I agree that the school is failing him.
Allowing the use of force to "disarm" a kid (i.e., take away his video game) whose behavior at the beginning of this episode was passive defiance is definitely an overreaction that falls outside the school's mission to act in loco parentis.
Please reread the paragraph preceding the one in which the boy's mother states that his counsellor says her son is getting worse:
At a court hearing Friday, the boy's mother told Family Court Referee David Perkins that her son had been in counseling since the fourth grade after he was illegally kidnapped by his stepmother and kept away from his mother for a year.
A year is a long time when you're nine years old [average age of a fourth grader]. I doubt that the school is unaware of this episode. Yet they chose coercion.
At age 14, if they don't act fast to improve the situation, that child will be lost for good.
Agreed. If you were the kid, would you trust anyone in authority at that school, or for that matter anyone wearing a police uniform, ever again? I know I wouldn't. They did a really nice job of undermining whatever trust he might have had in adult authority, already clouded by kidnapping.
On the other hand, I don't believe this treatment was about helping him at all. It was about taking his toy away.