Inclusion — where this district teaches kids with disabilities
Federal law (the IDEA, 20 U.S.C. §1412(a)(5) the law ) says children with disabilities should learn alongside their classmates without disabilities as much as is right for them — what the law calls the “Least Restrictive Environment.” The bar below shows how this district actually places its students with IEPs, from a regular classroom most of the day to a fully separate school. There's no single right answer — some children genuinely need a more specialized setting — but districts that include more students in the regular classroom usually have the staffing and support to do it well.
Safety & discipline record
How the district responds when a child with a disability struggles, from the federal civil-rights collection (CRDC). Suspension/expulsion remove a child from school; a police referral or arrest brings law enforcement into a school matter; physical restraint is staff holding a child immobile; seclusion is confining a child alone in a room they can't leave. The government tracks these because students with disabilities face them far out of proportion: nationally they are about 12% of students but 75% of those physically restrained and 58% of those secluded, and are suspended at roughly twice the rate of students without disabilities. U.S. Dept. of Education / OCR High numbers can flag a district that meets behavior with force or exclusion rather than support — read them as something to ask about, not a verdict.
Students with disabilities — and who supports them
Data vintage — and why some of it lags
Each figure is a public record, linked to its source with a retrieval date. Vintages differ because the agencies publish on different cycles:
- Inclusion / LRE, % with an IEP, and the academic outcomes for students with disabilities (proficiency, graduation, dropout, chronic absenteeism, mobility, 9th-grade-on-track) — ISBE Illinois Report Card, 2024–25 (current). The state publishes annually each fall.
- Restraint & seclusion — federal CRDC, 2017–18. This is the newest usable collection: the CRDC runs every two years and releases ~2–3 years later. The 2021–22 collection is released but, for restraint/seclusion, ~80% of Illinois schools are coded “not applicable/skipped” — virtual/remote-only schools (widespread that pandemic year) were skipped for this measure, and the collection had a documented skip-logic failure. The next complete collection, 2023–24, is expected from OCR around the end of 2025; we’ll refresh when it lands.
- Due-process decisions — ISBE, through FY 2026 (current). Statewide, because ISBE anonymizes the district.
- OCR complaints — value pending. The federal Office for Civil Rights complaint portal blocks automated access; on the roadmap.
Verify the numbers yourself. Every figure is computed from the agencies' public-use files and linked above. We cross-checked our Illinois restraint/seclusion/suspension totals against OCR's official state tables and they match exactly — e.g. physical restraint · seclusion · out-of-school suspension (open the file, find the Illinois row). PedsList aggregates and links — it does not editorialize beyond what the public data shows.