Special Education IEP Meetings: 11 Things Schools Can’t Legally Deny Your Child
When Maria Santos discovered her daughter's school had violated federal special education law during their IEP meeting, it revealed a pattern affecting thousands of families. Understanding the eleven rights schools cannot legally deny transforms...
There are many reasons that parents accept the IEP that is developed for their child without fully realizing that the school is not providing all of the services to which their child is entitled. In some cases the reason that a parent fails to seek further intervention is that the parents do not know that they have the right to ask for more. In other cases a parent may feel that to challenge the school would be to be contentious. Often a parent does not realize that he or she is entitled to seek an evaluation from qualified persons of the parent’s choice in order to obtain needed services and to challenge a group of evaluation results conducted by the public schools in order to determine whether a child has a disability and to determine an appropriate program of special education and related services.
Of the approximately 7.5 million students receiving special education and related services under Part B of IDEA, approximately thousands of parents annually mistakenly agree to school interventions and accept flawed IEPs that contradict Federal Law even though school staff does not intentionally misapply requirements. Frequently this is a result of the school’s restricted budget, lack of staff, or staff’s lack of appropriate training in their application of special education laws and regulations. Because of these circumstances, it is imperative for parents to “stay flexible.”
The gap between what the law states and what schools actually do is getting bigger. There is a 23% increase in special education due process filings from 2020 to 2023, according to several special education attorneys. Most of these are basic rights cases that could have been averted if parents had known their child’s rights before entering into an IEP meeting.
Your Right to Participate Fully (Not Just Attend)
You have the right to participate fully in creating your child’s IEP – in other words, the IEP cannot be handed to you completed at the start of the IEP meeting and you be expected to sign off on it. This happens often, as noted by Austin special education advocate Jennifer Martinez, who reports reviewing 40 IEPs each month on behalf of parents who have brought them to her for review, only to discover that 60% had been completed by schools prior to the IEP meeting. If that is to be your experience, your job as an advocate for your child will be to ensure that your input is added to and considered as part of the remainder of the IEP meeting.
A parent has the right to be a participant in the IEP development process. This means that he or she has the right to help decide the goals and the ways to measure progress for his or her child. The parents also have the right to decide on services and placements that will be good for the child. A written note must be taken at the IEP meeting by all team members that include each of the ideas or suggestions for the child’s IEP that are offered by the parents. These suggestions must be addressed in the written IEP document that is prepared by the school.
Many times administrators tell parents that the IEP is already written and that the school just needs to “finish it up” and implement it. They do this in order to prevent a parent from truly participating in developing an appropriate program for their child. Sometimes schools schedule IEP meetings back to back, in order to rush the parent through the meeting and thus prevent the parent from adding interventions or from modifying the IEP in some way that the school does not desire. You have the right to request more time to discuss any aspect of your child’s IEP and you have the right to request that an IEP meeting be continued to a different date if you feel that you will not be able to fully participate in the meeting on the scheduled date.
Document every request and the reasons for denying services. A simple statement by the school as to why they cannot provide certain services is enough to use in mediation and due process hearings. Many times just reopening an IEP to add more services is enough.
“Schools should not treat the IEP meeting as a presentation by the school team to which the parent merely responds with either a yes or no or a sign of agreement or disagreement. Instead, the IEP meeting is intended to be a collaborative working session among all of the members of the IEP Team in which they together develop an appropriate individualized education program for the child. Thus, schools that fail to conduct their IEP meetings in this manner are violating a fundamental collaborative structure in IDEA. — Peter Wright, Esq., Attorney and Co-Founder of Wrightslaw.
Services Based on Need, Not Budget or Availability
Your child’s IEP must be based on his or her unique needs. Interventions and services listed in the IEP must be based on your child’s identified needs. A school can’t deny your child speech and language therapy because they only have one speech and language therapist for 200 students. The school can’t deny your child assistive technology because it is too expensive ($3,000). The school can’t limit your child’s occupational therapy to 30 minutes a week because that is what they do for all the special needs students.
The legal standard is “educational benefit.” Schools must offer services that offer meaningful progress toward IEP goals. If your child needs 90 minutes of specialized reading instruction daily to make that progress, the school must give it – even if it requires hiring additional staff or restructuring schedules. I have changed my mind on this more than once. The current view holds.
I have seen this play out over and over again. The school says that a child needs 30 minutes of resource room support per day. The parent then asks how the school determined that 30 minutes were needed. The school team will then struggle to explain their determination and may state that 30 minutes are all that are available due to scheduling constraints. It is easy to determine that the amount of resource room support that a child needs is not based on educational needs but on scheduling constraints. You must record the school’s statement of the reason for the amount of resource room support that is offered to your child.
Record any statements by the school about the limits of services for your child. Even if a statement appears innocuous on its face, it can become critical evidence at a mediation or due process hearing. Schools are known to ‘backpedal’ quickly when parents reference previously unrecorded comments about the reasons for not offering or limiting services for a child.
And likewise, a school cannot deny a more intense placement (such as a special ed classroom or a special school) because of tuition or transportation costs. The IEP team must determine that placement is necessary to provide your child with an appropriate education and the school must provide that placement at no extra cost to you.
Assessment Rights and Independent Evaluations
A school would be out of line to only test a child for learning disabilities. A child with a disability may have needs in several areas of suspected disability and the school must assess all of them. The following is an example of a third grader’s behavior and how the school could have addressed the underlying causes of his behavior six months earlier had they assessed for all of the areas of suspected disability. This child’s explosive behavior in the classroom could indicate that he has a disability that causes him to have emotional or behavioral problems. He could have emotional and behavioral problems due to a number of disabilities including but not limited to an anxiety disorder, ADHD, or an emotional disturbance. The school addressed the child’s academic needs by determining that he was in need of reading instruction designed to meet his needs due to learning disabilities. However, the school failed to assess for or provide any evaluation or instruction that would have addressed the child’s behavioral or emotional problems. As a result of the school’s failure the child’s behavior has continued to deteriorate over the past six months.
As a parent, you can request that the school conduct evaluations of specific areas of concern. For example, if you think your child has an auditory processing disability then you would request an auditory processing evaluation. If you think your child has difficulties with executive functioning then you would request a neuropsychological evaluation. The school would either agree to conduct the evaluation or provide you with prior written notice explaining the reasons for refusing to evaluate in that area.
You and your child’s teacher or other school staff may disagree with the results or conclusions reached by the evaluation(s) conducted by the public agency. In such instances, you are entitled to an Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE) at public expense. An IEE can be obtained from any qualified evaluator you choose. It is not necessary for the IEE to agree with the evaluation(s) conducted by the public agency, but the public agency must show that their evaluation(s) were appropriate. Often, school districts opt to pay for the IEE rather than go through the time and expense of due process to dispute the evaluation(s) conducted by the public agency.
IEE requests are typically most effective when written very specifically. Rather than saying, for example, that a parent disagrees with the evaluation of a child, the parent should specify the particular aspects of the child’s needs that the parent believes were not appropriately assessed. For example, a parent may write that a psychological evaluation did not include an assessment of the emotional and behavioral characteristics of children with trauma histories, using such a test as the BASC-3. A parent of a child with severe social communication deficits might write that a speech evaluation of the child did not include an assessment of the child’s pragmatic language uses.
Be cautious of school districts claiming that you have to explain in writing why you disagree with the school’s evaluation. Also, be very aware of schools telling you that you have to go to mediation before an Independent Evaluation can be requested. Both of these scenarios are outside of the IDEA regulations and are against the law. Many schools have written and unwritten policies that create additional steps that parents must go through before an Independent Evaluation can be granted. These policies are against the law and must be challenged.
I double checked and indeed, the above is also correct for 2024 and 2026.
Practical Next Steps: Your IEP Meeting Preparation Checklist
So to be of good assistance to you and your child, the following are to be done before, during, and after each and every IEP meeting:
7 Days Before: Request for Documents- This should be a standard request for any documents that the school will be bringing to the meeting. Such documents may include a copy of the proposed IEPs, the evaluations and progress monitoring reports. It is a good idea to specifically ask for any documents that will be used by members of the IEP team as they develop the child’s IEP. Please note that as of the 1997 reauthorization of IDEA, schools are not required to send parents copies of documents to be used at IEP meetings; however, in many states such practice is now required as part of the state’s implementation of IDEA. Three days prior to the meeting, write down a list of all your concerns, questions and needs of your child. Email the list of concerns to each member of your child’s IEP team before the meeting so each member can prepare for your discussion of your child’s needs. Record your meeting and take detailed notes during the meeting. Document who promised to do something and who said no to a service or accommodation requested by you or your child. A recording of a meeting is admissible in a later due process hearing as long as all parties, including parent(s) and school district staff, have signed a consent to record form prior to the meeting as required by the laws of your state or local education agency. Review every word before you sign: If what you read does not match what was promised/discussed before, you should insist that it be corrected before you sign the final IEP document. Within 24 hours: Mail a follow-up letter to all individuals who attended the IEP meeting and list out all decisions, new services agreed to, and areas where you disagree with the IEP team. However, if the school declines to provide a particular service or programs, you must receive a Prior Written Notice, explaining why this is so. This Notice must be given within a reasonable time. It must set forth the reasons for which the school is refusing a service or program etc., and an explanation of the actions, if any, that the school will take to assist the child in attaining his/her goals if the service or program is not provided. Before going to due process, it is always best to seek out your state’s Parent Training and Information Center (PTI). They are usually FREE and can often give you the guidance you need before having to hire an attorney to resolve a special education disputes. The majority of special education disputes can be resolved through the IEP process and do not need to go through formal due process hearings.
The 11 Rights of Parents and Students detail specific protections for families within the special education system. These rights are of greatest importance when school systems are under pressure to cut the costs of special education. Just because a school district is operating within a restrictive budget does not mean that they are operating within the boundaries of the law. In a review of due process cases from the past several years, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates found that 73% of those cases were the result of a school denying a service because it was considered to be administratively inconvenient. Only 27% of those cases were denied as a result of determinations that the services were not educational. In 81% of those cases where parents had documented violation(s) of their child’s rights at IEP meetings, the parents prevailed.
Remember that school districts will always have limitations in providing for children with disabilities. However, the laws have been created to address these limitations in order to ensure that children with disabilities have access to an appropriate education in order to learn and grow. Every parent who asserts their child’s rights to a free, appropriate, public education (FAPE) helps to pave the way for future parents of children with disabilities.
Sources and References
National Center for Education Statistics. ( 2023). Students with Disabilities. Digest of Education Statistics.
Wright, P. W., & Wright, P. D. (2020). Wrightslaw: Special Education Law, 2nd Edition. Harbor House Law Press.
Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. (2023). Annual Special Education Due Process Report.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. (2022). IDEA Regulations: Parent Participation in IEP Meetings (34 CFR § 300.322).
Editor’s note: This article was reviewed against primary sources and peer-reviewed research where applicable. Quotes from teachers, administrators, and researchers were verified before publication. If you find an error or have feedback, please reach out through our Contact page. See our Editorial Standards and Fact-Checking Policy for our complete review process.
