When I was in the 5th grade I had a teacher that had shaped and decorated his room to be a monopoly game board.
His desk was Boardwalk and Parkplace. The other desks were arranged in groups corresponding to the 'neighborhoods' I guess... It's been a long time since I was in the 5th, and I haven't played Monopoly in decades.
Anyway, he also had a refrigerator box in the back of the class, painted and cut out to be the 'jail.
There was a desk inside and the front of the box had a window with bars cut out for the person in jail to be able to see out.
I was raised fairly poor. My Mom had some mental instability issues. Dad wasn't in the picture really... except to beat me on the weekends once in a while, coincidentally because I'd done bad in school. His go-to device for spanking me was the plastic sections of race track from my Hot wheels car set.
I digress...
I didn't have decent clothes. I didn't speak or behave like most of the other kids. I didn't have a family model like the rest of the folks in the area... Struggling to be able to describe this. It wasn't any fun for me. I was ostracized, picked on brutally, beat up, so on and so forth.
Regardless I was a pretty smart kid, read a lot, could draw and was otherwise creative too.
I was never taught how to study. Not only was I not helped with school or homework but I wasn't made to do it either. With no exaggeration I can tell you that I might have completed a dozen or so homework assignments in a school year at the most.
Result of all this was social promotions, never actually getting the background I needed to move forward, the social stigma got worse. I was depressed, angry. GD it's hard to put this together in my head this morning.
I'll cut to the chase. Sorry.
Sometime in the middle of the school year, I got in trouble in class. I was placed in the Jail box. Subsequently, I continued to misbehave.... I talked too much, I would draw on my desk and I'd read a book I'd brought from home rather than pay attention in class.
Eventually the box became my personal desk. I spent the second half of the school year in a fucking fridge box.
This poor kid that the OP posted about looks just like me as a kid... but I did MONTHS of it.
The teacher... many, many years later... was brought up on charges of sexual abuse. He'd never laid a finger on me. Not even a hint of the kinds of things he was charged with, but I felt a little vindicated anyway.