A couple of years ago, Ian's class hit a real rough spot. There was a perfect storm of problems.
The teacher was getting ready to leave for maternity leave. Well, her body was still there, but her mind left the building a long time before that.
The school hired an extremely young girl fresh out of ed school to take over the classroom, during the maternity leave. She was overwhelmed. They admitted a few older kids with emotional problems. To deal with the new behavior kids, the teachers set up multiple, confusing reinforcement programs, so the lessons were interrupted every two minutes with a bell, a star, or time earned on the computer. At one classroom observation, all I saw was chaos and stupidity.
The chaos and stupidity made the kids upset. Shocker, I know. They started having tantrums. Even kids like mine who never had behavior problems before. When they instituted even more complicated, loud, and redundant reward systems and the kids didn't change, they decided to start holding the kids down on the ground. When the kids began to fight off their aggressors, the teachers held them down even harder.
Eventually, the teachers got their act together, and the tantrums and the restraints ended. Believe it or not, we're still at this school.
This experience is not unusual. Every year, 40,000 kids are restrained in a public school setting by people who aren't trained in these matters. Here's another story here.
Apt. 11d 
“[T]he teachers set up multiple, confusing reinforcement programs, so the lessons were interrupted every two minutes with a bell, a star, or time earned on the computer.”
Sounds like an ABA consultant was desperately needed. Did they bring one in to fix things? A reinforcement regime badly done is as bad or worse than none at all.
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