New York district accused of confining disabled children in wooden boxes

Wooden boxes used inside Salmon River Central School District’s special-education program have triggered a statewide reckoning over how the district treated young children with disabilities, why parents were kept in the dark, and whether oversight failed in a community that already carries deep historical trauma.

State education officials said the practice amounted to seclusion, which New York rules prohibit. The district, based in Fort Covington and serving students on the Akwesasne, or St. Regis Mohawk, reservation, said the boxes were dismantled and removed after photos of one box circulated on social media in December 2025. District officials said the practice ended that same month.

The controversy widened quickly inside the Mohawk community. The St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council called for a vote of no confidence in Superintendent Dr. Stanley Harper, and tribal leaders said they were confronting multiple investigations. The district placed Harper, the special education director, a principal and a teacher on leave while the school board opened an independent investigation and cooperated with a New York State Education Department probe.

The facts have sharpened concern about how a public district serving largely Native American students could use a restraint-like measure without informing families. Parents later filed a lawsuit and a notice of claim on behalf of an 8-year-old nonverbal autistic boy, alleging he was placed in a wooden box as part of his behavioral intervention plan. The boy’s mother said she learned about the box through Facebook and had not been notified by the school.

The episode also exposed a gap between state rules and local practice. New York’s revised behavioral-support regulations took effect on August 2, 2023, and annual reporting for restraint, timeout and prohibited interventions began with the 2024-25 school year. Yet state officials still found the district’s use of the boxes violated those rules, and an outside investigation in March 2026 found multiple violations of state education regulations.

For Akwesasne families, the outrage was not only about one program but about what it symbolized. Community members said the boxes recalled the abuses of residential schools for Native children, where state power separated children from families and imposed control without consent. That history has made the Salmon River case more than a local scandal: it has become a test of whether state oversight, board accountability and promised reforms can protect disabled children from being hidden away again.