When Parents Make the Referral and the School Says "No"
If this happens, the school must provide you with written notice as to why the request for an evaluation has been refused and inform you of your right to request a due process hearing to challenge the refusal.Due Process Hearing
If you proceed to a due process hearing, it is often helpful to contact your local educational advocacy organization for help in preparing for the meeting. During the due process meeting you must be able to prove to the hearing officer the reasons that your child requires an evaluation.Matthew Cohen, an attorney with the Chicago law firm of Monahan and Cohen and author of A Guide to Special Education Advocacy, has been representing children and families in special education and related problems for over 25 years. Cohen notes that if parents find themselves in this situation often the most effective means of proving necessity is to obtain a private evaluation that demonstrates that the child has a disability. Even if the parents decide not to request a due process hearing to challenge the district's refusal to conduct an evaluation, the parents still have the right to get an evaluation on their own at their own expense.
Cohen explains the next steps:
If this outside evaluation results in a determination that the student has one or more disabilities, the parents can present this evaluation to the school. The school is always required to consider outside evaluations, but is not automatically bound to follow them. In fact, because outside clinicians sometimes use different criteria for diagnosing whether the child has a disability than are used by the school, it is not uncommon for the outside evaluation to find the presence of a disability and the school to disagree.
Sometimes one or the other evaluation may be wrong, but because the evaluators may be using different criteria, it is also possible for the evaluators to reach differing conclusions and both be correct based on the criteria they are using. Where the outside evaluator does find the presence of a disability, it makes it harder for the school to refuse to conduct an evaluation and may make it harder for the school to deny eligibility, once the evaluation is conducted.
The school has the option of accepting the findings of the outside evaluator, in place of doing some or all of their own testing. However, if the school wants to conduct its own testing, it is generally not obligated to accept the findings of the outside evaluator automatically.
Source:
Matt Cohen. Email correspondence/interview. April 28, 2009.
