Behaviour Incident Report: Template and the Language That Makes It Defensible

The single test that catches most defects: could a stranger reading this report reconstruct what a camera would have shown? If the sentence describes a state of mind, a character trait, or a conclusion, it is not an observation. The one exception worth making is direct quotation — write what was said exactly, including language you would not otherwise put in a school document, because a sanitised quotation misrepresents the severity in both directions.

The form, field by field

Sixteen fields. Anything longer does not get filled in properly.

1. Student name, ID, grade.
2. Date of incident and date of report. Both, because the gap between them is the first thing a reviewer looks at.
3. Time of incident, to the nearest five minutes.
4. Location, specific. “C-hall outside room 214”, not “hallway”.
5. Reporting staff member, name and role.
6. Others present, staff and students, named where known.
7. Antecedent. What was happening immediately before. The field most often left blank and the most useful one for anybody trying to prevent a recurrence.
8. Behaviour, observable, in sequence, with direct quotations.
9. Immediate response, with times: what the staff member did, whether a redirection was tried, who was called.
10. Outcome for the student that period — remained in class, sent to office, sent home, nurse.
11. Injury or property damage, described physically, with the nurse or maintenance record referenced.
12. Student’s account, quoted, or “declined to respond”.
13. Guardian contact: who, when, channel, outcome. Not “parent notified”.
14. Code section the conduct is alleged to fall under.
15. IEP, 504 or behaviour plan flag, and whether the plan was followed. This field prevents more litigation than any other.
16. Prior incidents this year, by date.

Two worked examples

Weak, as commonly filed.

Student was disruptive and disrespectful in class again today. Refused to follow directions and had a bad attitude when asked to stop. Became aggressive. Sent to office. Parent notified.

Nothing in that paragraph can be tested. It contains one fact (the student went to the office) and five conclusions. It does not say what was asked, what was said, what time, whether anyone else was involved, whether the behaviour plan was followed, or how the parent was contacted and with what result. If this incident becomes the third in a pattern supporting a long-term removal, this report will not carry the weight.

Same incident, properly written.

10:32, period 3, room 214. Class was working on a written task. I asked [STUDENT] to put a phone away. [STUDENT] said “in a minute” and continued using it. I repeated the request at 10:34 and offered to hold the phone until the end of the lesson. [STUDENT] said “you're not taking my phone”, stood, and pushed the chair back so that it struck the desk behind. Two students at that desk moved away. I asked [STUDENT] to step into the corridor; [STUDENT] left the room at 10:36, leaving the door open, and walked toward C-hall. I called the office at 10:37. No physical contact with any person. Chair undamaged.

Student account, taken by [AP NAME] at 11:05: “She always picks on me about the phone and never says anything to anyone else.”

[STUDENT] has a behaviour plan dated [DATE]. The plan specifies a non-verbal redirection first; I used a verbal request. The break card in the plan was not offered.

That last paragraph is uncomfortable to write and it is the reason the file survives. A district that records plan fidelity honestly, including when the plan was not followed, is in a materially stronger position than one whose reports are silent on it.

Who reads it, and when

Four readers, and the report has to work for all of them.

The administrator, that day. Needs enough to decide a consequence and to speak to a parent within the hour.

The family, within days. Often entitled to inspect it as part of their child’s record. Write it as though the parent will read it, because they will.

The IEP or 504 team, within weeks. Needs antecedents and plan fidelity, which is why fields seven and fifteen matter more than they look.

A hearing officer or advocate, months later. Needs the record to be internally consistent, dated, specific and free of conclusions the writer could not have observed.

Two practical rules follow. Write it the same day, before the account settles into a story. And do not amend it later — if something further emerges, file a supplementary report with its own date rather than editing the original, because an edited report is worth less than a supplemented one to every reader in the list.

Storage, notification and the honest product note

Reports contain student PII and frequently name other students, which makes access control a real question rather than an administrative one.

Kastr is a communications platform, not an incident management system. It does not store your incident reports and it has no discipline module. What it does is send the notification that follows one, and record that send: every message writes to a per-district append-only audit log chained with SHA-256, append-only at two layers, under Postgres row-level security enforced through a non-owner role that fails closed. Family-facing access to anything is via magic link only — 32 random bytes, fifteen-minute single-use token, same-device binding, no account enumeration. There is no SSO, SAML, OIDC or MFA of any kind, which some districts will find disqualifying and should know before a procurement conversation rather than during one.

Two further limits worth stating on this page specifically. There are no attachments, so a report itself never travels through Kastr — only the message about it. And retention defaults are published per record class, with student PII separated from guardian and staff records, but there is no automated purge job enforcing them today; the defaults are a stated policy, not a running process.

Questions people actually ask

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