language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-10-12

Wisconsin — persons required to report child abuse or neglect (Wis. Stat. §48.981(2), (3)(a))

Wisconsin's mandated-reporting provisions, within §48.981 ("Abused or neglected children and abused unborn children"): who must report, and to whom. School staff are mandated reporters, and the report goes from the reporter to the county department or the police.

Applicability to EdTech

What the statute says about where a safeguarding concern about a pupil must go:

• School staff are mandated reporters. The persons who "shall" report include "A school teacher", "A school administrator", "A school counselor" and "A school employee not otherwise specified in this paragraph", when they have "reasonable cause to suspect that a child seen by the person in the course of professional duties has been abused or neglected" (MANDATED-REPORTING.md#48-981-2-a; items 14. to 16m.).
• The report goes to the authorities, immediately. "A person required to report under sub. (2) shall immediately inform, by telephone or personally, the county department or, in a county having a population of 750,000 or more, the department or a licensed child welfare agency under contract with the department or the sheriff or city, village, or town police department" (MANDATED-REPORTING.md#48-981-3-a-1). The extracted provisions name no school-internal recipient, designee or deputy, and say nothing about reporting through one; nor do they address availability or school record-keeping.
• Protection for reporters. "No person making a report under this subsection in good faith may be discharged from employment, disciplined or otherwise discriminated against in regard to employment, or threatened with any such treatment for so doing" (MANDATED-REPORTING.md#48-981-2-e).

Contents

Scope note: the rest of §48.981 (definitions in (1), the health-care exception in (2m), the investigation duties in (3)(b) onward, and the subsections after (3)) is not extracted. The section is long, and the publisher serves it in overlapping windows; see the fact document's Meta.

Licence

The reproduced text is part of Wis. Stat. §48.981, enacted by the Wisconsin Legislature and published on docs.legis.wisconsin.gov. No copyright subsists in this text. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), 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 went on: "judges—and, we now confirm, legislators—may not be considered the 'authors' of the works they produce in the course of their official duties as judges and legislators. That rule applies regardless of whether a given material carries the force of law." (slip opinion, pp. 1 and 5–6, read 2026-10-01.)

The pages carry no copyright notice (the builder's cached Internet Archive copies, checked 2026-10-12).

Public-domain text carries no conditions. The corpus attributes it all the same: the {.meta} provenance line names the publisher and the captures, the Sources section links the official text, and the Meta section describes what the builder changed (markup and anchors only). Nothing here suggests that the Wisconsin Legislature endorses the corpus.

Related

• Wisconsin pupil records — Wis. Stat. §118.125, the records a school holds
• Indiana — duty to report child abuse or neglect — the other pilot state, which also bars a school policy that delays a report
• Title IX regulations — the federal Title IX Coordinator, for sex-based harassment

Sources

• Wisconsin Legislature — Wis. Stat. §48.981