Human Rights Glance
A school district board in upstate New York is investigating school officials amid accusations that the district may have confined elementary school students inside wooden “timeout” boxes.
Images of the boxes, which resemble tiny padded cells, first spread on social media last week, after a former member of the Salmon River school district school board accused officials of building them to seclude children with disabilities. The images unleashed an immediate uproar in the small district, which teaches about 1,300 children and lies on the border between New York state and Canada.
In addition to investigating the officials, the Salmon River central school district board of education announced last Thursday it had placed three officials, including an elementary school teacher, on leave. It also reassigned the district’s superintendent to “home duties” and is cooperating with a New York state department of education investigation.
While the district superintendent acknowledged that the district had set up three of the wooden crates at two elementary schools, he also said that the district had removed the boxes and that no student had ever been confined inside them. However, at an emotional and tense community meeting last week, multiple parents said they suspected their children had been inside the boxes, the Albany-based Times Union reported.
One parent of a minimally verbal child said his son told him: “If you are happy or if you are sad, this is the place you have to go to calm down.”
More than 60% of Salmon River students are Native American. For several community members, the controversy over the boxes evoked memories of abusive residential schools, the US government’s boarding school system that sought to force Native American students to assimilate to white society. Nearly 1,000 students died at those schools, which operated as recently as the 1960s.
Israeli occupation forces and illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers carried out widespread violations across the occupied West Bank on Saturday, including home invasions, abductions, shootings, among them the killing of two Palestinians, including a child, road attacks, and coordinated colonizer assaults on Palestinian towns and villages.
Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new “focus on children’s health”.
A leading Muslim civil rights group in the US has sued Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, over his order designating it and another organization as a “foreign terrorist organization”, saying the directive was unconstitutional.
At dawn on Tuesday, Israeli occupation forces escalated their invasions across multiple areas of the occupied West Bank, deploying reinforcements toward Nablus in the northern West Bank while continuing widespread military operations in refugee camps, towns, and villages.
Over 100 members of the US Congress signed a letter addressed to Prime Minister Netanyahu, urging him to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, according to a report published by Peace Now.
