Seclusion Rooms and Unauthorized Restraint in New Brunswick Schools: What Parents Need to Know

In December 2024, New Brunswick's Child, Youth and Senior Advocate published a report titled Isolated: How School Seclusion Rooms Became an Accepted Practice Outside the Law. The finding was stark: physical seclusion rooms — enclosed spaces where dysregulated students are placed, alone, often with doors held shut or locked — are being used in NB schools without any legislative authority. There is no law in New Brunswick that permits this practice.

If your child has been placed in a seclusion room, or if your child has been physically restrained at school, you are dealing with a situation that operates in a legal grey zone that the province's own watchdog has condemned.

What the Advocate Found

The CYSA's investigation found that seclusion rooms have become an accepted, normalized practice in NB schools — built into the physical designs of new school construction, used routinely to manage behavioral incidents, and in some cases, concealed from parents and documentation systems.

Former school staff told the Advocate's office they were instructed not to record when seclusion rooms were used. The rooms go by various names: "quiet rooms," "calm-down spaces," "de-escalation zones." The language softens the reality: a child alone in an enclosed space, sometimes against their will.

The core legal problem: no NB statute or regulation authorizes the use of physical seclusion as a behavioral intervention. Policy 703 — the policy governing student conduct and discipline — does not authorize seclusion. The Education Act does not authorize it. There is no regulatory framework governing when it is permissible, how long it can be used, what supervision is required, or how incidents must be documented.

The absence of a regulatory framework is itself the problem. Without authorization, without documentation requirements, and without oversight, these rooms have been used at the discretion of individual staff members with no accountability to parents, the district, or any external body.

What About Physical Restraint?

Physical restraint is separate from seclusion but equally poorly regulated in NB. Restraint — physically holding a student, blocking their movement, or using hands-on intervention to prevent injury — may be defensible in genuine emergency situations involving imminent risk of harm to the student or others. It is not defensible as a routine behavioral management technique.

Under New Brunswick human rights guidelines, schools cannot use physical restraint or any form of punishment for behavior that is a direct manifestation of a student's disability. A child with autism who is having a sensory meltdown, or a student with ADHD who is dysregulated due to an unaccommodated sensory environment, cannot legally be physically restrained or secluded as a disciplinary response.

If restraint is used, it should be:

• Used only in genuine emergency situations where there is immediate risk of harm
• The least restrictive physical intervention possible
• Followed immediately by incident documentation and parent notification
• Reviewed in the PLP context — because a restraint incident indicates the current behavioral supports are failing

If your child is being restrained regularly, that is strong evidence that the behavioral support strategies in their PLP are inadequate and require immediate ESS Team review.

What to Do If Your Child Has Been Secluded or Restrained

Step 1: Request a written incident report immediately. You have the right to be informed when any significant behavioral incident occurs involving your child. If your child was secluded or restrained and you were not notified, or if notification was informal and incomplete, submit a written request to the school principal for a full written incident report within five business days. State specifically that you are requesting documentation of any physical interventions used, the duration and circumstances, and who was present.

Step 2: Submit an RTIPPA request. Right to Information and Protection of Privacy Act requests allow you to obtain your child's complete school file — including behavioral incident logs, internal email correspondence between staff, and notes from any ESS team discussions about your child. Submit a written RTIPPA request to the District Coordinator requesting all records going back at least two years. This frequently surfaces documentation of seclusion or restraint incidents that were never communicated to parents.

Step 3: Request an emergency ESS Team meeting. Any incident involving seclusion or physical restraint is grounds for an immediate PLP review. The behavioral strategies currently in place are clearly insufficient. Request in writing that an emergency ESS meeting be held within five business days to review the PLP's behavioral support strategies.

Step 4: Reference Policy 703. Policy 703 (Positive Learning and Working Environment) governs student conduct and discipline. Bring this policy to the ESS Team meeting and ask specifically how the incident is consistent with the school's obligations under Policy 703 and the student's right to a safe and positive learning environment.

Step 5: Consider escalating to the CYSA. Given the Advocate's active investigation of seclusion and restraint practices, CYSA case specialists are specifically positioned to intervene in these situations. Filing a complaint with the CYSA signals that the situation has external oversight and often produces faster administrative response than school-level complaints alone.

The Disability Manifestation Question

This is critical: if your child's behavioral incident that led to seclusion or restraint was a direct manifestation of their disability — a meltdown triggered by sensory overload, an anxiety response, a regulation failure connected to ADHD or autism — then the school cannot legitimately characterize the intervention as a disciplinary response.

Human rights guidelines in New Brunswick prohibit discipline for disability-related behavior unless the behavior poses a severe and unmanageable safety risk that cannot be mitigated through accommodation. In most cases, the appropriate response to a disability-related behavioral incident is not isolation or restraint — it is a review of the PLP's behavioral support strategies to understand what triggered the incident and how the environment can be modified to prevent recurrence.

If the school responds to a behavioral incident by suggesting suspension, seclusion, or reduced attendance rather than a PLP review, this inverts the legal obligation. Challenge it in writing, referencing the human rights guidelines and Policy 322's requirement that behavioral support plans be embedded in the student's PLP.

Connecting Seclusion to the Broader Exclusion Pattern

Seclusion rooms and unauthorized restraint exist on the same spectrum as partial day plans and illegal exclusions: they are all mechanisms by which under-resourced schools manage complex student needs without providing actual support. The Advocate's reports have connected these dots explicitly.

When your child is secluded, restrained, or sent home rather than supported, the underlying failure is the same: the behavioral intervention systems that should be preventing escalation are not in place, not adequately resourced, or not being implemented as written.

For parents dealing with behavioral incidents at school — whether that involves seclusion, restraint, suspension, or exclusion — the New Brunswick Special Ed Advocacy Playbook provides a step-by-step response protocol, including an incident documentation template, an emergency ESS meeting request letter, and a guide to filing concurrent complaints with the school, the CYSA, and the Human Rights Commission when warranted.

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