Seclusion and Restraint Reporting Requirements

Dear District Administrators and Special Needs Scholarship Program (SNSP) School Administrators:

2019 Wis. Act 118 requires districts and SNSP participating private schools to report seclusion and restraint data annually. The 2022-23 school-year information must be shared with your school board by October 1 and reported to the Department of Public Instruction by December 1, 2023. More information about the Act and seclusion and restraint can be found on the Seclusion and Physical Restraint webpage.

To assist with this data collection, DPI will send you a Qualtrics survey link this week to enable you or a designee to submit your district’s information. You must complete the form even if you do not have any incidents to report for your district or school.

Information about the survey:

After clicking the link, you will have an opportunity to complete the form yourself or designate another individual. The person reporting the data will be asked to enter data for each school in the district, including alternate learning programs. They will identify the number of incidents of seclusion and the total number of pupils involved in these incidents. Next, they will be asked to identify how many of the pupils were students with disabilities. This process will then be repeated for incidents of restraint in each school.

To make this reporting process less laborious for larger districts, districts with more than ten schools will upload a file with the required data. If your district meets this threshold, a file upload question within the Qualtrics survey will automatically display. Please follow the format identified within the question.

In light of feedback shared by school staff in the past, DPI is offering an additional feature for districts to disaggregate incidents that involve law enforcement. As such, the form will present users with a conditional question asking if any of the total reported incidents involved law enforcement and if so, present them with a table to report this data. While this will not reduce the total number of incidents in a district, it will allow DPI to report this information more accurately so that incidents involving law enforcement are distinguished from incidents involving school staff. As a reminder, all seclusions and restraints conducted by law enforcement must be reported as mandated by state statute.

If you have any questions regarding this form or do not receive the email containing the survey link by October 1, please contact Denise Kohout at denise.kohout@dpi.wi.gov or (608) 266-0282.

If you have any questions regarding the requirements mandated by 2019 Wis. Act 118, please visit the Seclusion and Physical Restraint webpage or contact Timothy Peerenboom at timothy.peerenboom@dpi.wi.gov or (608) 266-1999.

Thank you in advance for your time and for helping us fulfill this requirement.