The Salmon River Central School District in Fort Covington, New York, confined elementary school children with disabilities in wooden boxes. The children included Native American students. The confinement was not a single incident or an aberration by a rogue employee. It was a practice. It continued until December 2025, when photographs circulated on social media and became impossible to ignore. Parents were not notified. The New York State government has now ordered sweeping reforms at the district.
The phrase “wooden boxes” is doing a significant amount of work in the reporting on this story, and it deserves precision. The boxes were constructed enclosures used to isolate children — specifically children with disabilities, specifically including children whose disabilities affected their behavior in ways the school found difficult to manage in a standard classroom setting. The practice of isolating children with behavioral or developmental disabilities in enclosed spaces is not unique to Salmon River. It exists, under various names and in various forms, in school districts across the country. The photographs made Salmon River visible. The practice made it possible.
The legal framework governing the treatment of students with disabilities in American public schools is extensive. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. The use of seclusionary restraint — isolating a child in an enclosed space — is governed by state regulations that vary significantly in their specificity and enforcement. New York has regulations on seclusion. Salmon River’s practice existed within a state that had regulations prohibiting what it was doing. The regulations did not prevent it.
The argument that this is a resource problem — that under-funded rural districts serving high-need populations lack the trained staff, therapeutic infrastructure, and administrative capacity to manage children with significant behavioral needs through any means other than physical isolation — contains a material truth. Special education is expensive. Rural districts are underfunded. The gap between what the law requires and what the funding supports is real and is not unique to Salmon River. The argument does not justify what happened. It describes the conditions that made it more likely to happen and less likely to be caught.
The children in those boxes were not children whose families had political leverage. They were children in a poor rural district, many of them Native American, many of them with disabilities that made them less able to communicate what was happening to them. The parents who were not notified were parents whose trust in the institution was being exploited by the institution. The photographs that ended the practice came from outside the institution because nothing inside the institution produced accountability.
New York’s order for sweeping reforms will produce paperwork, compliance reporting, and administrative changes. What it will not automatically produce is the condition that would have prevented the practice in the first place: an institutional culture in which the dignity of a child with a disability is not subordinated to the convenience of managing that child’s presence in a school that was not adequately resourced to serve them.
That condition is what the rest of the country needs to examine, not just Salmon River.
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