Inside Investigator

On May 20, 2024, teachers and administrators at Hazardville Memorial School in Enfield called the police on a five-year-old in kindergarten. The call to 911 was placed at 9:57 am. By that time, teachers and special education instructors had been handling a situation with five-year-old Cody (fake name) for about an hour. That morning, Cody had kicked a classmate, at which point teachers evacuated the classroom, called in the school’s crisis intervention team, and secluded Cody in the classroom with adults restraining him from kicking or hitting.

This particular incident with Cody was one of thirty-nine restraints or seclusions of the boy between October 2, 2023, and May 20, 2024. At five years old, Cody is small, hardly a real physical danger, and easily restrained by the teachers. He was later diagnosed with autism, which causes his emotional dysregulation and can lead to outbursts. Dave alleges that during an earlier incident, he found that staff had been isolating Cody in a “windowless, solid-core doored, single stall bathroom that’s inside a little storage space between classrooms.”