by Allison Ross

Jefferson County Public Schools officials will update the school board on Tuesday on its efforts to fix a major discrepancy between the number of restraints and seclusions the district recorded the past two years and how many were actually reported to the state.

The Courier-Journal first reported last month that JCPS has been underreporting its numbers of restraints and seclusions to the state. While JCPS initially told the state there were 174 instances in 2014-2015 where a student was restrained or secluded, JCPS said the actual number was more than 4,000.

After the Courier-Journal began asking questions about the differences in the numbers, Superintendent Donna Hargens reported the discrepancy to the state and asked internal audit firm Dean Dorton to do the review.

The Jefferson County Board of Education is slated to have an hour-long work session beginning at 5 p.m. Tuesday at district headquarters, 3332 Newburg Road, to discuss the district's efforts to fix the discrepancy and to document and verify incidents, as well as to hear the report of an internal auditor who was asked to look into the district's data reporting in light of the discrepancy.

JCPS has not posted that review nor any other documents yet to the board agenda item.

The agenda said that, in addition to discussing the auditor's findings and recommendations and the district's data documentation efforts, board members will hear a presentation about the definition and types of restraint and seclusion and in what situations they are allowed to be used.

Hargens told the Courier-Journal that JCPS had known about the problems with data inaccuracy related to restraint and seclusion since last school year, but told the board she herself only found out last month, at which point she immediately reported the issue to the Kentucky Department of Education.

According to Kentucky regulations, seclusion is the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area. This is different from a time-out or an in-school suspension.

A restraint is any hold that either immobilize or reduce the ability of a student to move his or her torso, arms, legs or head freely. It does not include temporary touching or holding a student's hand, arm or shoulder to encourage a student to move voluntarily to a safe location.

As outlined in Kentucky's 2013 regulation, restraint and seclusion may only be used if a student's behavior poses an imminent danger of physical harm to the student or others.

Kentucky regulation states that students can only be restrained by school personnel who are trained in restraint techniques except in "clearly unavoidable emergency circumstances," in which cases trained personnel are summoned as soon as possible.

The Courier-Journal recently detailed the results of three JCPS restraint investigations into a Layne Elementary special education teacher, including a 2014 investigation where JCPS investigators found that the teacher had pulled a student out of his chair and restrained him for about 40 minutes, not stopping the restraint when the boy threw up.

After the Courier-Journal requested the investigations into that teacher in March, the district began a new investigation and a personnel review of her, and a spokeswoman said that what had happened in the teacher's classroom was "unacceptable, and the way it was handled was unacceptable." JCPS temporarily reassigned the teacher, Jodi Anderson, last week.