Opinion ID: 858820
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: J.M.’s Timeouts

Text: Deer Creek Elementary had a special “timeout room” attached to J.M.’s classroom. The timeout room was small, although big enough for both a student and teacher to fit inside. It had a light fixture and a door without a lock. The door had a small window that was too high for children to see out of. -3- At school, J.M. was known to occasionally yell, throw, kick, hit, spit, throw tantrums, and otherwise exhibit disruptive behavior. As a result, teachers sometimes placed him in the timeout room. The duration of these timeouts is not clear. The school had a policy of multiplying the student’s mental age by two to set the maximum number of minutes a student could be in timeout on a single occasion, but the school did not always keep track of whether its employees followed this policy. As far as the record goes, the longest timeout J.M. endured was about four minutes. See Part