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Students across the state are secluded and restrained thousands of times each year.
The state defines seclusion as the confinement of a student alone in a room or an area from which they’re physically prevented from leaving. Physical restraint is defined as physical contact between a school employee and a student that involves the use of a manual hold to restrict freedom of movement of all or part of a student's body.
Traditional public schools and charter schools are required to report the number of incidents of restraint and seclusion by both employees and school resource officers in their annual performance reports. But these reports are difficult to find on the DOE website. And no database allows the public to search for seclusion or restraint incidents by school or district.
As a result, WFYI requested data from the Indiana Department of Education to create the below database as part of the investigation reporting project Uncounted — about the lack of state accountability on the seclusion and restraint of students.
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