The complete federal record on who gets restrained and secluded in American schools.
Prior Signal transformed two years of raw U.S. Department of Education CRDC data into an accessible, credible, interactive public record — for the nation’s leading restraint-and-seclusion advocacy organization.
What AASR needed.
The Alliance Against Seclusion & Restraint is the country’s most visible advocacy organization working to end the physical restraint and seclusion of students in schools. Every two years, the U.S. Department of Education releases the Civil Rights Data Collection — the most comprehensive federal census of school discipline practices.
AASR needed a data experience that could turn this raw federal record into an authoritative, citable public reference — one their advocates, congressional contacts, and journalists could open and check.
Structure. Verify. Build. Design.
Prior Signal’s method for high-stakes data work: every output is ground-truthed against the official record before any design work begins. In an advocacy context, a data error is a liability.
Python pipeline parses and normalizes both CRDC vintages. All 14 headline figures computed independently and held for cross-validation.
Each figure is asserted against OCR's official "A First Look" publication. Any mismatch aborts the pipeline. Zero tolerance for data error.
Verified data is inlined into a single HTML file. Vanilla JS only — no runtime network requests, no third-party scripts, no build toolchain to run it.
WCAG 2.1 AA throughout. Every chart has an accessible data table fallback. Okabe-Ito colorblind-safe palette. Reduced-motion gate on all animations.
What the data shows.
Reproduced directly from the CRDC record and cited against OCR’s official publications. Each figure represents a distinct dimension of the restraint-and-seclusion crisis.
Students with disabilities (IDEA + Section 504) represent about 14–16% of enrollment — yet account for 77.3% of every child physically restrained in American schools (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2021–22 CRDC).
Controlling for enrollment share, a student with a disability is 5.5 times more likely to be physically restrained than a non-disabled peer.
Black students represent 15% of enrollment but 40% of children subjected to mechanical restraint — straps, cuffs, or prone-restraint devices.
Each affected child was restrained an average of 3.3 times in a single school year. Restraint is not a one-time event.
Mechanical restraint grew from 3,619 to 8,219 children — more than doubling — while physical restraint and seclusion were roughly flat over the same span.
Only 21,739 of 98,010 schools reported at least one restraint or seclusion student or instance (22.2%). The other 77.8% filed no usable record, making the true national scale unknowable from public data alone (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2021–22 CRDC).
What Prior Signal produced.
Every deliverable is designed to outlast the engagement — portable, self-verifying, and legible to a non-technical audience.
Single self-contained HTML file (~820KB). All data inlined. No server or network required.
14-figure ground-truth validation against OCR’s “A First Look” reports. Aborts on any mismatch.
JSON + CSV for both school years. Suppression codes preserved and annotated for downstream use.
Per-year snapshots at stable URLs for long-term citability with no JavaScript dependency.
12 PNG crops at standard OG dimensions for Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Source files, suppression logic, derived metrics, and reserve-code analysis — fully documented.
Axe-core automated pass plus manual keyboard and screen-reader testing.
This is the build discipline behind every Prior Signal data engagement — see Durable Records.
If you have a dataset the public needs to understand, let’s talk.
Prior Signal takes on a small number of engagements at a time. Each one starts with a clearly scoped output — a verified data experience, an intelligence brief, a structured public record. No strategy decks that go nowhere.