Hearst Newspapers / Times Union
Project: When schools use force
Hearst Newspapers did a national project that looked at the frequency in which school staff use restraints and seclusion on students. Restraints can be techniques ranging from a physical hold to using chairs or straps to confine a student, usually in the midst of a behavioral crisis. Seclusion involves using small rooms or other spaces to enclose a student in crisis in a small space.
Albany, New York
https://www.timesunion.com/
Interview with Emilie Munson, data and investigations reporter, Times Union
Time:
15 months
Technology used:
Excel
Python
Amazon Textract
How it started:
The team came across an incident of this in Connecticut that was really concerning and our education team really wanted to know more about how often this happened around the country. Connecticut is a state that collects good data on this, but we quickly learned that that was not the case in all states and that the federal data collected by the U.S. Department of Education is generally a large undercount.
Challenges:
The team pursued data from 50 State education departments and ended up getting that data over the course of a year. But each state had its own definition of restraint techniques, which changed what schools would report based on the definition. And they all had their own ways of keeping data and records on these incidents.
New York did not keep data at the state level, so the team pursued data from 25 individual school districts, including the New York City Department of Education, which runs the largest public school district in the country. And this produced paper records from 25 districts that meant thousands of pages of pdf documents that we then had to turn into data because schools didn't track these in a unified way.
Further, reporting in schools can be difficult because the public isn’t allowed access to the schools all the time to observe these actions and parents may not have known what was happening if their child did not report it or could not report it, in the case of students who may be nonverbal.
This posed additional challenges when the team understood they were working with data that may be an undercount.
Data/Documents:
The team requested incident data from the following sources:
U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights
State education departments
Individual school districts in areas where state data was not collected
Impact:
The Times Union’s series was the 2022 winner of the Best use of the Freedom of Information Act, Best Investigation and third place in education reporting awards from the New York Press Association. The series also was the 2022 winner of the Stephen A. Collins Public Service Award from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists.
The series prompted the New York State Education Department to implement new regulations that limited the circumstances around how restraint and seclusion are used. New legislation was also filed in Connecticut, New York and Texas.
The work has also been cited in other legislation and Congressional letters.
The team continues to receive numerous tips about the misuse of these techniques in schools.
Advice:
Start with a narrow reporting question even if that leads to intensive and broader work.
Designate a project manager who can keep the team on track and set and meet interim deadlines .
Don’t be scared to build your own database when the data doesn’t already exist.