Disability Rights Wisconsin in collaboration with Wisconsin Family Ties and WI Facets worked on LRB-1898, to strengthen the statute on restraint and seclusion for Wisconsin students. It is s now circulating for co-sponsorship in the legislature!
The bill would make many important improvements, including:
• Require that restraint and seclusion data be reported to DPI as well as school boards (under current law, only school boards receive the data)
• Require schools to convey a written incident report to parents, including the names & titles of covered individuals and law enforcement officers present (current law only requires that parents be notified that the report exists, and does not require law enforcement officer’s names to be included)
• Remove the requirement that IEP teams decide whether restraint/seclusion is likely to be used a second time
• Require that the principal meet with the staff who participated in the incident to discuss the sequence of events and strategies to prevent future incidents
• Explicitly prohibit prone restraint
• Clarify that incidents involving law enforcement officers must be reported in a district’s data, even though law enforcement officers are not defined as “covered individuals” in the restraint/seclusion statute
• Specify that the restraint and seclusion law applies also to students who are district-placed into private schools
• Clarify the definition of “incident” for data reporting purposes
• Update the training requirements for an increased focus on de-escalation, and remove the requirement (but not prohibit) the teaching of “hands-on” techniques.
Read the bill.
Read the co-sponsor memo.
And then contact your state Senator and Assembly Representative and ask them to co-sponsor LRB-1898! The deadline for co-sponsorship is Monday 3/12 at 5pm.
Even though the current session is ending early and the bill has run out of time to pass in 2018, it is critical to build support for when the bill is re-introduced next session (early 2019)!