Edmonton Public Schools cuts number of seclusion rooms, but confinement continues

Advocates demanding an end to the use of seclusion rooms say they're pleased the Edmonton public school division has decommissioned more than 60 of them in the last year.

A new report to the school board last week shows the number of seclusion rooms has dropped by about 37 per cent during the last year, leaving 105 rooms operational in 56 public schools.

"We're extremely pleased to see a reduction in the number of seclusion rooms and in the use of those rooms, because quite frankly, the trend over the last few years has been in the other direction," said Trish Bowman, the CEO of Inclusion Alberta.

A seclusion room is an empty chamber that a staff member can hold closed from the outside. 

Provincial standards dictate that school staff are only to use the rooms in an emergency, when a student presents a danger of harm to themselves or others.

Staff are only supposed to put students in the rooms with parents' permission. Division employees have acknowledged that in a crisis, it does sometimes happen without parental consent.

For years, Inclusion Alberta and some parents are among advocates for students with disabilities who say the rooms should be eliminated.

Parent Rosemarie Jordan says she found out years after the fact that her son, who has multiple disabilities, was put into seclusion rooms, and school staff never informed her.

The experience caused him trauma, distress, and affected his willingness to attend school, she said.

"He just understood that this is something that adults shouldn't be doing to me," she said in an interview last week.

She said her son, who is now in Grade 10, consistently asks to speak school division managers because he wants to tell them to stop the practice.

Research suggests that when a school employee feels it necessary to put a student inside one of the rooms, the experience can also distress staff members and other students who witness the event, Bowman said.

Use of the rooms became the focus of attention in 2018, when a Strathcona County family launched a lawsuit in response to their autistic child's troubling experience in a seclusion room.

The then-NDP government promised to ban school seclusion rooms. After the United Conservative Party won the 2019 election, the government reversed that decision and instead introduced standards for the use of seclusion and restraint.

Since then, Edmonton Public Schools has had a stated goal of phasing out the rooms.

The division runs many programs for growing numbers of students diagnosed with autism, developmental disabilities or behavioural disorders. As it adapted more school spaces to accommodate these programs, it also built rooms that could be used for seclusion.

Data obtained through freedom of information requests showed last year that Edmonton Public Schools had almost two-thirds of the total number of seclusion rooms reported to the provincial government.

In the 2024-25 school year, staff in the division put 640 students into the rooms against their will 1,581 times, according to data from the division. Critics said that seemed to be an excessive number of emergency situations and questioned whether every incident warranted the use of seclusion.

The numbers do not include incidents where trained staff physically restrain a student who poses a risk of harm.

Board chair says goal remains zero rooms

Four parents and an Inclusion Alberta representative addressed the school board last week, applauding the decommissioning of rooms and reduction in their use.

Parent Sarah Doll called the trend "a ray of light in an otherwise dark year for families of disabled students."

Division superintendent Darrel Robertson told the board meeting he is requiring certain staff to take mandatory training in non-violent crisis intervention techniques.

A few schools are also piloting a different de-escalation program, which has been "highly impactful." Robertson said the division is working to scale up that training to more schools.

"I don't want seclusion rooms in our division at all," he said. "We're working hard to continue to get better."

However, the school division and board trustees are making changes to public reporting and meeting procedures that have sullied some advocates' satisfaction with the seclusion room reductions.

After five years of producing a standalone report on seclusion room use for the school board, the division will now include the information in a broader annual performance document called the Annual Education Results Report.

Trustees, who are elected officials, also decided earlier this month to change the rules about who may address the board at a public meeting. The board will no longer include public comments on its livestream of meetings. Speakers can only address issues on the board's agenda for that meeting date, and it is limiting the number of speakers on each topic to five per meeting.

Bowman said the school division's public reporting on seclusion rooms had been instrumental in the push to reduce their numbers. 

"It's actually deeply troubling that they've taken a step away from this kind of public transparency and accountability," she said.

School division spokesperson Kim Smith said trustees changed the meeting rules to align with other school boards, and make better use of meeting time. She said there are other ways the public can contact their trustees.

School board chair Julie Kusiek told reporters she thinks the change will strengthen accountability, because the report requires the division to set a goal and outline a plan for achieving that target.

"And we have our target for this, which is, we're moving towards zero seclusion rooms," Kusiek said.

The division has yet to set a timeline to meet that goal.

Kusiek says she expects the board to continue to publicly discuss seclusion room use annually.