Seclusion and Restraint Reporting Requirements

Dear District Administrators,

As you are likely aware, 2019 Wis. Act 118 revised Wisconsin state law on the use of seclusion and restraint in schools and went into effect March 4, 2020. The Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has developed two documents highlighting these changes. One document provides a summary of the changes made through 2019 Wis. Act 118. The other provides a side-by-side comparison of the new requirements compared to the requirements under the previous law: 2011 Wis. Act 125. Although many schools provided instruction in a virtual setting throughout much of the 2020-21 school year, LEAs are still mandated to collect this information, even if no incidents occurred.

The purpose of this letter is to provide you with information and instructions regarding LEA reporting requirements. Annually, the governing body of each LEA must report seclusion and restraint data from the previous school year to DPI by December 1. There are six data points that must be reported to DPI reflecting incidents of seclusion and restraint for each school within the LEA. The data points are:

• the number of incidents of seclusion during the previous school year
• the total number of students who were involved in incidents of seclusion during the previous school year
• the number of students with disabilities who were involved in incidents of seclusion during the previous school year
• the number of incidents of physical restraint during the previous school year
• the total number of students who were involved in incidents of physical restraint during the previous school year
• the number of students with disabilities who were involved in incidents of physical restraint during the previous school year

“Incident” means an occurrence of a covered individual or a law enforcement officer using seclusion or physical restraint on a pupil. It is considered one incident if immediately following the use of seclusion or physical restraint on a pupil, the pupil's behavior presents a clear, present, and imminent risk to the physical safety of the pupil or others, and a covered individual or law enforcement officer resumes the use of seclusion or physical restraint.

Please note that this same data must be reported to the LEA’s governing body (in most cases, the local school board) by October 1. The data collected by DPI is no different than the data required to be reported to the LEA’s governing body. DPI has worked to ensure accurate data can be submitted as efficiently as possible. To fulfill this obligation per 2019 WI Act 118, the following process has been developed for reporting incidents of seclusion and restraint in your district:

Beginning on October 1, 2021, all district administrators throughout the state will receive an emailed link to a personalized Qualtrics survey which will be used to enter and submit all required seclusion and restraint data for their district. Within the survey, district administrators may assign a designee to report the information through the Qualtrics survey. Should you opt to assign a designee to report this data, you must do so by entering their information in the Qualtrics survey you receive. Once DPI has obtained a designee’s contact information, that designee will automatically receive the same survey to fulfill the reporting requirement. It is important to note that all District Administrators or their designee must gather the required seclusion and restraint data (listed in the bullet points above) for each school in their district prior to beginning the Qualtrics survey.

About the Qualtrics survey:

This form will first ask district administrators if they wish to complete the form themselves or designate another individual. Should you opt to report the data yourself, you will then be directed to a table that allows you to enter data for each school in your district, first regarding the number of incidents of seclusion and pupils involved in these incidents, disaggregated by students with disabilities. This process will then be repeated for incidents of restraint in each school. To make this reporting process easier for larger districts, DPI is allowing LEAs with more than 10 schools to upload a file with the required data. If your district meets this threshold, you will automatically be directed to a file upload question within the Qualtrics survey.

Details on required format for file upload for LEAs with more than ten schools:

LEAs authorized to report data via a file upload are required to follow a specific format to ensure uniformity across the state. First, the file must be uploaded as a .csv rather than a generic .xlsx file. Additionally, data must be formatted as follows: each school in a given district must be listed with its own row on the x-axis of a table, with the six questions each having their own columns on the y axis. An example is provided below:

*Please note that you should only report numeric values in this table (i.e., do not write “5 students”, enter the number 5).

If you have any questions regarding this survey, please contact Owen Tortora at owen.totora@dpi.wi.gov or (608) 264-6715. If you have any questions regarding the requirements mandated by 2019 Wis. Act 118, please contact Timothy Peerenboom at timothy.peerenboom@dpi.wi.gov or (608) 266-1999.