NBC10 Philadelphia

Holton says she didn’t know the full extent of what happened in the classroom until she got a call from the school district in the spring.  “The Special Ed supervisor called me and said that he was restrained 3,193 times,” she said, her voice breaking. That was over the course of four months. “I remember, like, catching my breath and saying, ‘Wait, you mean minutes, minutes?’ and she said, ‘No, times,'” Holton said. The son of school board member James Pepper was in the same classroom. “They were so completely and utterly failed,” Pepper said in an August board meeting. Pepper’s son, who also has autism and is non-verbal, was restrained an estimated 2,933 times, according to an email the district sent Pepper and his wife recapping a phone call about the restraints. In total, the Central Bucks School District reported more than 6,400 restraints for the 2024-25 school year. That’s nearly a quarter of the total number of restraints reported statewide last year. “Six thousand is alarming,” Pennsylvania Department of Education Secretary Carrie Rowe said in an interview with the NBC10 Investigators. “Something has to be going wrong and additional oversight is needed.” Rowe said the state has begun “targeted monitoring” with Central Bucks and are determining “where the gaps are.”