Eleven-year-old Lucas Goodwin arrived at his middle school in Washington State last week only to find that his seat was in a new place: a bathroom.

His mother, Danielle Goodwin, who had asked the school for a quiet place for her son to work because he is autistic and has an autoimmune disorder, posted a photo on Facebook of his desk over a toilet.

“My son was humiliated, embarrassed, and disgusted at this inhumane suggestion that he work in a bathroom,” she wrote in the post, which has been shared and commented on thousands of times.

The school, Whatcom Middle School in Bellingham, faced fierce criticism for its decision, which reflected how students with autism can sometimes be stigmatized for seeking special accommodations.

Greg Baker, the superintendent of Bellingham Public Schools, said in a statement on Friday that staff members had been “trying to seek a solution to temporarily repurpose a room,” adding that it had been “used as storage, not as an active restroom.”

“We are all probably aware that state funding for schools is limited, particularly with regards to construction, and thus schools often have limited space to meet students’ instructional and social-emotional needs,” he continued.

“My preliminary assessment is this idea was well-intentioned, but in the end we did not move forward with it,” he said. “No students spent time in the repurposed space as part of their school day.”

Shannon McMinimee, a lawyer representing the Goodwin family, said she had been in education law for 16 years and had “never seen anything this weird.”

“And when you think about just how hard middle school is, can you imagine being the boy in the bathroom?” she added. “How is he going to make friends?”

In addition to autism, Lucas has pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcus; symptoms include behavioral tics and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ms. Goodwin had asked the school to find her son a quiet place so he could concentrate, an accommodation he had been provided in elementary school. Based on conversations with school staff, Ms. Goodwin believed they could find an appropriate space, like an empty office, Ms. McMinimee said.

After the school refused to move Lucas out of the bathroom and into the library, Ms. Goodwin took him home, where he has been since the incident, Ms. McMinimee said.

Ms. McMinimee said she hoped the school would conduct an investigation into the teacher’s decisions as a human resources matter and as a violation of the federal civil rights law against disability discrimination.

“Because if this could happen once, it could happen again,” she said.

Kim Musheno, the vice president of public policy for the Autism Society of America, an advocacy organization, said the decision to offer a bathroom as a quiet study space “did not pass any common-sense rule.”

Ms. Musheno said that autistic children or those with behavioral problems have sometimes been placed in locked closets or padded seclusion rooms at school, or had restraints used on them.

Nearly 70,000 students with disabilities were restrained or secluded in the 2013-14 school year, the most recent for which data was available, according to Education Week. Students of color, and especially students of color who have disabilities, are more likely to be restrained or secluded than their peers, and they are more frequently and more harshly disciplined in general, she added, citing a report published this year by the Government Accountability Office.

Ms. Musheno said that while states have made progress by enacting legislation to protect students from these practices, at least 11 states do not have policies in place. In many states, she said, parents are not notified that their child has been placed in seclusion or has been restrained.

“We need a federal floor,” she said.

Her organization is part of a coalition working on federal legislation that would make it illegal for any school receiving federal funds to seclude or physically restrain a child, except when necessary to protect students and staff, and that would provide training to help educators address challenging behavior.

Ilene Schwartz, a professor of education and the director of the Haring Center for Inclusive Education at the University of Washington in Seattle, said that educators are sometimes “asked to do things that are near to impossible,” and are hamstrung by limited options and resources, including time and training.

It’s a “very hard job, and an underappreciated job,” she said.

Washington lags behind other states in serving students with disabilities, according to a yearlong investigation published by the news station King 5, which estimated that many of the state’s 150,000 school-age children with learning disabilities were being left behind because of a lack of funding.

The Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds in Washington, which works with families and school districts to resolve disagreements and complaints, received 920 calls from families, community professionals and educators last year, about 35 percent of which involved concerns about special education programs, said Rose Spidell, an education ombuds with the office.

Ms. Spidell said that families are sometimes seeking reassurance that there is empathy and love for the child by asking, “Would you do this for your own son?”

Lucas’s case is “heartbreaking,” she said, but it showed the need for more direct and frank conversations about the myths and stigmas around disabilities.

“Would we imagine a similar suggestion would be proposed for any other student who just needed a quiet place for whatever reason?” she said. “Or is there something about the understanding and the ability to empathize with, and connect to, and see the core humanity and dignity of, a child with disabilities?”

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