint and seclusion – and what meets the definition of restraint and seclusion – and because it is a fine line, it can also become blurry. In Cody’s case, he was being physically restrained in a classroom, however the CSDE determined that it met the definition of seclusion because he wasn’t allowed to leave, and the room didn’t meet the standards for a seclusion room.

“The issue to me is that we should be looking to reduce reliance on restraint and seclusion and focusing on appropriate behavior intervention methods and training staff to deescalate and avoid those things,” Cosker said. “I know that’s easier said than done.”

With school district budgets already strained in no small part due to special education costs, the prospect of getting enough tax revenue and funding to cover additional mental health professionals in school districts may appear daunting, but according to numbers provided by the state, the need continues to grow, as does outcry against the use of restraint and seclusion for students.

“We have significant concerns regarding restraint and seclusion of children in schools,” said Child Advocate Christina Ghio, head of the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA).  “Restraint and seclusion are traumatic for children and are not effective interventions for addressing challenging behaviors.  The use of restraint and seclusion is an indication that the child’s needs are not being met, and that educational programming and interventions need to be reviewed and revised.”

The OCA issued a report on restraint and seclusion in 2015, which found the CSDE “reported more than 1,313 incidents of a child being injured during a restraint or seclusion, with more than 2 dozen injuries categorized as serious.” Many of the OCA’s recommended policy changes were implemented over time, including restricting restraint and seclusion from a student’s IEP, and requiring PPT meetings after certain number of incidents with a student. 

According to the report, “restraint and seclusion incidents repeatedly top 30,000 per school year and affect more than 2,500 special education students each year, with many students subject to repeated isolation and restraint,” and there were 1,700 incidents in 2013-2014 school year in which restraint and seclusion lasted more than 40 minutes, and 144 children were “secluded or restrained more than 50 times.”

“Throughout the country, changes are being called for to reduce or eliminate the use of restraint and seclusion for children in schools,” the OCA wrote in 2015. “Children who are subject to these practices are often young and diagnosed with developmental or emotional disorders. There is no research to support the use of restraint or seclusion as therapeutic interventions.”

Despite the legislation and special education resources added since the 2015 OCA report, the number of restraint and/or seclusion incidents in Connecticut schools has only increased over the last decade, as has the number of students with IEPs, according to annual reports issued by CSDE.

During the 2013-2014 school year, there were 70,213 students with IEPs in all education facilities across the state, including public schools, charter schools, and private special education schools. During that school year there were 35,892 incidents of restraint or seclusion, a 6.4 percent increase from the year before. Those incidents involved 2,460 students.

By the 2023-2024 school year, there were 91,125 students with IEPs and 46,186 incidents of restraint and seclusion involving 4,070 students. This marked a 65 percent increase in the number of students with IEPs and a 28.6 percent increase in the number of restraint and seclusion incidents. The report found that while the number of restraints was nearly identical to the 2022-2023 school year, the number of emergency seclusions and forcible escort restraints had increased.

These changes have occurred against the backdrop of a declining school population in Connecticut. According to EdSight – the CSDE’s data source – the total number of students in Connecticut has declined over the last ten years from 538,899 in 2015-2016 to 497,764 this year, marking a 7.6 percent decline; meanwhile the percentage of special education students increased from 14.2 percent of the student population to 19.08 percent.

Interestingly, most of the restraint and seclusion incidents are concentrated in the youngest students, kindergarten through grade 4, according to the CSDE’s reports. This is likely, Cosker says, because younger children have yet to be identified as having an emotional or mental issue affecting their behavior.

“Those kids might not have gotten the interventions they need,” Cosker said. “They’re brand new into school, they’re five, six years old, kindergarten, first grade, they start acting out. They may not be diagnosed with a disability yet, and they start acting out and our next action is to restrain them.”

The largest diagnosis cohort to be subject to restraint and seclusion is for children diagnosed with autism; the second largest is for “emotional disability,” a somewhat nebulous term that can be applied to a child who is emotionally dysregulated but maybe not yet diagnosed, and third is “other health impairment,” which can include students with attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Altogether, those three categories account for 80 percent of all restraint and seclusion incidents.

According to the numbers, some districts have far more restraint and seclusion incidents than others and that can largely depend on the school and its circumstances. Smaller districts in rural areas may have very few special education students and therefore move them to more well-equipped schools out of district, while larger schools, faced with those daunting costs, may elect to keep their special education students in district and meet their needs through trained staff, resulting in higher rates.

Public schools accounted for roughly half of all restraint and seclusion but were far more numerous and held far more students in general than the six regional education resource centers (RESC) around Connecticut and the 84 approved private education programs that are many times designed specifically to take high needs special education students. 

The RESC’s had the highest numbers of incidents, totaling 9,368 incidents, with Capital Region Education Council (CREC), which contains four schools dedicated to educating students with special needs, making up 3,549 incidents involving 154 students, and Area Cooperative Educational Services with a listed 209 students across eight specialized schools had 2,025 incidents.

Among typical public schools, Meriden appeared to be an outlier with 155 special education students during the 2023-2024 school year and 2,073 incidents – although it should be noted, only 492 of those incidents listed were seclusions, the remainder were either restraints or “forcible escort restraints.” 

East Hartford, Bristol and New Britain had highest number of incidents after Meriden, followed by Enfield, which had 697 incidents the year Cody had the police called in response to one of his incidents. Restraints accounted for the majority of incidents in each school.

The report, it should be noted, indicates that often a small number of students account for an outsized number of incidents. While nearly 75 percent of students had ten or fewer incidents, forty-six students had more than one hundred. As indicated in CSDE’s investigation of Cody’s treatment, that year he had 38 by the time of the investigation.

Special education costs have emerged as one of the primary concerns among school districts, and when the district officials can’t provide the appropriate services for a special needs child, they may have to place the child in a program out of their district, skyrocketing the costs into the six-figure range per year for that one child. 

It is something Connecticut’s General Assembly partially addressed last year with a $30 million increase in special education funding to school districts, and while that helped, it was not nearly enough, according to Fran Rabinowitz, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public-School Superintendents (CAPSS).

“The enrollment in special ed has increased dramatically in the last fifteen years,” Rabinowitz said in an interview. “The number of students is definitely growing and as the number is growing, so are the costs.”

In 2022, Brookfield resident Denise Rice was in a battle with Brookfield’s Special Education director at the time over how and where her severely autistic 11-year-old son Michael would be educated. Rice wanted Michael to remain in the district and claimed Michael and other special education students were suffering over the lack of paraprofessionals to help them, leading to IEPs not being followed.

Special Education Director Robin Riccitelli, on the other hand, was offering to send Michael – who was in no way violent, but required extra attention just get around the school – out of district to a private special education school at an estimated cost of over $100,000 per year, provided Denise stop complaining about the district for the rest of her life, according to the contract offer. If she were to speak up again, she’d be forced to repay the out of district costs. 

Riccitelli eventually resigned after the terms of the deal were published by Inside Investigator, but the costs of special education are causing greater consternation among school districts. Lawmaker in the General Assembly have sought to increase grant funding, but the supply of money has not kept up with the increase in demand for services.

Special education funding mostly comes through three troughs: federal grants administered by the CSDE; Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grants provided by the State of Connecticut to school districts, and then Excess Cost Grants provided by the state to help districts pay for out of district placements.

The federal government provides two 2-year grants to states through the U.S. Department of Education – one for special education students aged three through age 22, which totaled $14.1 billion in 2023, and a much smaller preschool grant program to catch developmental disabilities early in ages three through five, which totaled $420 million in 2023. 

Connecticut received $164.2 million in 2024 through the IDEA grant program and $168.7 million in 2025, although those amounts were far less than the budgeted $221 million and $216 million, respectively.

Then there is the ECS grant program through which the state of Connecticut distributes funds to education districts, and is an annual source of constant debate as municipalities clamor for more funding and lawmakers adjust the state’s funding formula. Despite changes and updates, municipalities and school districts say it’s still not enough to keep up with growing costs. ECS grants amounted to $2.29 billion in 2025.

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) has been pushing to increase the ECS grant, saying Connecticut’s formula “has not kept pace with inflation or the realities facing students and municipalities.” While the state has experienced revenue surpluses over the last five-years, CCM argues that has not trickled down to education districts, which then must raise property taxes to meet their education funding demands.

Lastly, there is the state’s Excess Cost grant. Under the Excess Cost grant a district can seek funding to cover the costs of a student who is four and a half times more expensive than the per pupil rate in the district. For instance, if a typical student costs $10,000, but a special needs student who needs out of district placement costs $100,000, the grant will cover the $55,000 difference. In 2025, the CSDE distributed $181.2 million in Excess Cost grants in 2025.

“In terms of funding, the state has made some advances but we’re certainly not where we need to be,” Rabinowitz said. “Excess Cost, which is the funding that’s provided to kids placed out of district, it’s supposed to be funded at 100 percent, but it never is. Districts received 67 to 71 percent last year of the funding for students out of district. There’s a long way to go there.”

Last year, the legislature did create additional funding for special education through the Special Education and Expansion Development (SEED) grant, part of another major special education bill, which set aside a total of $30 million for building out a district’s special education program. Districts are awarded the grant through a formula that sees Meriden, for instance, receiving a little over $1 million, and Enfield receiving nearly $400,000. 

Rabinowitz, however, says the need among school districts is more like $190 million. “It’s something, but it’s not everything that we need.”

One of the key necessities in special education is paraprofessional support in the school system. When paras are removed or reduced, sometimes special education students who need additional help to regulate their behaviors, or a teachers who need additional help in the classroom, suffer the loss – it was pointed to repeatedly by Dave and CSDE as a contributing factor in Cody’s behavioral backslide in 2024, and was one of the primary concerns for Denise Rice in advocating for her autistic son.

“Paras are incredibly important to education, but most especially to special education,” Rabinowitz said. “We depend upon them to assist us in keeping kids in district by providing individualized help for those students. There’s a shortage of paras and that may be due to how much we pay them and also health benefits, which thankfully the state is helping out with that.”

Paras are paid less than teachers and don’t receive the same benefits. The average para is paid roughly $27,000 and is generally not part of the teachers’ health plan but enrolled in a high-deductible plan. It is also a difficult job, involving extensive work with special needs students, so the turnover rate can be high. As part of the 2023 budget, Connecticut established a fund to subsidize paraprofessionals enrolled in high-deductible healthcare plans.

Some districts will band together to establish a shared special education system, or towns will set up a school focused on special education where students from surrounding towns can be placed – technically out of district – but closer to home than perhaps the private institutions, and generally for a lower cost.

Essentially, districts who establish their own special education facilities and start accepting students from surrounding districts are under-bidding the private special education providers, which are generally the most expensive, or the regional education resources like CREC. The state provides school construction grants of 80 percent for “purchasing, constructing or reconstructing appropriate facilities primarily for children requiring special education,” provided the local board of education approves those facilities as part of a “long term regional plan.”

“It’s a way of serving the students better and closer to home many times and avoiding private, very costly services,” Rabinowitz said.

There are 84 state approved private special education programs in Connecticut, many of which take some of the highest needs students. These schools are built and staffed specifically for taking on the neediest students, thus making them, not only expensive, but also with high rates of restraint and seclusion. Public school districts often seek to avoid out-placement to these facilities, not only due to the cost of tuition, but also transportation to and from the school. Depending on the student, however, there may be few or no alternatives.

Among those private schools, there were a total of 14,777 incidents of restraint or seclusion involving 932 students; four of the schools had over 1,000 incidents. These private schools, while dealing with some of the highest needs and most time-intensive students, are not free from scrutiny, oversight, or lawsuits when a high needs child is not handled appropriately.

Connecticut has the highest rate of out-of-district special education placements in the country and the second highest rate of placing children “identified as having Emotional Disturbance,” in out-of-district schools, according to a 2024 joint investigative report on the private High Road schools by Disability Rights CT and the Office of the Child Advocate, which also noted that the majority of students placed out of district “have been children of color.”

That report found High Road schools – which had 316 students from 38 school districts, making it one of the largest private providers in the state, taking in “millions” from contracts – found a “widespread problem of student disengagement and absenteeism, lack of adequate assessments and evaluations to determine students’ needs, lack of an individualized approach to student education, uneven related service delivery.”

Furthermore, the report found “significant deficiencies in the number of certified special education teachers and other credentialed educational staff along with widespread failures to document legally required background checking for staff working with children.” High Roads documented 1,905 restraints or seclusions across its eight schools in the 2023-2024 school year. 

A similar report by DRCT and OCA issued this year found widespread placement of special education students out of state and outside Connecticut’s statutes governing restraint and seclusion, and where a “concerning number of injuries,” could not be explained. Collectively, 72 school districts spent $75 million over three years sending 224 children to out of state schools, some of which were not licensed by their respective state. This equated to more than $107,000 per student per year.

“These placements are among the most expensive options available, costing millions of dollars annually,” the 2026 report said. “Instead of investing state and local funds in educational services within the state and districts, districts are sending large sums of money out-of-state to restrictive segregated placements.”

“We have the highest or one of the highest rates of placement for kids with emotional disabilities, so kids identified with an emotional disability on the IEP, something like 30 percent of students with that classification are outplaced,” Cosker, of Disability Rights CT said. “Sometimes they do get placed into a school that will have – I guess I’ll say better – services, trained professionals and behavior technicians and that could be better for the student, and I acknowledge that, but often times they’re not. They’re not placed at a school that has good services.”

Now in second grade and with a diagnosis of autism that has been included in his IEP, Cody is doing much better. Following his year at Hazardville Memorial, he was transferred to Henry Barnard School in Enfield, which has a higher number of special needs students and is better equipped for meeting special education students’ needs.

At the time of his interview with Inside Investigator, Dave said Cody had only two “minor” incidents that required only escorts from recess back inside. He’s doing so well, in fact, that he was moved from a more restrictive program and back into the general education program within three weeks of first attending Henry Barnard.

“It took a lot of change and a lot of therapy and a lot of working with staff over at Henry Barnard, who I will say, the Henry Barnard staff are fantastic,” Dave said. “They did the evaluation right up front, and they realized Cody is not the problem. Cody is a fantastic learner; he just needs a very direct approach.”

Education, and particularly special education, is costly and given the rising rate of special needs children in Connecticut’s school system, those costs will continue to escalate. The legislature is responding, however, having passed two major special education bills in 2023 and 2025, but getting ahead of the curve on the escalating costs and services to meet towns’ growing needs may prove difficult.

As part of that 2023 special education bill was the creation of the Transforming Children’s Behavioral Health Policy and Planning Committee, who issued their 2025-2028 strategy report in April 2025. Among their recommendations for school interventions is commissioning a school-based behavioral health services study, increasing the number of behavioral health professionals working in school districts, and to “increase access to preventative behavioral health services and ensure early identification for all children.”

“There’s work being done to try to move the needle toward looking at reducing the need to use [restraint and seclusion] by providing appropriate behavior interventions, of course with that comes the need for staff,” Cosker said.

Rabinowitz says that sometimes special education just becomes a catch-all for students who may not be facing behavior or developmental disabilities but instead are just having educational difficulties that require extra help. Since there may not be enough time or staff to give those students extra help, they get referred to special education to get that help.

“One of the things is we don’t always have a robust system of intervention for students in school districts because of resource issues, so teachers refer kids to special ed because that’s where they feel they can get the help they need,” Rabinowitz said. “Districts don’t always have the systems in place, or the resources to create these systems, so you can have reading teachers working with the kids or well-trained behavior staff working with the children to avoid placement in special ed.”

In January 2026, WestEd, a nonprofit contracted by CSDE to study Connecticut’s special education system and make recommendations, released its report. Among its findings reached through many interviews with parents and stakeholders in the special education system was CSDE lacked timeliness in complaint resolution and faltered on some communication issues, and respondents expressed “persistent concern” regarding special education staffing at both the state and local level.

However, the findings also indicated that perhaps there is a “disconnect” between the legislature and reality when it comes to special education.

“Multiple respondents noted that there continues to be a disconnect between policy decisions made by the legislature and what is considered realistic or actionable by those in the education field,” the WestEd report stated. “Respondents pointed out that several unfunded mandates in recent years have imposed policies that, while they may appear to improve student outcomes on the surface, are not feasible given the current funding and personnel shortages.”

Lawmakers are again this year looking to bolster school district budgets with a possible $170 million infusion into the ECS grant. That proposal remains under consideration.

“We have everything in place to satisfy what’s needed, finally,” Dave said, adding that schools like Hazardville should at least have a padded and appropriate blue room, even if they don’t have programs specifically designed for special education. “Those specialty programs, in a lot of ways, need to be centralized. They are costly, they are resource intensive, they are space intensive.”

“There are DOJ investigations on districts around the country and have filed lawsuits and had settlements with districts over their use of restraint and seclusions,” Cosker said. “Those investigations have not landed in Connecticut yet.”

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