Engrossed Substitute House Bill 1795 (69th Legislature, 2026) amends existing Washington law (RCW 28A.600.485 and RCW 28A.600.486) to restrict and regulate the use of student restraint and isolation in public schools and other public educational providers. The bill permits restraint or isolation only when reasonably necessary to control spontaneous behavior that poses an imminent likelihood of serious harm, requires close monitoring and immediate discontinuation once the risk dissipates, and expressly prohibits certain methods (mechanical restraint, chemical restraint as defined in part, and physical restraints or escorts that are life‑threatening or that restrict breathing or blood flow, including prone, supine, and wall restraints). It also prohibits creating new rooms or enclosures whose primary purpose is student isolation, while allowing limited exceptions for voluntary quiet spaces, certain temporary safe places under positive behavior plans, and temporary separations during imminent danger (which are still treated as isolation for reporting). The bill makes multiple procedural and reporting changes: staff who use isolation or restraint must notify a building administrator as soon as possible and file a written report within two business days with the superintendent’s office or chief administrator containing specified incident details; building administrators must attempt verbal parent/guardian notification within 24 hours and send written notice postmarked within five business days (in the family’s customary language when applicable); providers must give parents/guardians of students with IEPs or 504 plans a copy of the provider’s isolation and restraint policy when the plan is created; and school districts and other providers must submit annual incident summaries to OSPI by January 1, which OSPI must publish within 90 days and may use to investigate training and practices. School resource officers are not barred from carrying out lawful duties, but incidents involving them trigger the bill’s procedural and reporting requirements. The change is primarily regulatory and procedural rather than criminal: it modifies existing statutory requirements, adds substantive prohibitions on certain restraint methods, and establishes reporting, notification, data collection, and publication duties. The extracted text includes definitions for terms such as isolation, imminent, likelihood of serious harm, mechanical restraint, physical restraint, physical escort, and provider, but the definition of “chemical restraint” is incomplete in the available material. The bill’s stated intent includes implementing a trauma‑informed professional development program and permitting the state to ban isolation practices by 2031, but specific implementation details and the full amended text of RCW 28A.600.486 and subsections containing procedural requirements are not included in the provided facts.

If enacted, the bill will force schools and other public education providers to sharply limit when staff can isolate or physically restrain a student, ban several types of risky restraints, forbid creating new rooms whose main purpose is isolation, and treat temporary separations with removable barriers as reportable isolation events. Staff who use isolation or restraint must tell their administrator right away, file a written report within two business days, and administrators must notify parents verbally within 24 hours and in writing within five business days in the family’s language; districts must compile annual summaries and send them to OSPI, which will publish the data and can review training and practices. Most affected will be school districts, charter and contract providers, and their staff, who will face more paperwork, notification duties, monitoring, and likely training and translation costs, and may change behavior-management practices to avoid prohibited restraints and increased scrutiny. Parents of students with IEPs or 504 plans will get the provider’s isolation and restraint policy when plans are created. Key implementation details are missing from the extracted text—notably the full definition of chemical restraint, the procedural text of the referenced subsections, and the specifics of the planned trauma‑informed training and any 2031 ban—so how some prohibitions and the long‑term ban would be enforced or rolled out is unclear.