TheConcrete Room.

The room was eight feet by eight feet. Concrete walls. No windows. A desk. A chair. The chair had her name on it.

That was where the school board put Samira—diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, placed by her school board in February 2023 in a specialized program for students with autism—for about 80 percent of the 2024/25 school day. She was eight years old.

Her parents did not know. The school did not tell them. They learned about the room from a visit by a representative of their local social services agency for children with complex needs. The principal confirmed it only after they asked.

The school called it a “calm room.” Samira’s parents had been told it was a place she could go when she became overstimulated—coloured walls, calm background music, sensory materials. The room they had not been allowed to see was concrete.

This is not new. We have done this before, in this province, to people we said we were going to take care of. And we have been warned. Across the border, in a state much like ours, the story has already been written down—in 50,000 pages of incident logs, in the language of children, in the days and months and years of their school lives.¹⁰

In December 2013, Premier Kathleen Wynne stood in the Ontario legislature and apologized—formally, on behalf of the Crown—to thousands of survivors of Huronia Regional Centre and the province’s other institutions for people with developmental disabilities.¹ Huronia, in Orillia, operated for 133 years before its doors closed in 2009.² Rideau Regional Centre in Smiths Falls. Southwestern Regional Centre at Cedar Springs, near Chatham.³ The apology followed a $35-million class-action settlement⁴ and decades of documented testimony from people who had been warehoused, isolated, restrained, secluded, and educationally abandoned—many of them as children, many of them autistic or otherwise neurodivergent.

The province apologized for what it called a “painful chapter” of its history.¹ It pledged that this would not happen again.

Samira was placed in the concrete room eleven years after that apology.

The architecture of institutional cruelty

The architecture of institutional cruelty is remarkably consistent across centuries. The Victorian asylum had its quiet rooms and padded cells. The mid-twentieth-century state hospital had its seclusion rooms. The developmental-disability institution had its locked dormitories and isolation wards. Erving Goffman, writing about what he called “total institutions” in 1961,⁵ catalogued the pattern: a controlled space, a controlled body, a controlled day, and a vocabulary designed to make the control sound therapeutic.

“Calm room” belongs in that vocabulary.

So does “calming period”—the phrase used when, following a physical incident in October 2024, Samira’s parents were asked to keep her home for a few days. Those few days became a year. She was directed not to return to school as a formal exclusion. No return date was established. The school did not reintegrate her into her classroom until October 2025.¹⁵ She was not formally expelled, because formal expulsion would have triggered procedural rights. She was, in the bureaucratic euphemism, “excluded.”

Throughout the exclusion, the board provided one hour of virtual learning per day, on material below her abilities.

Source: Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, Special Report: Special Education Needs (12 May 2026), Family Experience Story #4(Section 4.6.1, p. 48). See Note 15.

Huronia survivors testified that the institution’s “school” consisted of busywork, sorting tasks, and instruction far below their capabilities. Many of them learned for the first time, as adults during the class action, that they had been denied an actual education because the institution had decided they did not need one. The Ontario government, in 2013, agreed that this was a harm worth $35 million to acknowledge.⁴

One hour a day. Below her abilities. For a year. She is eight.

What Ontario is doing in 2024 is what Illinois was doing in 2018, and what Illinois was doing in 1989, and what Ontario itself was doing in 1959. The vocabulary changes. The architecture does not.

The Quiet Rooms

On November 19, 2019, ProPublica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune published the results of a year-long joint investigation into the use of seclusion in Illinois public schools.¹¹ The reporters—Jennifer Smith Richards, Jodi S. Cohen and Lakeidra Chavis—obtained the incident logs that state law required school employees to fill out every time they put a child in seclusion. The logs ran to roughly 50,000 pages, covering more than 20,000 incidents over a single 14-month window. About 12,000 of the incidents recorded enough detail to determine why a child had been confined. In more than a third, no safety reason was documented at all.¹¹

The rooms had different names in different districts. Reflection room. Cool-down room. Calming room. Quiet room.¹¹ They were five feet by five feet, sometimes smaller, made of plywood and cinder block, with padded walls bearing scratch marks from children’s fingernails and observation windows scratched at the height of an eight-year-old’s eyes. The Chicago Tribune photographs of those spaces—by staff photographer Zbigniew Bzdak, taken inside two rooms at the Pathways school of the Belleville Area Special Services Cooperative—run alongside the ProPublica reporting. See the photographs in the original investigation. This article does not reproduce them; their copyright is respected.

Adults stayed outside the door and wrote down what the children did. The logs survive because the law required them.

A boy named Jace, nine years old, autistic, prone to seizures, was sent to one of these rooms at the Kansas Treatment and Learning Center in east-central Illinois—an institution operated by the Eastern Illinois Area Special Education district—at least twenty-eight times in the 2017–18 school year. On February 1, 2018, after he tore up a math worksheet and tried to leave the building, staff put him in a five-foot square plywood-and-cinder-block cell. He was eventually stripped of his shoes and shirts. He wet his pants. He defecated. He smeared the feces on the wall. Adults watched and wrote it down, minute by minute, on nine handwritten pages. They closed the door, the log notes, “for privacy.”¹²

Jace was released to his grandmother at 2:07 p.m. He died at home, of a seizure in his sleep, in October 2018. His mother had pulled him out of the school by then. She had never seen the February 1 log. She learned what it said when reporters showed it to her, almost two years after the fact.¹²

A six-year-old boy named Eli, in his first-grade year at a school called The Center in East Moline, spent more than twenty-seven and a half hours in his school’s reflection rooms in a single school year.¹¹ A boy named Dalton, eleven, was repeatedly secluded at the same school; his mother reported that it did not improve his behaviour. The Center is part of the Black Hawk Area Special Education District, which documented roughly 850 seclusions in the 14-month window the reporters examined. When reporters asked to see the rooms, the district’s director declined. She told them that this was not something the district was proud of.¹¹

The plywood box, and the rules that grew from it

The Illinois practice is older than the rules that govern it. In the late 1980s, in the small central-Illinois city of Pontiac, the public schools used plywood boxes—three feet by three feet by seven feet tall—to confine students with developmental disabilities. The mother of one of those students, a nonverbal sixteen-year old named Ted Meckley, went public in 1989. The local paper, The Pantagraph, ran the story with an illustration of the box.¹³ The boxes were removed. The mother joined a state task force. Reform appeared to follow.

Ten years later, in 1999, the Illinois State Board of Education issued formal rules on the use of seclusion. Those rules required constant monitoring, locks that could not trap a child during a fire, and a documented safety justification for each use. They have not been substantively updated since.¹¹

The lawyer who helped draft the rules—Zena Naiditch of the disability watchdog Equip for Equality—told the ProPublica reporters, two decades later, that the rules had not constrained the practice but legitimised it. The State Board did not collect data on isolated timeouts. It did not read the reports it required schools to write. Several district administrators acknowledged, when interviewed, that they had themselves never reviewed the incident logs from their own schools until a journalist asked for them.¹¹

The reform of 1989 became the regulation of 1999 became the unmonitored licence of 2018. Each generation’s fix became the next generation’s floor.

The story moved. The Illinois State Board of Education issued an emergency order halting the use of isolated timeouts in public schools within days of the investigation’s publication. State legislators introduced a bill to make the prohibition permanent. The investigation was syndicated, taught in journalism schools, and cited in subsequent reform efforts in U.S. states beyond Illinois.¹⁴

Ontario read it. Ontario teaches it. Ontario does it anyway.

The Auditor General, on the record

On May 12, 2026, Ontario’s Auditor General, Shelley Spence, tabled a performance audit of special education in three of the province’s school boards: the Peel District School Board, the Toronto Catholic District School Board, and the Upper Canada District School Board.¹⁵ The audit located the failure in three structural places. Taken together, they describe Samira’s case not as an outlier but as an instance.

Section 4.6 of the audit—Student Exclusion and Suspension—found that the Ministry of Education had not established province-wide guidance on the lawful basis for refusing a child’s entry; that one of the three audited boards had no formal exclusion policy at all; and that none of them clearly addressed informal, undocumented exclusion. In an anonymous teacher survey conducted by the Auditor General, thirty-nine percent of teachers reported having observed or been involved in informal, undocumented exclusions of disabled students. A third of those teachers reported it had happened more than five times in a single school year. The province’s official figure for exclusions of special-education students stands at an average of 239 per year. Twenty-three of Ontario’s seventy-two school boards reported, for each year of the four-year audit window, that they had excluded zero such students. The audit, in its plain prose, makes clear that this figure is not credible.¹⁵

Section 4.3.1 of the audit—on Individual Education Plans—found that between 38 and 95 percentof student files at the three audited boards contained no evidence that parents had been consulted on their own child’s plan (TCDSB 38%, PDSB 67%, UCDSB 95%). Section 4.4.1, on educational assistant absences, found that EAs were absent an average of 18 percent of school days, and that between 49 and 72 percent of those absences went unfilled by qualified replacements. The Auditor General notes, with care, that the EA absences are driven primarily by stress and student-related physical injuries. The staffing collapse and the informal exclusions are two faces of the same crisis.¹⁵

The audit does not identify Samira by that name. It does identify her. She appears on page 48 of the report, in Section 4.6.1, under the heading Students with Special Education Needs Were Sometimes Excluded from School Informally Without Tracking the Number, Documentation or Rationale. The auditor calls her case Family Experience Story #4. The audit records her age (eight); her diagnosis (autism spectrum disorder); the date of her placement in a specialized program (February 2023); the dimensions of the room (eight feet by eight feet); its construction (concrete walls and no windows); its contents (her schoolwork, and a desk and a chair labelled with her name); the share of her school day spent in it (about eighty percent of the 2024/25 school year); the means by which her parents learned of it (a classroom visit by a representative of their local social services agency); the date of the incident that turned a “calming period” into a year of exclusion (October 2024); the date she was eventually allowed back into her classroom (October 2025); and the substitute for her education during that year (one hour of virtual learning per day, on material that did not meet her abilities).¹⁵

The audit notes, with care, that Samira’s parents had expected the room to be a place she could settle in when overstimulated—a place with, in the audit’s words, “coloured walls, calm background music and sensory materials.”¹⁵ The audit records what the room was instead.

The audit produced fifteen recommendations. The Ministry of Education agreed with thirteen of them.¹⁵ It did not agree to ban the practice that put Samira in the room. Its formal response, on the question of disabled children being sent home from school without records, without rationale, and without notice to their parents, was a commitment to a mandatory Professional Activity Day for the 2026/27 school year focused on the development and implementation of Individual Education Plans. A single PA Day. That is the floor.

It is also worth noting what the Ministry did before the audit. According to the auditor, the Ministry began drafting a province-wide exclusion policy in 2024. It paused the work in January 2025, before the provincial election. At the time the audit was tabled, the Ministry had no direction on next steps for resuming it.¹⁵

The architecture, drawn from memory

The province has constructed, inside its publicly funded school system, a parallel architecture of confinement for children whose disabilities make them inconvenient. The architecture is small, distributed, and locally deniable. Every individual room is “just” a quiet space. Every individual exclusion is “just” a calming period. Every individual case has a specific behavioural justification.

This is precisely how the institutional era worked. Huronia did not begin as a horror. It began as a “training school.” Each restraint was justified. Each seclusion was therapeutic. Each child sent there was a special case. The horror was not the existence of any single decision; it was the accumulation, the normalisation, the absence of anyone outside the institution who was allowed to see what was happening inside.

Samira’s parents were not allowed to see what was happening inside.

That is the line. That is the historical signature. When a publicly funded institution puts a child in a concrete cell, deprives her of education, and conceals the practice from her family, it is not a school making a clinical decision. It is the asylum returning under softer language.

What defenders always say

The defenders of these rooms will say what defenders have always said. That the children are dangerous to themselves or others. That the staff are overworked. That the resources are insufficient. That the alternative—restraint, ejection, police—is worse. Every one of those statements has been said, in those words, in every previous era of institutional confinement. The provincial commissions of the early twentieth century heard them. The Ontario Hospital reformers heard them in the 1950s. The Huronia administrators said them until the doors closed in 2009. The Illinois special-education directors said them to the ProPublica reporters in 2019, on the way to declining to let those reporters see the rooms.¹¹

The fact that the people inside the institution find the practice difficult to give up is not a defence of the practice. It is a description of how institutions metabolise cruelty into routine.

The reckoning that always arrives

There will be a public reckoning for this. There has been one for every previous chapter. The only questions are how long it takes, how many children pass through the rooms before it arrives, and what the apology will read like when a future premier finally stands up and delivers it.

Illinois shows that the lag between exposure and reform can be measured in days, not decades—when the documentary record is forced into the light. Ontario, as of 12 May 2026, has its documentary record. The Auditor General has written it down. The Ministry of Education has read it and responded with a Professional Activity Day. The reckoning, this time, is not waiting on the exposure. It is waiting on the will to act on it.

The apology, when it comes, will not be enough. The 2013 apology was not enough—Huronia survivors are still suing, still testifying, still dying without seeing the records the province kept on them.⁶ An apology is what the Crown offers when accountability has already failed.

Samira deserves accountability now. She deserves the records of every minute she spent in that room. She deserves a formal finding that her year of exclusion was unlawful under the Education Act⁷ and discriminatory under the Ontario Human Rights Code⁸—a discrimination claim the Supreme Court of Canada has already made plain in Moore v. British Columbia, where Justice Abella wrote, for a unanimous bench, that adequate special education is not a dispensable luxury but rather the ramp that provides access to the education promised to every child.⁹ She deserves an independent provincial inventory of every other “calm room” in every other board, and every other child who has been excluded under the same euphemism. She deserves a law that requires every minute in those rooms to be written down, and every page of those logs to be reviewed, and every parent to be told, the same day. She deserves, at minimum, the protections this province extended—eventually, posthumously, inadequately—to the children of Huronia.

She is eight.
The room was concrete.
Her parents were not told.We have done this before, and we have been warned, and we said we would not do it again.