Lobbying effort helped Massachusetts special needs school block ban on electric shocks
From The Boston Globe: The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, a special-needs school in Canton, Mass., that disciplines students with electric shocks, used a lobbying campaign in Congress last year to help defeat a ban of its techniques. The center, the only school in the country that uses electric shocks to modify behavior, launched its campaign after the House approved a measure last year outlawing the use of restraints and some other devices to control students. The center paid $100,000 to a law firm headed by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in a successful effort to help stifle the measure in the Senate, according to 2010 lobbying disclosure records.
NOVEMBER 2010...from The Boston Herald: The family of a former student who received electric skin-shocks at a Massachusetts special-needs school has agreed to receive $65,000 to settle a lawsuit claiming the treatment was inhumane and violated the student’s civil rights. The privately operated Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., uses aversive therapy to control aggressive behavior and prevent severely autistic students from injuring themselves or others. The suit was filed in 2006 on behalf of then-17-year-old Antwone Nicholson of Freeport, N.Y.
DECEMBER 2007: Nearly a year ago, New York sought to ban the use of electric shocks as a punishment for bad behavior, a therapy used at a Massachusetts school where New York State had long sent some of its most challenging special education students. But state officials trying to limit New York’s association with the school, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Mass., have found a large obstacle in their paths: parents of students who are given shocks.
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EARLIER: A state report identifies multiple failures by staff members of a group home that allowed two emotionally disturbed teenagers to be given dozens of electrical shocks at the direction of a caller posing as a supervisor. The report says none of the six staff members in a Stoughton residence run by the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center on the night of Aug. 26 acted to stop the harrowing events for three hours, despite ample reasons to doubt the validity of the caller's instructions to wake the boys in the middle of the night and administer painful shock treatments, at times while their arms and legs were bound.
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Two special-education students at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton were wrongfully delivered dozens of punishing electrical shocks in August based on a prank phone call from a former student posing as a supervisor. School staffers contacted state authorities after they realized they had been tricked into delivering 77 shocks to one student and 29 shocks to another. Both students were part of a Rotenberg-run group home in Stoughton for males under age 22. The center, which serves about 250 adults and children, has been under fire for more than two decades for its unorthodox behavior-modification treatments, including electric shock treatments.
Read The Boston Globe article.
