Fw: Many parents and pros advocating 'calming rooms' for schools

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Many parents and pros advocating 'calming rooms' for schools

By Blackburn - ryan.blackburn@...

Published Tuesday, May 11, 2010

On days when kindergartner Wesley Childers gets too antsy, his teachers at Rutland Academy in Athens usher him into a special calming room and let him crawl through a canvas tube, swing in a hammock or sit on a bean-bag chair that vibrates and makes ocean-like sounds.

on Wesley Childers, 6, rocks in a suspended swing recently as Forren, 6, relaxes on a Somatron body pillow in the calming room at Rutland Academy. The room uses a sensory integration approach to help de-escalate students’ anxiety, anger and frustration.

on

Wesley Childers, 6, rocks in a suspended swing recently as Forren, 6, relaxes on a Somatron body pillow in the calming room at Rutland Academy. The room uses a sensory integration approach to help de-escalate students’ anxiety, anger and frustration.

Sometimes, the 6-year-old and his teacher read together in the room, often called a "sensory room" or "calming room," used by some Georgia schools to head off fits or tantrums so students can return to class and focus on their work.

As more schools face the challenge of teaching a rising population of students with autism spectrum disorders, administrators are considering the use of sensory rooms as a tool to better manage students' behavior.

"It makes it so much easier for them to be focused when we go back into the classroom, because we have a separate space we can use outside of the classroom to de-escalate and expend some of that excess energy," said Meredith Nettles, who teaches kindergarten and first grade at Rutland, a school for students with behavioral disorders.

Teachers and administrators in counties from Gwinnett to Madison recently have outfitted rooms with special swings, lava lamps or soft, vibrating chairs to help students feel more at ease in school.

In April, a group of parents, teachers and volunteers came together to build a similar room at Barnett Shoals Elementary School to serve both autistic and traditional students, said teacher Barbara Gaertig.

Students with autism, a developmental disorder that affects social and communication skills, benefit from the rooms, some teachers say, because they cater to their heightened sense of touch, sound, smell and vision.

To students with autism, normal speech volumes may hurt their ears, and a simple tap on the shoulder might feel like the prick of a needle.

"For those kids, especially, we need to provide an environment where they can calm their bodies," Gaertig said.

Just a few minutes inside the sensory room can do wonders for some students if the room is incorporated into a student's daily routine, according to Rutland Director Edenfield.

"The goal is to direct them to the kinds of things we know are going to benefit them in terms of returning to the classroom and being successful," Edenfield said.

Before sensory rooms, teachers used some of the same tools, like trampolines, bean-bag chairs or weighted vests in traditional classrooms, but those techniques tended to disrupt class or took time away from teachers' work with other students.

However, some educators and advocates for students with disabilities question the research behind the rooms and whether their use has any bearing on a student's academic achievement.

"There really isn't research to support these as things to help kids," said Ayres, an assistant professor of special education in the University of Georgia's College of Education. "They look like fun - kids have fun in them - but there's no research to say they improve educational outcomes."

And sensory rooms aren't cheap. Just one music learning chair costs $1,600 - and one room may be outfitted with several pieces of furniture.

Even though effective research is lacking, parents have heard anecdotal evidence the rooms work and are asking schools to build them, Ayres said.

"We probably all wouldn't mind sitting in a room for 20 minutes a day listening to music not having to worry about anything else," Ayres said. "But that's really not anything that we're trying to accomplish in schools. It has high social validity, meaning people like it, but low empirical standing, because there's no data to support it that it improves kids' learning or behavior."

But other special education teachers say sensory rooms have worked. They serve as a more humane alternative than other methods used in schools to restrain or correct student behavior, said Dulce Bird, who is finishing her master's in special education at UGA and also is the parent of an autistic student at Barnett Shoals Elementary.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put a child in a sensory room and observe the difference between restraining a child," Bird said.

At Rutland Academy, teachers are keeping track of students' behavior as they filter in and out of the sensory room. They plan to collect and review the data at the end of the year to analyze whether it has helped students.

Some students already are recognizing when they're on the verge of a tantrum and have used swings or lights at their own homes to help cool down and collect themselves, Edenfield said.

"We're hearing that they can generalize it into their everyday lives in their home situations," she said. "Ultimately, that's what we want to do, is try to give them the skills to be able to de-escalate themselves."-- ACE Chairwww.freewebs.com/acechair