Legislation

This legislation is being championed by UnSilenced, Think of Us, and Breaking Code Silence.

This bill defines the term Congregate Care Program or Facility (CCP/CCF) as a public or private entity that, with respect to one or more children who are unrelated to the owner or operator of the program, purports to provide housing, treatment, or modify behaviors in a residential environment, such as:

• Wilderness or outdoor experience, expedition, or intervention
• Boot camp or other experience designed to stimulate characteristics of basic military training or correctional regimes
• Residential treatment program, center, or facility
• Non-medical residential center
• Therapeutic boarding school
• Behavioral modification program
• Foster care facility
• Youth justice facility

The ACCA will address systematic weaknesses across multiple agencies and systems that increase reliance on congregate care and subject youth to abuse and neglect.

The passive of this act will create a uniform Youth in Congregate Care Bill of Rights for all youth in congregate care regardless of which public or private pipeline they entered the facility.

This Bill of Rights will create a standard for the ACCA Joint Commission to lead an interdisciplinary program of research, in consultation with other Federal agencies, recognize experts in the field, and advocates. Through this research, the Commission will advise on the reduction of congregate care placement, understanding the nature and scope of institutional abuse, and will consult with States on the closure of facilities that are unable to meet standards within the Youth in Congregate Care Bill of Rights.

By supporting the passage of ACCA, funds will be created to mend systematic issues that have led to our current failures in youth and family services. The main goal being to not only establish understood rights but to lift the walls of our largest systems and work together to provide youth with the tools and opportunities to have the brilliant futures they deserve.

The Youth in Congregate Care Bill of Rights states that every youth in congregate care should have the right...

• To physical well-being, including
  • Freedom from abuse and neglect; including all forms of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, neglect, exploitation, financial exploitation, and excessive medication; the right to be free from institutional abuse and neglect.
  • Freedom from aversive behavioral interventions
  • Freedom from physical, mechanical, and chemical restraint or seclusion
  • Protection against unreasonable search and seizure; including the use of strip searches or cavity searches as a means of punishment
• To social and emotional well-being including
  • Prohibition of long periods of forced silence, restriction of communication with staff, caregivers, child protective services, law enforcement, or advocates
  • Sufficient education and life skills imparted onto them
  • Reasonable daily access to the outdoors
• To have essential needs met
• To individualized and appropriate treatment that is culturally competent, trauma-informed, and most supportive of each youth's personal liberty and development
• To be free from abusive, humiliating, degrading, or traumatizing treatment by staff of other youth; including
  • The ability to report mistreatment anonymously without fear of reprisal
  • Access a protection and advocacy agency

To learn more about supporting the Accountability for Congregate Care Act (ACCA), please contact UnSilenced, Inc

The most current data reveals that 101,990 students were subjected to seclusion or restraint in the United States during the 2017-18 school year, 78 percent of whom were students with disabilities and disproportionately Black boys. Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), and U.S. Representatives Don Beyer (D-Va.), Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), and A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) reintroduced the Keeping All Students Safe Act, legislation to protect students from dangerous seclusion and restraint discipline practices in school.

Here’s what leading education and disability groups and advocates are saying about the bill:

Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates: "The Keeping All Students Safe Act (KASSA) comes at an important intersection in our nation’s history – where the abuses toward children, including children of color and those with disabilities have created a need and impetus to prohibit seclusion and set forth minimum standards for states in the use of physical restraint. For too long, the injuries, lifelong trauma and even death of vulnerable Black students, boys, and students with disabilities through these practices have been ignored. We are a modern nation that has developed evidence-based practices that can help. It is critical that school leaders and teachers receive the resources and training they need to make school climates’ positive and conducive to learning; where students have what they need to learn and can build trusting relationships with school personnel. KASSA makes this possible,” said Denise Marshall, CEO.

National Disability Rights Network: “No child in America should have to attend a school where being locked in a room alone or suffocated while being restrained is part of a school’s standard operating procedure. KASSA establishes minimum safety standards for all children to help ensure?equal opportunity and?full participation?in school for students with?disabilities?who are disproportionately subjected to restraint and seclusion,” said Executive Director Curt Decker.

TASH: "TASH strongly supports the Keeping All Students Safe Act and applauds Senators Murray and Murphy and Representatives Scott, Beyer and McEachin for their leadership.  We are especially glad that this legislation would prohibit the unlawful use of seclusion and restraint in federally funded educational programs, is grounded in evidence-based practice and includes funding to support state planning and oversight. Indeed, we know that positive behavioral interventions and supports are effective alternatives that produce much better results for students and schools.  TASH encourages passage of this landmark legislation that will result in safer environments and better outcomes for all students including those with disabilities,” said Michael Brogioli, Executive Director.

National Center for Learning Disabilities: "Every child has the right to feel safe at school. And yet, for decades, seclusion and physical restraint have been inappropriately used to punish students with disabilities and students of color at alarming rates. These harmful practices have no place in our public schools, proving traumatic and even fatal for students. The introduction of the Keeping All Students Safe Act is essential to putting standards in place to ensure every child is educated in a safe and positive environment," said Meghan Whittaker, Director of Policy & Advocacy.

Center for Learner Equity: “The Center for Learner Equity thanks our Congressional champions for the introduction of the Keeping All Students Safe Act which would end the harmful practice of seclusion and significantly restrict the use of physical restraint in schools. We know that students thrive when schools commit to employing a holistic approach to behavior, and this bill would help teachers and school leaders gain access to training in proactive, evidence-based strategies that are centered on such an approach, protecting students from the abuses of seclusion and restraint. We look forward to helping ensure that this bill becomes law,” said Lauren Morando Rhim, Co-founder and Executive Director.

Autistic Self Advocacy Network: “ASAN commends Congress for its reintroduction of the Keeping All Students Safe Act (KASSA). KASSA would ban almost all kinds of restraint and all kinds of seclusion across all 50 states, and would require school districts to collect data to prevent further use of these harmful practices. We urge Congress to move swiftly to pass this long-overdue legislation. … Restraint and seclusion are incredibly traumatic practices, and can kill or injure students on whom they are used. They are disproportionately used on students with disabilities and students of color. Restraint and seclusion are part of the systematic marginalization and removal of children of color, children with disabilities, and especially children of color with disabilities from school. This is also called the ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’ Ending the use of restraint and seclusion would save lives, prevent abuse, and make our schools safer and more equitable.”

Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint: “Today the Keeping All Students Safe Act (KASSA) will be re-introduced. in both houses of congress. We sincerely thank Representatives Beyer, McEachin, Chairman Scott, Senator Murphy, and Chair Murray, for supporting this critical legislation. … . Our schools should be moving towards neuro-developmentally informed, trauma-sensitive, biologically respectful, relationship-based ways of understanding, and supporting all children. Unfortunately, schools, left to their own devices have in many cases continued to mistreat children within their charge. Without data and oversight, children continue to pay the price. The Keeping All Students Safe Act is needed to protect children across the nation from these dangerous and abusive practices,” Guy Stephens, founder.

Paris Hilton, child welfare advocate: “Restraint and seclusion are incredibly traumatic practices. Ending the use of restraint and seclusion would save lives, prevent abuse, and make our schools safer and more equitable. I support and urge Congress to pass KASSA.”

The Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act (SCARPTA), originally introduced on July 14, 2015, was built on a bill championed by former California Rep. George Miller. In 2008, Miller held hearings with painful testimony about such abuse and neglect that he ordered a Government Accountability Office report on “the troubled teen industry”—unregulated “last resort” residential treatment facilities and “boot camps” that market to desperate parents of children deemed unruly, LGBT, addicted, or acting out with some form of undiagnosed mental illness.

The GAO reported that in just one year (2005), 1,619 program employees in 34 states were involved in incidents of abuse, including substantiated accounts of starvation, excessive use of physical restraints and isolation, severe verbal abuse and intimidation, and medical malpractice.  Survivors of Institutional Abuse (SIA) reported 300 deaths on their In Memorial page, deaths linked to starvation, medical malpractice, beatings, and suicide.

Miller’s hearings and the GAO report emphasized how the lack of federal oversight and “deceptive marketing,” no unified regulations among states regarding licensing and regulations of residential facilities put vulnerable children at greater risk. Additionally, if a resident died or the media got a whiff of the abuse, the unscrupulous owner would move to another state and reopen under another name. Often the con artists, who prey upon deeply religious families with anti-LGBT attitudes, cry foul when exposed as if scrutiny of their harsh treatment violated their religious liberty.

Miller’s bill to regulate the billion-dollar “troubled teen industry” twice passed the House but stopped there.

Schiff’s bill would not only protect youth through federal minimum standards but would also “crack down on offenders who attempt to move abusive facilities across state lines by requiring all states to improve their licensing and oversight processes and help families weed out bad programs by requiring they publicly disclose their licensing status and any history of violations,” according to a press release.

“There are hundreds of good residential treatment programs that provide services which can truly help youth recover and transition from serious behavioral problems or traumatic experiences,” Schiff said. “But without stronger federal regulation and oversight, programs that engage in abusive practices will continue to slip through the cracks, leaving behind traumatized and abused children and families.”

Families that turn to treatment facilities, Schiff says, “deserve to know that their children are safe and in the care of professionals.”

Schiff’s legislation would:

• Prohibit all programs from withholding food, water or shelter from a child, putting a child in seclusion, and all other forms of physical and mental abuse
• Require licensed medical staff on hand at all times in case of an emergency and require all staff members to be properly trained in recognizing and responding to signs of child abuse and neglect, and mental health crises
• Allow youth to stay in contact with their parents so that they know their children are safe, and provide uninhibited access to a child abuse reporting hotline
• Publicly disclose any past record of child abuse and their state licensing status so families can make informed decisions about where to send their children
• Prohibit programs from using anything other than safe and evidence-based treatment — meaning that any form of junk science such as conversion therapy or electric shock would be banned in these programs

This bill is currently pending being reintroduced by Schiff. To find out more information, contact Representative Adam Schiff's office