W. Joseph Hatley, Monday, September 20, 2010 | Filed under: Special Education Due Process, Education Records
A school district in Texas was recently
ordered to pay parents for the cost of an Independent Education Evaluation, after the district was unable to prove that its own evaluation was appropriate. The reason? The school had not retained the test protocols or the student's responses to the questions on the various assessments. According to the hearing officer, this violated IDEA in two ways. First, it violated the section of IDEA requiring that information obtained from all evaluation sources be documented. Second, it violated the rights of the parents to participate in the process of developing an IEP.
Schools should probably retain test protocols and student responses until it is clear that the evaluation in question is no longer relevant, e.g., when the student is re-evaluated. This does not necessarily mean that parents may see the test protocols, since there are often copyright or ethical restrictions prohibiting such documents from being reviewed by persons who are not qualified to interpret them. (In the Texas case, the parents had retained an expert who said her ability to critique the school's evaluation was hampered by the lack of protocols.) But they should be available in the event they are needed to show that a school's evaluation is accurate.