Using love, patience and kindness to treat troubled young schoolchildren is apparently a thing of the past in America, as teachers now routinely throw students, many of them special needs, into windowless "seclusion" rooms lined with cold, hard concrete floors.

A quick Google image search for seclusion rooms, also called "recovery rooms" or "scream rooms," results in a variety of images, many of which resemble eerie prison cells enclosed with thick steel doors.

Efforts by NPR and ProPublica to investigate this outrageous practice uncovered 267,000 instances nationwide throughout the 2011-2012 school year during which students were locked and restrained in seclusion rooms, with more than 75 percent of those cases involving children with disabilities, according to information provided by the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data.

In more than 160,000 instances, students were restrained. About 7,6000 of those cases used mechanical restraints. In most scenarios, this type of controversial disciplinary action was used on children who are "autistic or labeled emotionally disturbed," possibly as a result of the damaging effects of neurotoxic ingredients in vaccines.

The 2011-2012 school year was the first time reporting seclusion and restraint was mandatory for schools, reports Texas Monthly. However, in many cases, schools were not required to notify parents when their children were placed in scream rooms unless the staff had to physically restrain them.

Texas Public Radio reports:

Sometimes the students will get upset; they might even get violent. To calm or control them, teachers and aides might isolate them in a separate room, which is a practice known as seclusion. Or they might restrain them by holding or hugging them, or pinning them to the ground, or by using mechanical restraints, such as a belt or even handcuffs.

Special needs student suffers from broken hand after being forced inside a scream room by faculty members

A separate 2009 investigation by the Government Accountability Office also concluded that scream rooms are used more frequently on special needs students and, in extreme cases, may result in injury or death, as with the case of 13-year-old Carson Luke.