Inclusion Daily Express -- Parents Upset That Police Handcuffed Kids

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Parents Upset That Police Handcuffed Kids
By Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express
January 30, 2008

NEW YORK, NEW YORK--Parents of two children with disabilities expressed outrage this week over the handcuffing of their children at New York schools.

Taneisha Pearson held a news conference last Saturday, during which she told reporters how her 10-year-old daughter Imecca Burton was handcuffed by New York Police officers on her school bus on January 15.

Imecca, a Brooklyn girl with diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, reportedly was one of several "unruly" kids on the bus.

"I thought if they arrested me, I would never get out," she said.

Two days after Imecca was cuffed, NYPD school security officers at a school in Queens handcuffed 5-year-old Dennis Rivera to a chair in his kindergarten class.

Officers had been called in when Dennis -- who has asthma, attention deficit disorder and speech problems -- reportedly became agitated in his classroom. They cuffed the kindergartener with metal restraints, then called for an ambulance to transport him to Elmhurst Hospital Center for a psychiatric evaluation. He was released four hours later.

Dennis' mother, Jasmina Vasquez, said she has since enrolled her son in a private school.

"He's 5 years old. He was scared to death," she told the Daily News. "You cannot imagine what it's done to him."

School officials told the Daily News that Dennis had punched an assistant principal on January 16, and that he broke glass in an office door the previous week.

Related:
"Cuffed Schoolkid Feared For Her Life" (New York Post)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2008/red/0130b.htm
"5-year-old boy handcuffed in school, taken to hospital for misbehaving" (New York Daily News)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2008/red/0130c.htm

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