An analytical overview of the amendments to 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00 adopted on June 24, 2025, the statewide reporting architecture created by Special Education Policy Memo SY2025-2026-9, and the implementation resources rolled out in Special Education Policy Memo SY2026-2027-1.
Introduction
On August 17, 2026, the most consequential revision of Massachusetts’ seclusion rules in more than a decade took effect. The amendments to 603 CMR 46.00 — the state regulation titled “Prevention of Physical Restraint and Requirements If Used” — and to its companion, 603 CMR 18.00, which governs approved special education schools and programs, were adopted unanimously by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) on June 24, 2025, after a public comment window that ran from March 25 through May 2, 2025. The regulation’s effective-date provision, 603 CMR 46.08, states the matter plainly: “The amendments adopted in June 2025 shall take effect on August 17, 2026.” As the Massachusetts Association of School Committees reported the day after the vote, the Board moved the start from September 2025 to August 17, 2026 “rather than this September,” responding to commenters who argued that schools could not retrain staff and rebuild rooms in a single summer.
What the amendments did is easy to misstate. Massachusetts did not newly prohibit seclusion in 2026: 603 CMR 46.03(1)(a), in the version the Board adopted on December 16, 2014, already read, verbatim, “Mechanical restraint, medication restraint, and seclusion shall be prohibited in public education programs.” What changed is everything around that sentence. The definition of seclusion was rewritten to align with the definition the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights uses for data collection — reaching confinement the student is “not permitted” to leave, with or without adult supervision, rather than only confinement from which the student is “physically prevented” from leaving. And a practice previously flatly prohibited, with no carve-out at all, is now permitted in one tightly defined emergency lane, conditioned on a long list of cumulative regulatory requirements and wrapped in a documentation, notification, review, and reporting apparatus that did not previously exist.
The quieter change may prove the more consequential one: for the first time, Massachusetts will count seclusion. Special Education Policy Memo SY2025-2026-9, “Required Reporting on the Use of Seclusion and Emergency Seclusion,” signed by Jamie Camacho, Acting State Director of Special Education, and dated June 25, 2026, directs every public education program that uses emergency seclusion to report it through a form in DESE’s Security Portal. Real-time reporting of all incidents is encouraged, and the memo sets the floor: “the minimum requirement is to annually report and certify the data to the Department through the designated portal no later than June 30th each calendar year.” The first full cycle closes on June 30, 2027 — the date the Commonwealth’s first statewide seclusion dataset will exist.
Until then, the state’s published numbers describe a different phenomenon entirely. DESE’s School and District Profiles Student Restraints Report for 2024-25, the most recent complete dataset as of this writing (last updated January 22, 2026), records 4,057 students restrained statewide, 29,314 total restraints, and 968 injuries to students or staff, against a statewide enrollment of 925,389. Restraint has been reportable — and reported — for years, under 603 CMR 46.06(8). Seclusion never was. A practice that Massachusetts has prohibited since 2014 has never been counted by the state that prohibits it; the extent of its use, the types of programs that use it, and the students subjected to it are, as a formal matter, unknown. The new reporting form is the state’s first instrument for seeing the practice it banned a decade ago. Throughout this article, claims are attributed to the documents that carry them; where the record is silent, the article says so rather than filling the silence with estimates.
One correction runs through everything that follows, because it changes how the story is told. The mechanical-restraint ban is not new; it has been on the books verbatim since 2014, and dating any restraint “ban” to 2026 gets the timeline wrong. What is genuinely new is threefold: a broader, OCR-aligned definition of seclusion; a tightly conditioned emergency-seclusion exception that did not previously exist; and a reporting architecture that will, for the first time, produce numbers. The amendments are best understood not as a new prohibition but as the conversion of an unenforceable prohibition into a measured, conditioned, and — in the regulation’s own words — targeted-for-elimination exception.
The 2014 Baseline: A Prohibition Without a Measurement
What the 2014 Regulation Already Said
The last previous amendment of 603 CMR 46.00 was adopted by the Board on December 16, 2014, and took effect January 1, 2016. For the decade that followed, that version was the operative law of school seclusion and restraint in Massachusetts, and the 2025 amendments carry its architecture forward largely intact. It prohibited mechanical restraint, medication restraint, and seclusion outright. It permitted physical restraint only in limited circumstances and regulated it intensively: parent notification with written reports on defined timelines, injury reporting to the Department, annual data collection, and staff training requirements. That machinery — not the seclusion prohibition — is where the state’s attention and its data lived.
The restraint-side provisions are worth naming precisely, because the 2026 seclusion system borrows from them deliberately. Under 46.06(3), a program using physical restraint must make “reasonable efforts to inform the student’s parent of the restraint within 24 hours” and must send a written report “within three school working days” — to a parent-provided email address or by postmarked regular mail — translated into the parent’s customary language, with the student and parent given an opportunity to comment. Under 46.06(7), restraint-related injuries must be reported to DESE “postmarked no later than three school working days,” together with the prior 30-day restraint record, and the Department must decide on action “within 30 calendar days of receipt.” Under 46.06(8), “Every program shall collect and annually report data to the Department regarding the use of physical restraints.” The state already knew how to collect this kind of data; it had simply never pointed the machinery at seclusion.
Two consequences of the 2014 design define the problem the amendments were written to solve. The seclusion prohibition had no exception and no procedure: there was no lawful way to seclude a student, which meant there was nothing to document, nothing to review, and nothing to report. And the definition of seclusion was narrow enough that much of what schools actually did inside time-out rooms plausibly fell outside it. A prohibition that neither admits an exception nor produces data is, as an enforcement matter, close to invisible.
The Definition Gap: “Physically Prevented” Versus “Not Permitted”
The old definition — in force from 2016 until August 2026 — defined seclusion as “the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area from which the student is physically prevented from leaving.” Every element of that sentence does limiting work. “Alone” excluded supervised separations; “physically prevented” excluded confinement maintained by instruction, expectation, or authority rather than by a latch or a hand. A student watched through an observation window was not, on the text, “physically prevented” from leaving; neither was a student who was told, in words, to stay put. The amended definition — “the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision, from which the student is not permitted to leave” — closes both gaps at once, which is why DESE described it in its July 9, 2025 summary memo as an update “to align more closely with the definition used by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for data collection purposes.”
Acting Education Commissioner Russell Johnston made the same point in plainer language during the March 2025 public-comment period. WBUR and the State House News Service reported on March 26, 2025 (in a report by Sam Drysdale) that Johnston drew a hard line between the two practices: “This improved language really helps clarify that difference between timeout, which is a strategy to be used when students need to self-regulate, and then a very limited, prescribed circumstance that could lead to an emergency use of seclusion. But we need to call it that. We need to say that it is seclusion. It’s not timeout.” He added that “seclusion is not a behavior management strategy, and that’s what we really have to make clear with these regulations,” and that “we can’t say that putting a student in a room and closing the door and observing them from outside is behavior management, and that any conflating of those notions is exactly why we need this.” The old definition made that conflation easy; the new one is drafted to make it impossible.
The Guidance Era: 2021’s Memorandum Without a Mandate
DESE did not discover the problem in 2025. The mass.gov release announcing the June 24, 2025 adoption notes that “in Massachusetts, DESE has been examining the topic since 2020” and that “during the 2020-2021 school year, DESE engaged with a broad range of stakeholders in a process that resulted in guidance being issued in 2021.” That guidance took the form of a memorandum dated September 10, 2021, “Reducing or Eliminating the Use of Time-Out Rooms During the 2021-2022 School Year,” signed by Russell Johnston, then Deputy Commissioner and State Special Education Director, serving under Commissioner Jeffrey C. Riley. Its factual predicate was stated without hedging — “Use of seclusion is prohibited in Massachusetts” — and its tone, for a guidance document, was unusually urgent: “Given the trauma and academic loss that the inappropriate use of time-out rooms can cause, the Department urges school administrators to carefully review this memorandum and discuss it with their staff.”
The 2021 memo is best read today as a dress rehearsal for the 2026 rules: nearly every safeguard that later became a regulation appears in it first as a recommendation. It urged districts “to make concerted efforts during the 2021-2022 school year to reduce or eliminate the use of time-out rooms.” It recommended verbal parent notification within 24 hours — ideally before the student returned home — and written notification ideally within three school-working days; it recommended that principals conduct weekly and monthly reviews of time-out data; and it stated flatly that “the Department expects that spaces such as closets, storage rooms, and copy rooms will not be used as time-out rooms.” Read against the amended regulation, the resemblance is striking: 24-hour notice, three-day written notice, weekly and monthly reviews, and physical room standards all reappear as obligations rather than suggestions.
What the 2021 memo did not do is the point. It collected no data, required no reports to the state, and created no registry of rooms, no injury-reporting pathway, no portal form, and no consequence for a district that never read it. The state asked districts to reduce and eliminate the use of time-out rooms and then, structurally, took their word for it that they had. In February 2024 the administration added money to the ask, announcing the federal competitive special education grant Fund Code 213, “Implementing Strategies to Reduce or Eliminate the Use of Time-Out Rooms,” with applications due on or before February 20, 2024 — an acknowledgment that changing practice required resources, but still not a mechanism for finding out what practice actually was.
That is the baseline against which the 2025 amendments should be measured. For a decade, Massachusetts had a seclusion prohibition with no seclusion data, a guidance memorandum with no reporting requirement, and a definition that reached only the most overt form of the practice. Its only quantitative window on the territory — the annual restraints report — captured the adjacent conduct but not the confinement itself. Ten years of prohibition produced no statewide answer to the simplest question: how often does this happen?
From Testimony to Adoption: January through June 2025
January 2025: The Commissioner’s First Stop and a Parent’s Testimony
The regulatory process has a visible starting moment. In January 2025, Acting Education Commissioner Russell Johnston told the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that when he visits a school, his first stop is always asking administrators to see their time-out room. WBUR and the State House News Service preserved his explanation in their March 26, 2025 report by Sam Drysdale: “I walk into the rooms myself,” he said, “I close the door. I look to see what it’s like for a student in one of those rooms.” Five years after signing the 2021 memorandum as Deputy Commissioner, the official who had politely urged districts to abandon time-out rooms was inspecting them on every visit.
The Board heard the parent’s side of the same ledger at the same meeting. Emily LaMarca testified about her son Cole, a student with Down syndrome who was placed in a time-out room beginning at age ten, and her testimony was preserved in WBUR’s March 26, 2025 coverage: “He was constantly afraid, afraid to go to school, afraid that his teachers would come to our house and harm him. He talked about angry eyes at school and the sounds that his friends made when they were taken to what he called ‘the naughty room’ in therapy. Cole acted out his trauma by locking himself in the therapy dog’s crate, because, in his words, he was a ‘bad boy.’ ” A decade after seclusion had been prohibited by regulation, a parent was telling the Board that her child had experienced it as a defining feature of his school years — and the state had no way of knowing, because the state did not count.
The pairing of those two testimonies is worth being precise about. It does not show that seclusion was widespread; no dataset existed to show that. It shows that five years of guidance had not eliminated the practice, that the people closest to it believed it was still occurring, and that the state’s information system could neither confirm nor refute anyone’s belief. That evidentiary vacuum is the argument for what came next.
March 2025: The Proposal, the Comment Window, and the First Fight
On March 18, 2025, DESE formally proposed amendments to 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00 on the topic of time-out practices, as Memo SY2025-2026-1 later recounted, and on March 25, 2025, the Board voted to release the proposals for public comment through May 2, 2025. The same day, the Boston Globe ran the headline “Massachusetts seclusion timeout rooms in schools get tighter rules,” and WBUR and the State House News Service followed the next morning. Iraida Alvarez, DESE’s acting executive director of special education, told WBUR (March 26, 2025) that the updates would require time-out spaces to be unlocked and “an ‘appropriate size for the student. There’s adequate lighting, ventilation, temperature, and free of objects that may be harmful to the student.’” Johnston supplied the conceptual frame — time-out is a support a student may use to self-regulate; seclusion is confinement, full stop — and his formulation tracks the regulation’s text: an “unlocked setting from which the student is permitted to leave” is categorically different from “a room or area from which the student is not permitted to leave.”
The pushback surfaced in the same week’s coverage. Board member Michael Moriarty, then in his second five-year term, questioned how the proposal’s documentation requirements could function in a genuine emergency. WBUR reported his full framing on March 26, 2025: “In all of those different schools, with all the different contexts and scenarios, how do you anticipate — for an emergency — that prior documentation? And not fall out of compliance and find yourself sued, with your license at risk, with the school’s reputation harmed in the media, with all the bad things, when all you were trying to do was maintain an effective learning environment and safe classrooms?” He described the stricter rules as “further constricting behavioral management” and suggested they risked being “a little tone deaf” to the realities facing special educators. The question was not answered in March 2025; it was answered substantially by the final text of the regulation — and, as discussed below, it remains the sharpest open question about how the rules will operate in practice.
June 24, 2025: Unanimous Adoption and a Deliberate Delay
At its June 24, 2025 meeting in Everett, the Board voted unanimously to adopt the amendments. The administration’s same-day release (contact Jacqueline Reis) led with the procedural fact: “The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education today unanimously approved updated regulations that the Healey-Driscoll Administration proposed to the use of time-out practices in schools.” The Massachusetts Association of School Committees’ public policy update by Tracy Novick the following day recorded the one change the comment period produced: the Board moved the implementation date to August 17, 2026 “rather than this September.” The delay is regulatory craft, not retreat — the substantive amendments survived comment essentially intact, while the start date moved by nearly a year.
The vote was not unopposed in spirit, and the MASC account preserves the split: “Two administrators expressed concerns regarding implementation and unintended consequences of the changes, including possible increased use of restraint, crisis teams, and law enforcement, as well as possible dangers to staff and students. Two others called for the Board not to ‘allow this fear to dictate our policies,’ and urged them to move ahead with the change.” Moriarty, speaking at what would be his final meeting — he left the Board in June 2025 after two five-year terms — focused on “addressing problematic districts that do not see a problem,” sharpening the enforcement question at the heart of the package: rules bind everyone, but only data can find the programs that “do not see a problem.”
The administration’s statement of purpose came from Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler in the June 24, 2025 release: “Inclusive, accessible, safe and welcoming school environments are critical for students to learn and grow academically, behaviorally and social-emotionally. And we know that an important part of that is seeing all students learn alongside their peers to the greatest extent possible… The changes approved today give schools and districts additional clarity on appropriate behavioral supports that should be in place for all students to thrive.” Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell’s statement in the same release was notable for its source — an Attorney General publicly endorsing a DESE regulatory amendment is not a routine occurrence — and for its bluntness: “Our students deserve safe and healthy learning environments, free from harmful seclusion practices that are detrimental to their wellbeing. I am grateful to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for proposing these updated regulations, which provide significant additional protections to prevent seclusion.” Elizabeth Dello Russo Becker, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Association of Approved Special Education Schools, spoke for the approved-school sector: “Our member schools employ hundreds of compassionate, highly trained educators and staff who are able to meet the specialized needs of students across the Commonwealth and ensure safe learning environments. Clear policies informed by experts in the field help these educators best support the children they work with each day. We appreciate the robust process DESE undertook to finalize these regulations and look forward to improving outcomes for staff and the students they serve.”
July 9, 2025: The Summary Memo
On July 9, 2025, DESE issued Memo SY2025-2026-1, “Amendments to DESE’s regulations at 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00 (Use of Time-Out Practices),” signed by Jamie Camacho, summarizing what the Board had adopted. Its enumerated changes are the cleanest official statement of the package: it “updated definition of seclusion in 603 CMR 46.02 to align more closely with the definition used by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for data collection purposes”; updated the definition of time-out “to specifically include ‘in an unlocked setting from which the student is permitted to leave’”; added room requirements for time-out spaces covering size, lighting, ventilation and HVAC, the absence of dangerous fixtures, and fire and building code compliance; and “added emergency circumstances under which a type of seclusion, where an adult is present and monitoring the student, may be used as a last resort and lists specific conditions that must be met before its use.”
The memo also named the safeguards that would define the reporting architecture — “parental notification, conducting weekly and monthly reviews of data… and documenting and reporting such use to DESE” — and noted that DESE had “simplified language in 603 CMR 46.07(2) for the purpose of clarifying the use of the emergency exception.” On the 603 CMR 18.00 side, the amendments “require approved special education day programs, including the day component of special education residential programs, to comply with the updated version of 603 CMR 46.00” and align their documentation requirements with the updated 46.00. That pair matters more than it may appear: approved special education schools, many serving students with the most intensive behavioral needs, had operated under a parallel documentation regime, and the amendments bound them to the same seclusion rules, definitions, and reporting as districts for the school day.
The memo closed with two practical directives. Until the amended regulations took effect, programs were directed to continue the September 10, 2021 memo’s strategies — the guidance-era rules remained in force through the 2025-2026 school year. And on implementation support: “DESE is developing multi-year professional learning opportunities and funding supports to assist schools, districts, and programs implement any needed changes.” Both promises were kept: the training modules and implementation guide arrived in August 2026, and the funding supports arrived in February 2026.
What the Amended Regulation Says
The New Definition of Seclusion
The amended 603 CMR 46.02 defines seclusion as “the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision, from which the student is not permitted to leave.” Set against the 2014 text — “the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area from which the student is physically prevented from leaving” — the amendment changes two phrases that carry the entire definition. “Physically prevented” becomes “not permitted,” so confinement maintained by instruction, expectation, or authority now counts the same as confinement maintained by a latch; and “with or without adult supervision” enters the definition, so a student watched through a window or camera is secluded for regulatory purposes just as a student left entirely alone. The FAQ states the elements without decoration: “The key elements of this definition are that a student is: alone in a room or area with no adult present, and not permitted to leave.” The alignment with OCR is deliberate — DESE’s July 9, 2025 memo lists it first among the changes — and it matters practically: a state definition matching OCR’s is the precondition for Massachusetts data that can be read alongside the federal numbers.
The definition then draws its own boundaries, naming the arrangements that do not constitute seclusion. A classroom in which all students need permission to leave is not seclusion; monitored separation in an unlocked setting the student is allowed to leave, for the purpose of calming, is not seclusion; a separate placement within the classroom is not seclusion. The FAQ adds the two clarifications schools most often asked for: supervision of a confined student “through an observation window or video feed” does not bring the practice inside the law, because the defining feature is a student who is alone and not permitted to leave; and routine disciplinary placements were never the target, so being sent to the principal’s office or to in-school suspension is not seclusion at all. The new definition polices the combination of aloneness and non-permission, not the furniture.
The New Definition of Time-Out
The amendments also rebuilt the definition of time-out, which now reads, verbatim: “a behavioral support strategy in which a student temporarily separates from the learning activity or the classroom, either by choice or by direction from staff, for the purpose of calming. During time-out, a student must be continuously observed by a staff member in an unlocked setting from which the student is permitted to leave.” Three elements carry it: the purpose (calming), the observation (continuous, by a staff member who is present), and the door (unlocked, with the student permitted to leave). If any element fails — if the setting locks, if observation becomes remote, if the student is not permitted to leave — the practice is no longer time-out under the regulation’s definition. It is seclusion, and it falls under the seclusion rule.
That structure is what Johnston described in March 2025 when he told WBUR: “We need to say that it is seclusion. It’s not timeout.” The definitions implement the distinction mechanically rather than rhetorically: a practice is either inside the time-out definition — unlocked, continuously observed, the student free to leave — or it is seclusion, and the regulation provides no third category. The physical standards the July 2025 memo summarized — appropriate size, adequate lighting, ventilation and temperature, freedom from harmful objects, fire and building code compliance — attach to time-out spaces, so the environment of a lawful separation cannot quietly become the furniture of confinement.
The Emergency-Seclusion Exception: Conditions (a) Through (n)
The largest drafting change is the creation of an emergency-seclusion exception where none previously existed. The 2014 regulation prohibited seclusion without exception; the amended regulation opens one narrow lane, and Special Education Policy Memo SY2026-2027-1 states the structure in a single sentence: “The amended regulations reinforce that seclusion is prohibited except in limited emergency situations when all regulatory requirements are met.” The exception lives in 603 CMR 46.07(2), which sets out its conditions in subsections (a) through (n); the July 2025 summary memo described it as “added emergency circumstances under which a type of seclusion, where an adult is present and monitoring the student, may be used as a last resort and lists specific conditions that must be met before its use.”
The conditions are cumulative, and they can be grouped by what they demand. The student’s history must document repeated serious self-injury or injury to others, and the incident must be one in which the student was not responsive to directives or to less intrusive interventions, with other interventions tried and failed. Two clinical clearances must exist in advance: no medical contraindications, per a licensed physician, and a psychological or behavioral justification with no contraindications, per a licensed mental health professional. Consent must be on file from the parent — and, if appropriate, the student — with written approval by the principal; the staff who administer and monitor the seclusion must be trained; and the advance documentation of all of it must exist before the practice is used.
The remaining conditions govern the event itself: continuous, active monitoring, with staff “immediately available” and the student “observable in all parts of the room”; de-escalation continuing throughout rather than merely preceding the confinement; the use never serving as discipline, punishment, or a standard response to any behavior; and the confinement ending when the emergency ends — including when the student has moved from danger into severe distress. Read together, the conditions make lawful emergency seclusion rare — a documented history of repeated serious injury, two professional clearances, and parental consent are not features of a typical crisis afternoon — and make every use reviewable afterward, because each report must confirm the program met the full condition set.
The Procedural Requirements: 603 CMR 46.07(3)
If 46.07(2) governs when emergency seclusion may be used, 46.07(3) governs what must happen around each use, and the section is built almost entirely from the restraint regulations’ existing machinery. Use beyond 30 minutes requires principal approval based on continued agitation, mirroring the restraint rule at 46.05(5)(c), which requires principal approval for restraint beyond 20 minutes on the same basis. Parent notification must occur “within the same timelines and in the same manner as described in 603 CMR 46.06(3) and (4)” — reasonable efforts at notice within 24 hours, a written report within three school-working days to a parent-provided email or by postmarked regular mail, translated into the parent’s customary language, with the student and parent given an opportunity to comment. A written report of each incident must reach the principal by the next school working day.
The review obligations scale with use and import the restraint regulations’ standards wholesale: where the same student is secluded repeatedly, the program must conduct the weekly review that 46.06(5) requires for students restrained multiple times, and the school must conduct the monthly school-wide review that 46.06(6) requires for restraints. The section closes with the two provisions that point outward: subsection (f) obligates programs that use emergency seclusion to maintain a procedure for “examining and adopting alternatives and strategies for reducing and eliminating its use no later than 3 years from the date of effectiveness in 603 CMR 46.08,” and subsection (g) requires reporting “in a manner, form, and with frequency specified by the Department” — the hook on which Memo SY2025-2026-9 hangs the entire portal-reporting system.
One clause deserves to be quoted verbatim, because its force is commonly overstated. Subsection (f) requires adoption of a procedure for “examining and adopting alternatives and strategies for reducing and eliminating its use no later than 3 years from the date of effectiveness in 603 CMR 46.08” — by approximately August 17, 2029. That is an obligation to adopt alternatives, not a facial sunset of the exception. The elimination goal is carried by different text: 46.07(4) provides that “The Department shall collect the data reported pursuant to 603 CMR 46.07(3)(g) with the goal of reducing and eliminating the use of such emergency interventions in public education programs.” Data collection with an elimination goal is the design; the 2029 clause is the checkpoint, not the finish line.
The IEP Bar: 603 CMR 46.07(5)
The amendments also close the most predictable loophole a seclusion regime has: the individualized plan that names seclusion in advance. The amended 46.07(5) provides: “No written individual behavior plan or IEP may include use of seclusion as a standard response to any behavior.” The rule is short and absolute, and its placement matters — it sits inside the section governing emergency seclusion, so a program cannot launder a planned seclusion practice through the paperwork of an IEP or a behavior intervention plan and then characterize each use as an emergency. The exception is defined by the circumstances of the incident, not by the anticipatory paperwork of the plan.
The parallel restraint rule — 46.03(2)(d), which bars restraint as a planned standard response — predates the amendment, so the seclusion bar brings confinement up to the standard the Commonwealth long applied to physical restraint. For parents, the provision supplies a bright line that is easy to test: if a child’s IEP or behavior plan names seclusion, a locked room, or a time-out room used with the door closed as a response to specified behavior, the document itself is out of compliance, and the defect is visible on the face of the plan. It is the fastest audit in the framework.
What Did Not Change
A surprising amount of the landscape is unchanged, and knowing what did not change is as useful to parents as knowing what did. The core prohibition of 46.03(1)(a) carries forward verbatim from 2014 — mechanical restraint, medication restraint, and seclusion remain prohibited. The physical-restraint framework is untouched, including the narrow case-by-case lane for prone restraint under 46.03(1)(b), which requires a documented history of repeated serious self-injury or injuries to others, the failure of all other restraints, physician and mental-health clearance, consent obtained in an emergency with written principal approval, and retained advance documentation — as is the 20-minute principal-approval rule for extended restraint. The Policy Minute (Center for Education Policy and Practice, March 16, 2026) makes the same point from the classroom side: no new duties fall on teachers to collect data or contact parents about ordinary time-out — only principals track emergency seclusion — and nothing in the package touches discipline under 603 CMR 53.00 or the suspension statutes; the guidance “does not limit or prevent schools from using or implementing school discipline procedures.”
The reporting boundary is equally deliberate. Under FAQ Q16 (updated August 21, 2026), time-out itself need not be reported to DESE; the state collects emergency seclusion and restraint, not every separation. But the FAQ attaches a caution that keeps time-out inside the legal system by another route: for students with disabilities, repeated exclusionary measures “could constitute a disciplinary removal from the current placement, implicating the student’s right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE).” The design is coherent: the state regulates the confinement it prohibits, monitors the exception it created, and leaves ordinary discipline — with its own procedural protections — to the framework that already governs it.
The Reporting Architecture: Memo SY2025-2026-9
The Form, the Fields, and the SASID
Memo SY2025-2026-9, “Required Reporting on the Use of Seclusion and Emergency Seclusion,” dated June 25, 2026 (the page’s internal last-updated date is July 8, 2026), is the operational heart of the regime. Its operative sentence is blunt: “Beginning August 17, 2026, public education programs that use emergency seclusion must submit data using the Department’s Emergency Seclusion Reporting Form in the security portal and in accordance with this and any additional guidance issued by the Department.” The form lives in DESE’s Security Portal, inside the application titled “Restraint and Emergency Seclusion Data Collection,” and the Department published an eleven-page reference guide for it. The memo also promised advance notice: “Prior to August 17th, education leaders will be notified when the reporting tool becomes available and will receive written instructions on how to complete the requirements via the reporting tool.”
The field list shows how much of the regulation is enforced through data entry. Each incident requires the student’s SASID — the State Assigned Student Identifier — along with IEP status, the incident’s date, times, and location, and whether the seclusion exceeded 30 minutes, the trigger for principal approval under 46.07(3). The form captures the names, titles, and training recency of the staff who administered and observed the seclusion, directly enforcing the training condition of 46.07(2). Narrative fields ask for the antecedent conditions, the behavior that prompted the seclusion, the de-escalation strategies attempted, a description of the process, the monitoring and observation provided, ongoing de-escalation during the event, and how it ended — a structure that requires every report to document the condition set of 46.07(2) in the program’s own words.
Two confirmation blocks turn the form from a tally into a compliance instrument. The program must confirm that all advance documentation existed — physician clearance, mental-health professional clearance, parent or student consent, written principal approval, and staff training — so each report asserts that the conditions of 46.07(2)(a) and (d) through (g) were satisfied before the event. The program must also confirm the room’s condition, including “the date of the most recent room inspection” and an explanation if the room “was not inspected or did not meet requirements.” The injury fields are the sharpest edge: per the reference guide, “Selecting Injury to Student and/or Injury to Staff will automatically notify the Department,” pairing the form with the memo’s three-day rule so that injury incidents travel to the state on a clock rather than an annual cycle.
Real Time Encouraged, June 30 Required, Injuries on a Clock
The memo’s cadence creates three distinct timelines, and the difference between them is where most compliance risk lives. For ordinary incidents, the memo states the preference and then the floor: “While all programs are encouraged to report all incidents of seclusion in real time, the minimum requirement is to annually report and certify the data to the Department through the designated portal no later than June 30th each calendar year.” A program may therefore batch its reporting once a year — but the certification is annual even when nothing happened: DESE’s Restraint and Emergency Seclusion Reporting Procedures page states that programs must certify even if 0 occurred, for both restraints and seclusions. The first full cycle closes on June 30, 2027, and that certification is the moment Massachusetts’ first statewide seclusion dataset comes into existence.
Injuries run on a faster clock. Where an injury occurs, the memo directs that “the program shall submit a copy of the Emergency Seclusion Incident Report to the Department no later than three school-working days following the emergency seclusion” — the same three-school-working-day window 46.06(7) has long applied to restraint injuries, now extended to seclusion and backed by the form’s automatic notification when an injury is selected. The parallel treatment is explicit in the memo: “Similar to the Department’s existing collection and review of restraint data pursuant to 603 CMR 46.06(8), the collection of emergency seclusion data will support statewide monitoring, oversight, and implementation of the regulatory requirements.” The memo’s legal hooks — 603 CMR 46.07(4), 46.07(2), 46.07(3), and 18.05(5)(h) — reach across both regulations, binding approved special education programs to the same reporting for the school day.
The memo also assigns the recordkeeping that makes the system auditable at the building level: “The principal shall maintain an ongoing record of all reported instances of emergency seclusion and ensure that records of required weekly and monthly reviews are maintained in accordance with 603 CMR 46.07(3). Such documentation shall be made available for review by the Department or a parent upon request.” That final clause is easy to skim past and should not be: the principal’s ongoing records — the running log of incidents and of the required weekly and monthly reviews — are expressly open to parents on request, under 46.06(2) for restraints and 46.07(3) for seclusions. A parent who suspects a pattern does not need to wait for the state’s annual dataset; the records sit in the building.
The Implementation Machinery: Memos, Guidance, Grants, and Training
From Time-Out Guidance to Seclusion Guidance
The amendments were accompanied from the start by a guidance track, and the track evolved as the effective date approached. On February 5, 2026, DESE issued Special Education Policy Memo SY2025-2026-5, releasing “Time-Out Practices: Guidance on the Implementation of Regulatory Amendments to 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00,” with purposes that included efforts to “clarify definitions and regulatory requirements related to time-out practices,” to “distinguish time-out from seclusion and other prohibited practices,” to “provide implementation guidance and examples,” to “address common questions related to documentation, oversight, and monitoring,” and to “support schools and programs in developing policies, training, and systems aligned with the amended regulations.” The February document was preparation guidance, written for the school year before the rules bound anyone.
Seven months later, three days after the effective date, the guidance track was rebuilt. Memo SY2026-2027-1, dated August 21, 2026, is signed by Robert Curtin, Deputy Commissioner, and Jamie Camacho, Acting State Director of Special Education — the only memo in the sequence with two signers — and its purpose is “to remind school districts, charter and career/technical schools, educational collaboratives, approved special education schools, and other interested parties of the implementation resources available to support the amendments to 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00, which became effective on August 17, 2026.” It lists four resources: the FAQ, updated August 21, 2026; guidance whose internal title — “Reduce and Eliminate the Use of Seclusion: Guidance on the Implementation of Regulatory Amendments to 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00, August 2026” — announces the expansion from time-out practices to seclusion elimination; the reporting memo; and a Training Modules and Implementation Guide on DESE’s professional-development site.
The August guidance’s framing sentence is the department’s cleanest statement of the new structure: “The amended regulations reinforce that seclusion is prohibited except in limited emergency situations when all regulatory requirements are met.” And the transmitting memo goes past compliance into purpose: “The Department recognizes that achieving this goal requires more than regulatory compliance. Reducing, and ultimately eliminating, the use of seclusion depends on schools and programs establishing proactive systems that emphasize prevention, early intervention, effective behavioral support, and relationship-based practices.” Questions route to specialeducation@mass.gov. The evolution tracks the regulation’s own logic — first teach the difference between time-out and seclusion; then build the systems that make the emergency exception disappear.
The February 2026 Grant Round: $3.6 Million to 78 Programs
The funding promise made in the July 2025 summary memo was redeemed on February 6, 2026, when the Healey-Driscoll Administration announced $3.6 million in competitive grant awards to 78 recipients — school districts, charter schools, educational collaboratives, and approved special education schools — to implement the revised regulations, the successor round to the Fund Code 213 program announced in February 2024. Most recipients received $50,000 each, with amounts scaled for some: the announcement lists, among others, Martha’s Vineyard at $45,392, Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative at $40,580, Falmouth at $38,800, Ludlow at $35,495, Oxford at $33,000, Webster and Weymouth at $28,415 each, Granby at $26,141, Leverett at $19,450, Latham Centers at $17,400, North Brookfield at $14,780, and Springfield Preparatory Charter at $9,000. The distribution itself is information: the money followed the full range of settings the amended rules now bind.
Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler framed the round in the February 6, 2026 release: “This funding will help educators reduce the use of time-out rooms and to use student-centered behavioral support strategies that promote belonging and inclusion.” Commissioner Pedro Martinez — who had taken office the previous summer, succeeding Tutwiler after Tutwiler’s interim stint as acting commissioner — tied the money to the timeline: “While these regulatory updates have been under development for some time, we know that meaningful change requires investment… These grants are designed to help districts strengthen behavioral supports, build staff capacity and implement the revised regulations in ways that lead to better outcomes for students.” The sequencing is the signal: the grants landed six months before the effective date, while programs still had time to change rooms, policies, and training.
How Compliance Will Be Policed
The FAQ updated August 21, 2026 answers the enforcement question directly (Q14), and the answer spans the department’s full monitoring apparatus: “Schools, districts, and programs will be monitored for these requirements through cyclical monitoring, targeted monitoring, and investigations of complaints filed with the Department’s Problem Resolution System Office and any credible allegations of noncompliance.” The monitoring reaches the substance of the new rules — “including monitoring of updated policies and procedures, facility observations, and implementation of the requirements outlined in 603 CMR 46.07(2) and (3).” Facility observations are the operative phrase: a monitor can walk into a program, ask to see the rooms, and check the locks — the inspection routine Johnston described performing personally in January 2025. The Department also split its intake by subject — restraint questions to restraint@mass.gov, seclusion questions to specialeducation@mass.gov — a division that matters in practice, because a parent who sends a seclusion concern to the wrong address loses days at the front of a three-day injury clock. And the Problem Resolution System, the complaint machinery parents already use for special education disputes generally, is now an express part of seclusion enforcement.
What the Data Shows So Far — and What It Cannot
The 2024-25 Restraints Baseline
The one quantitative window Massachusetts currently has on the adjacent practice is the annual restraints report. For 2024-25, the most recent complete dataset as of this writing, DESE’s School and District Profiles Student Restraints Report records 4,057 students restrained statewide, 29,314 total restraints, and 968 injuries to students or staff, against a statewide enrollment of 925,389. The report carries its own caveats, and they are instructive about how to read the seclusion data when it arrives. Schools are not listed at all if they or their districts certified that they had no restraints; cells are suppressed when, per the report’s note, “fewer than 6 students were restrained” or when injury counts fall within the report’s small-number bands; and the report states plainly that “the Department does not encourage comparison between schools.” The suppression rules are designed to keep small numbers from identifying individual students — with the side effect of making the statewide totals the only safely quotable figures.
Those totals describe physical restraint, not seclusion, and the distinction is the point of the new reporting system. What the restraint numbers establish is scale and injury: in a single school year, physical restraint touched more than four thousand students and produced nearly a thousand injuries. That is the observable edge of the behavioral-intervention system seclusion sits inside, and it is the baseline against which the first seclusion data will be compared.
The Seclusion Void
On seclusion itself, the honest summary is that no statewide figure exists — none existed before August 17, 2026, and none will exist until the June 30, 2027 certification closes the first reporting cycle. Any figure circulating about how many Massachusetts students are secluded in a year is, as of today, an estimate without a state source behind it. The Emergency Seclusion Reporting Form is the first instrument the state has ever pointed at the practice, and its first readings will carry the caveats all first-year data carry: uneven initial compliance, districts learning a new portal, and the real possibility that early totals understate actual use before enforcement matures.
What the record establishes without numbers is that the practice did not disappear during the guidance era. The Acting Education Commissioner described inspecting time-out rooms on every school visit in January 2025; a parent testified the same month about her son’s years inside one; the Board unanimously rewrote the regulation that June. The 2021 memorandum’s urgent language — “Given the trauma and academic loss that the inappropriate use of time-out rooms can cause” — was a five-year-old document by then, still written in the present tense. The first dataset will not settle every question — data collected under a new regime measures reporting as much as practice — but it will replace anecdote with something that can be checked, and that is what the reporting architecture was built to do.
The Compliance Bind: Educator Concerns and DESE’s Answer
The Question Moriarty Kept Asking
Board member Michael Moriarty’s March 2025 challenge — how staff can produce prior documentation for an emergency no one anticipated, “with your license at risk, with the school’s reputation harmed in the media” — received a structural answer in the final regulation. The documentation conditions of 46.07(2)(a) and (d) through (g) describe paperwork that should exist for any student whose crisis behavior is foreseeable enough to plan for: clearances, consents, and a documented history of serious injury are not documents assembled during a crisis, but the record of a team that has planned for one. What remains unresolved is the scenario both sides feared in 2025: the student whose first serious crisis arrives with none of the paperwork on file.
FAQ Q11: The Concession That Defines the Regime
The FAQ updated August 21, 2026 concedes that scenario in plain terms. Q11 states: “In rare and isolated circumstances, a school, district, or program may need to engage in the unexpected use of seclusion without the documentation on file required by 603 CMR 46.07(2)(a) and (d) through (g).” DESE’s answer is not a retroactive defense but an escalation of everything else: the program must satisfy every remaining safeguard — the adult present and monitoring, the student observable, de-escalation continuing — and take immediate corrective action, obtaining the missing clearances and consents and building the documentation that should have preceded the event. The FAQ thereby states the regime’s operating theory: the exception is a narrow lane whose preconditions a program is expected to have assembled in advance, not a refuge for the unprepared.
That theory has a corollary for IEP teams, and it is the quiet centerpiece of the framework. If a student’s behavior poses a recurring risk of serious injury, the team’s obligation is to plan — clearances, consents, trained staff, a crisis protocol — before the crisis, so that a rare emergency use occurs inside the lawful lane. A program that instead leans on Q11 is not operating within the exception; it is accumulating a record of its own unpreparedness, one portal report at a time, in a system the Department monitors and parents can read. The architecture converts the bind Moriarty identified — staff forced to choose between safety and compliance — into a paper trail showing where and how often that choice is made.
The Federal Context: CRDC Disparities and the Keeping All Students Safe Act
The state amendments sit inside a national pattern the federal government has measured for years. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights states the disparity on its disability-discrimination page (last reviewed September 23, 2025, citing Civil Rights Data Collection figures): “students with disabilities represent 12% of students in public schools but 58% of students placed in seclusion or involuntary confinement. They are also 75% of students physically restrained at school and make up 25% of students arrested and referred to law enforcement.” The page does not date the CRDC vintage it cites, and this article attributes the figures to OCR’s summary rather than to a specific collection year. The numbers supply the disparate-impact spine of the issue: seclusion is overwhelmingly the experience of students with disabilities — which is why the Massachusetts amendment reaches the special-education-adjacent restraint regulation and binds approved special education schools directly.
The federal executive framing is the same. In a letter dated January 8, 2025, on restraint and seclusion in schools, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona wrote: “Instead of relying on reactive restraint and seclusion practices, it is critical for educators to be given opportunities to learn about and implement positive, proactive practices.” That is the theory the Healey-Driscoll administration funded: Martinez’s “meaningful change requires investment” and Tutwiler’s “student-centered behavioral support strategies” are the same idea at the state level — educators need the training and supports to do something other than restrain and seclude.
The federal legislative instrument is the Keeping All Students Safe Act, reintroduced in the 119th Congress as H.R. 6617 in a bicameral push in December 2025 — K-12 Dive covered the reintroduction on December 16, 2025, and endseclusion.org marked it on December 12, 2025 — with the stated purpose “To prohibit and prevent seclusion, mechanical restraint, chemical restraint, and dangerous restraints that restrict breathing.” No federal seclusion ban has been enacted, which is what makes the state action the operative law: Massachusetts’ amendments are the vanguard of the same elimination goal, and the regulation states it in its own text — 46.07(4) directs the Department to collect the data “with the goal of reducing and eliminating the use of such emergency interventions in public education programs.” Prohibit, define tightly, count: that is the shared theory of change, and Massachusetts built it into regulation first.
What This Means for Parents
From August 17, 2026, every use of emergency seclusion in a Massachusetts public education program carries parent-facing protections that are specific and checkable:
- Advance documentation is the lawful precondition. A program may seclude only if a documented history of repeated serious self-injury or injury to others exists, physician and mental-health clearances are on file, parent (and, if appropriate, student) consent is recorded, the principal has approved in writing, and the staff involved are trained — all before the event, not after.
- The event itself is regulated. An adult must be present and actively monitoring; the student must be observable in all parts of the room; de-escalation must continue throughout; use beyond 30 minutes requires principal approval; and the practice must never serve as discipline or a standard response to any behavior.
- Notification runs on two clocks. Parents are entitled to reasonable efforts at notice within 24 hours and a written report within three school-working days, in the parent’s customary language, with an opportunity to comment — the timelines that have long governed restraint, now applied to seclusion.
- Injuries trigger the state automatically. An injury to a student or staff member must be reported to DESE within three school-working days, and selecting the injury fields on the reporting form notifies the Department automatically.
- The principal’s records are open to you. The principal must maintain an ongoing record of all reported emergency seclusion instances and of the required weekly and monthly reviews, and make it available “for review by the Department or a parent upon request.”
- The IEP itself is a compliance document. No written behavior plan or IEP may include seclusion as a standard response to any behavior; a plan that names seclusion is out of compliance on its face.
- Approved special education schools are bound too. Approved special education day programs, including the day component of residential programs, must comply with the updated 603 CMR 46.00 for the school day.
Three practical levers follow. First, request the records: the principal’s ongoing seclusion and restraint log is expressly available on request, and the request itself documents both the pattern and the program’s response. Second, watch the timelines: a missing 24-hour notice or a late written report is a compliance failure that can be raised with the building administration, and an injury without a three-day report to the state is a reportable lapse. Third, use the Problem Resolution System: complaint investigations through the Problem Resolution System Office are now an express part of seclusion enforcement, alongside the Department’s cyclical and targeted monitoring. And for students with disabilities, the FAQ’s caution bears repeating: repeated exclusionary measures short of seclusion “could constitute a disciplinary removal from the current placement, implicating the student’s right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE)” — which places repeated removals inside the IEP process, where parents hold procedural rights.
Looking Ahead: June 30, 2027, the 2029 Checkpoint, and the Elimination Goal
The next dated milestone is the first dataset. By June 30, 2027, every program must have reported and certified its emergency seclusion data — including programs that used none — and the Commonwealth will have its first statewide answer to the question the 2021 memorandum never asked. First-year figures should be read cautiously: a new reporting regime measures both practice and reporting, and districts recalibrating from the old “physically prevented” definition to the OCR-aligned one may report either less or more than actual use warrants while enforcement matures. The meaningful trend line begins with the second and third years of data; the first certification is the floor.
The regulation’s own checkpoint arrives around August 17, 2029 — three years from the effective date — when programs using emergency seclusion must have adopted a procedure for “examining and adopting alternatives and strategies for reducing and eliminating its use.” The clause obligates programs to build the alternatives machinery; it does not, on its face, prohibit emergency seclusion after that date, and describing 2029 as a sunset would overstate the current law. But the direction is in the text: 46.07(4) ties the data collection to “the goal of reducing and eliminating the use of such emergency interventions,” and the August 2026 memo says the quiet part in policy language — “Reducing, and ultimately eliminating, the use of seclusion depends on schools and programs establishing proactive systems.” The 2029 checkpoint is where that aspiration either acquires consequences or remains rhetoric.
Between now and then, the things to watch are the architecture’s own behaviors: whether programs report in real time or batch to the June 30 floor; whether the injury pathway produces incident-level records within days rather than years; and how the first public trend line reads. The federal bill remains in motion — the Keeping All Students Safe Act’s reintroduction keeps a national ban on the agenda, and Massachusetts’ dataset will give its advocates an in-state evidentiary base. The amendments’ deepest bet is that measurement changes practice: programs that must document every seclusion will use fewer, and a state that finally counts cannot look away from the count.
Conclusion
The amendments that took effect on August 17, 2026 resolve a decade-old contradiction in Massachusetts education law. Since 2014 the state prohibited seclusion while collecting no data on it; since 2021 it urged districts to abandon time-out rooms while asking no one whether they had. The June 24, 2025 vote ended that arrangement by rebuilding the regime from the definition outward: a seclusion definition aligned with the federal standard, a single emergency exception conditioned on fourteen cumulative requirements, an IEP bar that forecloses the planned-seclusion loophole, and a reporting architecture that runs from the principal’s ongoing log to a DESE portal form with automatic injury notification.
The design’s bet is stated in the documents themselves: seclusion survives only as an exception so narrow that its lawful use requires years of advance planning for the individual student, and every use generates a record the state — or a parent — can read. The compliance concerns Moriarty and the two administrators raised in 2025 were answered structurally rather than rhetorically: FAQ Q11 admits the unforeseeable case and routes it through every remaining safeguard plus immediate corrective action, while the enforcement apparatus — cyclical monitoring, targeted monitoring, facility observations, and Problem Resolution System investigations — is the answer to “problematic districts that do not see a problem.”
What the amendments cannot yet do is answer the question the Commonwealth has never been able to ask: how often does this happen, to whom, and where? That answer begins on June 30, 2027, when the first statewide certification closes. Until then, the state’s own record — the 2021 memorandum’s urgency, the commissioner’s room inspections, the parent testimony, the unanimous vote, and the $3.6 million in implementation grants — documents a policy establishment that has decided the practice should end and has finally built the machinery to find out whether it does. Parents now hold records rights, notification timelines, and a complaint pathway that make them participants in that measurement rather than spectators to it. That shift — from prohibition without data to elimination with data — is the story of the 2026 amendments, and its next chapter arrives with the first numbers.
Sources
- Massachusetts regulations, 603 CMR 46.00, “Prevention of Physical Restraint and Requirements If Used,” as amended by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, June 24, 2025; effective August 17, 2026 (46.08); full text published by DESE, doe.mass.edu/lawsregs/603cmr46.
- Massachusetts DESE Special Education Policy Memo SY2026-2027-1, “Implementation Resources to Help Schools Reduce and Eliminate the Use of Seclusion,” signed by Robert Curtin, Deputy Commissioner, and Jamie Camacho, Acting State Director of Special Education, August 21, 2026.
- Massachusetts DESE Special Education Policy Memo SY2025-2026-9, “Required Reporting on the Use of Seclusion and Emergency Seclusion,” signed by Jamie Camacho, Acting State Director of Special Education, June 25, 2026 (page last updated July 8, 2026).
- Massachusetts DESE Special Education Policy Memo SY2025-2026-1, “Amendments to DESE’s regulations at 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00 (Use of Time-Out Practices),” signed by Jamie Camacho, Acting State Director of Special Education, July 9, 2025.
- Massachusetts DESE Special Education Policy Memo SY2025-2026-5, releasing “Time-Out Practices: Guidance on the Implementation of Regulatory Amendments to 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00,” signed by Jamie Camacho, Acting State Director of Special Education, February 5, 2026.
- DESE guidance, “Reduce and Eliminate the Use of Seclusion: Guidance on the Implementation of Regulatory Amendments to 603 CMR 46.00 and 603 CMR 18.00,” August 21, 2026; and “Use of Seclusion: Frequently Asked Questions,” updated August 21, 2026 (Q11, Q14, and Q16 as quoted).
- Massachusetts DESE memorandum, “Reducing or Eliminating the Use of Time-Out Rooms During the 2021-2022 School Year,” signed by Russell Johnston, Deputy Commissioner and State Special Education Director, September 10, 2021.
- DESE Restraint and Emergency Seclusion Reporting Procedures page (including the requirement to certify annually even if zero incidents occurred) and the Emergency Seclusion Reporting Form Reference Guide, 11 pages; DESE Training Modules and Implementation Guide.
- DESE School and District Profiles, 2024-25 Student Restraints Report, statewide totals (data last updated January 22, 2026).
- mass.gov press release, “Elementary and Secondary Education Board approves changes to time-out practices in schools,” June 24, 2025, with statements from Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler, Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, and Elizabeth Dello Russo Becker, Executive Director, Massachusetts Association of Approved Special Education Schools.
- mass.gov press release, “Healey-Driscoll Administration proposes changes to regulations related to time out,” March 2025; DESE news notice opening public comment on 603 CMR 46.00, March 25, 2025.
- mass.gov press release, “Healey-Driscoll Administration awards $3.6 million to support implementation of revised time-out regulations,” February 6, 2026, with statements from Secretary Tutwiler and Commissioner Pedro Martinez; DESE news release announcing the Fund Code 213 grant round, February 2024.
- BESE June 2025 meeting materials, including the adopted amendments and public-comment summary, and the BESE public-comment notice for 603 CMR 46.00, doe.mass.edu Board documents, FY2025.
- Massachusetts Association of School Committees, Public Policy Update by Tracy Novick, June 25, 2025 (unanimous vote, implementation-date change, and June 24 meeting testimony).
- WBUR and the State House News Service (Sam Drysdale), reporting on the proposed time-out and seclusion regulations, March 26, 2025 (quotes from Acting Education Commissioner Russell Johnston, Iraida Alvarez, Emily LaMarca, and BESE member Michael Moriarty).
- The Boston Globe, “Massachusetts seclusion timeout rooms in schools get tighter rules,” March 25, 2025.
- The Policy Minute (Center for Education Policy and Practice), “New time-out/seclusion guidance 2026,” March 16, 2026 (practitioner analysis of what the amendments did not change).
- U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “Disability Discrimination: Discipline, Restraint, and Seclusion,” page last reviewed September 23, 2025, citing Civil Rights Data Collection figures; CRDC School Discipline Snapshot.
- U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, letter on restraints and seclusion in schools, January 8, 2025.
- Keeping All Students Safe Act, H.R. 6617, 119th Congress, reintroduced December 2025; K-12 Dive coverage of the reintroduction, December 16, 2025; endseclusion.org, December 12, 2025.