Photos show blood splattered across a small bare-walled room in a North Carolina school where a second grader repeatedly punched himself in the face in the fall of 2019, according to the child’s mom.

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Federal law requires school districts like Wake County to tell the U.S. Department of Education every time they physically restrain or seclude a student.

But the district, one of the largest in the nation, with nearly 160,000 children and more than 190 schools, reported for nearly a decade, starting in 2011, that it had zero incidents of restraint or seclusion, according to federal data.

Staten said she was alarmed to learn about the district’s reporting practices, and in March 2022 she sent a complaint letter to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. When the district set up her son’s special education plan, she wrote, “they said things like ‘it’s for his safety and the safety of others.’”

Further, she wrote, in his district files, “nowhere in the record was there documentation of the restraints and seclusion.”

The practice is “used and is used at often very high rates in ways that are quite damaging to students,” said Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for the Office for Civil Rights.

The Department of Education says it is meeting with schools that underreport cases of restraint and seclusion, tactics used disproportionately on students with disabilities and children of color like Staten’s son.