Last week, the Provincial Government said that they will look into new guidelines to address the use of Seclusion Rooms in Alberta Schools.

The move have since been endorsed by the Alberta Liberal Party after hearing of several complaints from parents about how seclusion rooms are used.

Superintendant of Rocky View Schools, Greg Luterbach wouldn’t comment on which schools use the seclusion room policy but did talk about how they address them.

“We have a high standard for safety and dealing with our learning environments. We work closely, we develop plans with families and with schools if they need to do any kind of restricting movements or actions like that. Certainly, that’s not our first card that we’ll play but in some cases to ensure the safety of other students or staff, we might need to do some kind of restriction.”

Luterbach said that they’re approach to dealing with students behaviour is more proactive.

“If we’re seeing some kind of escalating of behaviour, you want to sit down and debrief that situation and have a conversation. That might be parents to say ‘ok, this is what we saw and this is ultimately what happened.’ Part of the prevention part is understanding what might trigger a student to ultimately get to such a physical reaction.”

The Government of Alberta as now appointed a parent led committee to review the use of seclusion rooms in the province.

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