During the state of Iowa’s investigation this fall into the alleged use of excessive restraint on troubled teens, the director of a for-profit home for troubled youth said no serious injuries had occurred for over a year.

Three campus nurses at Clarinda Academy in southwest Iowa also told investigators that no major injuries had occurred to restrained students in at least two years, new documents obtained this week under Iowa’s open records law show.

But some staff at Clarinda have slammed children to the ground and injured them while punishing them, according to documents from Iowa’s Department of Human Services.

They also kept several students for weeks at a time in a suspension room with no plan to help them earn their way back into Clarinda’s general population, the documents show.

Under existing procedures at Clarinda, residents are only expected to be secluded from their peers for up to 72 hours if they were posing a threat, likely to cause property damage or seriously disrupt a group. They could be held another 72 hours if that behavior continued.

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But a month after eight teens 14 to 17 ran away this spring and assaulted two staff members, they were still kept in the suspension room, state reports show.

State inspectors received a complaint May 8 related to the run-away incident, which happened March 20. Two staff were injured when the students fled; one suffered broken bones and fell unconscious.

The unnamed complainant said that when one teen refused to write a statement acknowledging he was responsible for the assault on one staff member, he was slammed to the floor and restrained.

Later, all the boys were forced to sit in chairs in their dorm and stare at a wall for several hours, according to inspection reports.

One of the teens told the investigator they were kept in the private suspension room and given school work for about a week but then received “nothing but a few books."

"The boys were never told how to work their way back into the group and this lasted until he was released April 6,” the report says.

After that incident was reported to the state, Clarinda staff members created documents to make it appear they had required service plans for the teens and forged student signatures on those documents.

“The names of the children written on the back of the documents were forged, as none of the children had signed or even seen” the plans created for them, investigators wrote.

Clarinda Academy houses hundreds of delinquents and foster children ages 13 to 18 with significant behavioral and mental health needs — about two-thirds from outside Iowa. Iowa's Department of Corrections rents buildings and land to its owner, Sequel Youth and Family Services, a national company specializing in residential programs for youth.

► Related: Fights, sex crimes found at Iowa's Clarinda Academy amid state probe

The federal government has tried to move facilities such as Clarinda and Woodward Academy, a sister facility owned by Sequel, away from restraining youth, saying the practice can be harmful and re-traumatize them.

Iowa's group-care standards allow the use of physical restraint "to prevent a child from hurting them self, others or property."

State investigators required Clarinda to rewrite procedures and retrain staff this year after their investigation. But the complaints obtained under open records law raised more questions about the treatment of foster and delinquent children in Sequel's care.

This fall, Disability Rights Washington said it partnered with sister organization Disability Rights Iowa, based in Des Moines, to expose "a very restrictive and segregated institution where policies, training and oversight do not adequately protect against the risk of abusive restraints."

Disability Rights Washington workers said students told them a different story in private interviews than what Iowa licensing officials reported earlier after routine visits.

Steve Gilbert, executive vice president at Sequel, said Clarinda successfully remediated problems identified by state investigators after the Washington advocacy organization released its finding this fall.

"Their investigation concluded that our use of restraints were all appropriate and were consistently utilized for the safety of the students and people around them," he said.

During the investigation, he said, several students from each of Clarinda's dormitories were interviewed, as well as staff. He noted that students also remarked about improvements and made positive comments about their experiences.

"We work very hard to continually improve our practices and ensure that we are providing the best care possible for our students," Gilbert said.

Clarinda Academy and Clarinda Youth Corp. still face a trial this spring after a 19-year-old Texas woman alleged in a civil lawsuit they were negligent in hiring Antonio Aranda, a counselor who sexually assaulted her in November 2015, when she was 17 years old.

Little information released about Woodward

Police were called to Clarinda Academy about 35 times in five years, including for physical and sexual assaults, a Reader's Watchdog report last month found.

Incomplete information released by Woodward police indicates they were called far more — about 55 times — in just two years. Police have responded to calls for assistance with assaults, harassment, drug use, runaways, sex offenses and medical emergencies, a log of calls obtained by Watchdog shows.

Under their contracts, Woodward and Glenwood are supposed to report “critical incidents” to the state, including the use of restraints, sexual conduct, serious bodily injury, serious illnesses, injuries to residents, self-harm, run-away attempts and police calls.

But Iowa’s Department of Human Services failed this month to respond to an open records request to release information about the number of critical incidents reported at Clarinda and Woodward.

Former employees tell Watchdog that a “No Reject, No Eject” clause in Clarinda and Woodward’s new contracts in 2017 — required by the state of all such facilities — has meant no Iowa youth can be refused, including sex offenders and the most violent teens.

Such policies have been controversial nationally as they’ve been tried in states around the country: Some say they help staff at residential facilities learn how to better intervene with the most troubled youth; others say the policies create danger for other kids and lead to high staff turnover and lower morale.

Mark Parham, a 32-year-old former staff member at Woodward’s sex offender unit, said he quit after about three months on the job in part because he disagreed with how often youths were restrained there.

He said staff members would sometimes goad teens to a point where they felt they had to be restrained.

Parham said he made several trips to the hospital with children who had been restrained and injured, one of whom suffered a concussion and wet his pants.

“The way they trained me to restrain is not how they do it," he said. "In a span of two weeks, I went to a spate of hospital calls and wouldn’t get home until 1 or 2 a.m. The restraints were over the top. There were more injuries than there were successes."

Kari Sisson, executive director of the Association of Children's Residential Treatment Centers in Wisconsin, said restraints can be used in limited circumstances, as some programs deal with very complex behavioral issues.

But most programs nationally are moving away from the use of restraints as a way to control trouble kids.

Sisson said it often takes years to change the culture, "but it absolutely can be done."