HB 209 Summary

• Prohibits school personnel from placing students with disabilities in seclusion and bans specific manual physical restraint techniques including prone/supine restraint, pain inducement, bone locks, choking, and pressure on chest or neck.

• Permits manual physical restraint only when imminent risk of serious injury or death exists; requires school medical evaluation of restrained students and limits restraint duration to the minimum necessary.

• Requires school districts to develop training and certification programs for personnel using manual physical restraint, with initial training covering deescalation, risk assessment, specific techniques, team implementation, and CPR; mandates annual refresher courses.

• Mandates schools notify parents within the school day when restraint occurs and provide written incident reports within 3 school days; requires incident reports include student demographics, incident context, behavior description, injuries, medical evaluation results, and positive behavioral strategies used.

• Requires schools to send weekly redacted incident reports to Disability Rights Florida; mandates Department of Education maintain and publish monthly aggregate restraint data by county, school, and student exceptionality; requires review of functional behavioral assessments when students are restrained more than twice in one school year.