EdLaw
Illinois — Abused and Neglected Child Reporting Act: persons required to report (325 ILCS 5/4)
Section 4 of the Abused and Neglected Child Reporting Act, the Illinois mandated-reporting provision: who must report suspected child abuse or neglect, to whom, what role the person in charge of a school may play, and the mandated-reporter training and acknowledgement duties.
Applicability to EdTech
What the section says about where a safeguarding concern about a pupil must go:
- School personnel report to the Department, immediately. The persons "required to immediately report to the Department when they have reasonable cause to believe that a child known to them in their professional or official capacities may be an abused child or a neglected child" (PERSONS-REQUIRED-TO-REPORT.md#section-4-a) include "Education personnel, including any: school personnel (including administrators and certified and non-certified school employees)" (PERSONS-REQUIRED-TO-REPORT.md#section-4-a-4).
- Telling the person in charge is optional, and does not replace the report. A school staff member "shall make report immediately to the Department in accordance with the provisions of this Act and may also notify the person in charge of such institution, school, facility or agency … or designated agent of the person in charge that such report has been made"; and "Under no circumstances shall any person in charge … or designated agent of the person in charge to whom such notification has been made, exercise any control, restraint, modification or other change in the report or the forwarding of such report to the Department" (PERSONS-REQUIRED-TO-REPORT.md#section-4-e).
- A designated reporter is possible only among co-reporters, with written confirmation. "When 2 or more persons who work within the same workplace and are required to report under this Act share a reasonable cause to believe that a child may be an abused or neglected child, one of those reporters may be designated to make a single report"; "The designated reporter must provide written confirmation of the report to those mandated reporters within 48 hours. If confirmation is not provided, those mandated reporters are individually responsible for immediately ensuring a report is made" (PERSONS-REQUIRED-TO-REPORT.md#section-4-b).
- Records the section requires. A mandated employee signs a statement of knowledge of the reporting requirements, which "shall be retained by the employer" (PERSONS-REQUIRED-TO-REPORT.md#section-4-i); mandated reporters must complete training "within 3 months of their date of engagement" and "at least every 3 years thereafter" (PERSONS-REQUIRED-TO-REPORT.md#section-4-j). The section says nothing about deputies or availability beyond the designated-reporter rule above.
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| PERSONS-REQUIRED-TO-REPORT.md | 325 ILCS 5/4 in full |
Scope note: only section 4 of the Act is extracted; the rest of the Act is not.
Licence
The corpus reproduces 325 ILCS 5/4 verbatim from the Illinois General Assembly's compiled-statutes page (through the Internet Archive's id_ endpoint, which returns the publisher's original bytes), with its "(Source: P.A. …)" trailer.
Statute text enacted by a state legislature is outside copyright under the government edicts doctrine. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020) (slip opinion, read 2026-10-01), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It applied the doctrine to an arm of the legislature as well as to legislators: "Because Georgia’s annotations are authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties, the government edicts doctrine puts them outside the reach of copyright protection."
ilga.gov pages end with the footer "All Rights Reserved" (ilga.gov, read 2026-10-01 through the Internet Archive). The site's Disclaimers page (read the same way, 2026-10-01) sets no terms for reproducing statute text. A site-wide footer of that kind can cover the site, but not the Acts the General Assembly enacts.
Conditions: none attach to the statute text. The corpus nonetheless names the official source in its Sources section and in the fact document's {.meta} provenance line, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).
Related
- Illinois SOPPA — the student-data duties of operators and schools
- Indiana — duty to report child abuse or neglect and Wisconsin — persons required to report — the other pilot states
- Title IX regulations — the federal Title IX Coordinator, for sex-based harassment