N.Y. aides ask curb of shock use at center

State education officials in New York are calling for a near ban on the use of electric shock to discipline students at a controversial Massachusetts school for troubled children.

More than 150 of the 251 students at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center come from New York, and 77 wear electrodes on their arms or legs that teachers use to shock them if they misbehave.

Massachusetts officials tried for years to close the Canton school, which uses an elaborate system of rewards and punishments to treat students with autism, mental retardation, and emotional problems. Judges have repeatedly protected the center's practices, finding that for certain troubled children, the fear of an electric shock may be the best way to prevent them from hurting themselves or others.

But Rebecca Cort, New York State's deputy education commissioner, called yesterday for the state's Board of Regents to adopt a policy that bans sending children to any schools that use painful punishments such as electric shock, unless an independent panel of experts agrees that it's in the child's best interest.

Cort said that state investigators could find no independent science that showed that the Rotenberg Center's methods really work, but that shocks might still be used in unusual cases if specialists deem it appropriate.

''This is a big step forward for all disabled students in New York," said Kenneth Mollins, lawyer for Antwone Nicholson, 17, who received 79 two-second shocks on his arms and legs for misbehavior over a year and a half period at the Rotenberg Center. ''Students are being punished and tortured and abused, and the state of New York can't just send them anywhere."

Officials at the Rotenberg Center said the proposed policy would be unfair to parents of children who don't respond to any other form of treatment. However, Michael Flammia, the school's lawyer, said that the limits on painful punishments are not as severe as an earlier draft of New York's proposed policy and that Rotenberg officials will seek further changes.

The Board of Regents is scheduled to discuss Cort's proposal in Albany on Monday, but a vote on the policy is not expected until next month. In her memo to the New York Board of Regents, Cort said state agencies had ''general concern" about the deliberate use of pain on New York children. In addition to shocks, she said, the Rotenberg Center commonly restrains children with splints, helmets, or tubes and forces them to eat ''bland food consisting of mashed potatoes, chicken, and spinach garnished with liver powder" as punishment.

''We were unable to identify any peer-reviewed research which supports the interventions used at the Judge Rotenberg Center," wrote Cort, in calling for severe limits on such practices.

Matthew Israel, the school's founder, counters that school records show an extraordinary reduction in dangerous behaviors such as head-banging after students are subjected to shock treatment. He stresses that the shock devices have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and that they're only applied with the approval of both a judge and the student's parents.

''This treatment has actually saved lives, and it has stopped children . . . from mutilating their own bodies," Israel said, adding that school enrollment has tripled since 1999, as parents increasingly see skin shocks as a better alternative than drugs and treatment at a psychiatric hospital.

Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com.