School under fire for placing autistic student’s desk in bathroom stall

A middle school in Washington is coming under fire after staff placed the desk of an 11-year-old boy with autism in a bathroom stall, CNN reports.

According to the network, the boy’s desk was moved to the stall after his mother, Danielle Goodwin, told staff at the Whatcom Middle School in Bellingham that her son, who also has an auto immune disorder, worked better in quiet surroundings.

{mosads}”I was stunned,” Goodwin told a CNN affiliate last week. “I was so shocked I just took the picture because I didn’t believe what I was seeing.” 

Goodwin in a Facebook post last Thursday shared an image of her son standing in the bathroom next to his desk and chair.    

Goodwin said in the post, which had racked up over 15,000 reactions as of Sunday afternoon, that his teacher “also provided a camping mat and pillow for him to nap” on the bathroom floor.

“I asked if he could work in the library and she said no. She also said it was fine for him to be in there because they ‘don’t use it as a bathroom,’” she continued.

Shannon McMinimee, an attorney representing Goodwin’s family, told CNN that she couldn’t “believe that there was anybody that thought this was a good idea.” 

“There’s a lot of different ways you can accommodate students with disabilities without humiliating them,” she said. 

McMinimee has called on the school to apologize to Goodwin’s family and told CNN that she has requested a tort claim, which is a step she said attorneys are required to take in Washington before being able to file a suit.

In a statement shared on the Bellingham Public Schools website on Friday, Superintendent Greg Baker wrote that officials “have been fact-finding in order to ensure we understand what occurred; that work continues.”

He said that his “preliminary assessment is this idea was well-intentioned, but in the end we did not move forward with it.”

“This current situation is an example of staff trying to seek a solution to temporarily repurpose a room. To our knowledge, the room had been used as storage, not as an active restroom,” he also wrote.

“We are all probably aware that state funding for schools is limited, particularly with regards to construction, and thus schools often have limited space to meet students’ instructional and social-emotional needs,” he wrote. “We are always looking for creative ways to best use our facilities to meet students’ needs.” 

He went on to write that his staff is “incredibly skilled, compassionate and dedicated,” but added that “like all of us, including myself, our staff are not perfect.”