State Superintendent Jill Underly is calling for more special education and mental health funding in response to a new Department of Public Instruction report showing double-digit increases in instances of students being secluded or restrained.
Starting in the 2019-20 school year, state law has required public school districts and private schools participating in the Special Needs Scholarship Program to annually report seclusion and restraint data for the previous school year.
Underly in a statement called the increases “alarming.”
“These troubling incidents reflect a system that needs more than just reactive measures; it needs proactive solutions,” Underly said Monday. “Wisconsin students deserve more support than what our state legislature allocates to special education and what the school funding formula provides.”
Gov. Tony Evers has proposed increasing the special education reimbursement rate from 33% to 60% in the state budget. Underly had proposed raising the rate to 75% and then to 90% the year after. Evers is also seeking more than $167.7 million for mental health services in schools.
Overall, 51.2% of the 415 schools reported zero incidents of seclusion or restraint in the 2023-24 school year, while 44.4% reported at least one incident of restraint and 32.5% reported at least one incident of seclusion.
There were 6,222 incidents of seclusion involving 2,066 students. That was a 15.3% increase in seclusion incidents from the 5,396 reported for the 2022-23 school year. Students with disabilities accounted for 80.7% of secluded students.
Meanwhile, there were 7,439 incidents of restraint involving 2,915 students. Restraint incidents went up 16.9% compared to the 6,366 reported in the prior school year. Of those restrained, 76.1% were students with disabilities.
Instances where students are both secluded and restrained are counted separately as seclusion or restraint, meaning total numbers of students can’t be added together.
GOP chairs of the Legislature’s education committees did not immediately provide comment on the report and Underly’s funding call.
The report says yearly trends should be considered with caution, noting this is only the fifth time the state has collected the data, and not all schools offered in-person instruction through the entire school year in 2020-21 and 2021-22 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report notes seclusion and restraint “must be a last resort and used only when there is a clear, present, and imminent physical safety risk to the student or others and when it is the least restrictive intervention feasible.”
Other findings in the report included:
- There were three seclusions and 2.6 restraints per student;
- Most incidents again occurred in elementary schools, including 89.1% of seclusions and 82% of restraints;
- Incident rates don’t appear to be strongly connected to a specific region in the state, or to urban or rural areas based on incidents per 1,000 students across the 12 Cooperative Educational Service Agencies in Wisconsin.
