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
This district is below average on support staff
Its school psychologists, social workers, counselors and nurses work out to 4.4 per 1,000 students — below the Illinois average of 5.6. These are the people who evaluate children and deliver the counseling, OT, PT, and speech services written into an IEP, so fewer of them usually means longer waits and thinner services.
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.