Seclusion and Restraint Reporting Requirements

Dear District Administrators,

2019 Wis. Act 118 requires districts to report seclusion and restraint data annually. The information must be shared with your school board by October 1 and reported to the Department of Public Instruction by December 1, 2022. 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 survey link on Monday, October 3, 2022, 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.

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 the total number of pupils involved and how many 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 may 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 and requests shared by school staff in the most recent data collection, DPI is now offering an additional feature for districts to disaggregate incidents that involve law enforcement. As such, the new 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 more accurately report this information 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 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.