Update on Restraint and Seclusion in the Nation’s Schools: ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Their work has focused on stories which they feel are important and have  “moral force.” Over the past few years, one of the issues which they consider to meet their criteria has been the use of restraint/seclusion with pupils with disabilities. The linked story entitled “Journalists: How to Report on Restraints in U.S. Schools”, written by Heather Vogell on June 19^th, 2014, uses federal data that shows such practices are happening regularly in public schools across the country. The federal data, which was released spring 2014 and “cleaned” by ProPublica, shows that restraints and seclusions were used at least 267,000 times in the 2011-2012 school year. In the ProPublica article, you can link to this data, which as reported by the Office of Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education (as a side note, it is in this same data that the largest school districts in the country, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles reported 0 instances of restraint/seclusion!!!) The article goes on in great detail to outline how an interested investigative reporter can find families and those pupils affected by these practices in each state, including more than 30 tips from families in a variety of states, which have been assigned to a reporter, those tips which are available to a reporter who wishes to follow up on the tip, and those who wish to sign up with ProPublica (educators, parents and others with stories of restraint and seclusion) and write an article for their local newspaper or publication. Federal bills to curtail the use of restraints/seclusion have stalled (Bills have been sponsored by U.S. Representative George Miller of California and Senator Tom Harken, Iowa), as the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) and the National School Boards Association have opposed these efforts with strong Congressional Republican support. http://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/item/reporting-recipe-investigating-restraint-and-seclusion-in-us-schools