North Dakota

1. Initial evaluation timeline

60 calendardays from the district’s receipt of parental consent - extendable to a hard ceiling of 90 calendar days, and one of the two enumerated extensions is a blizzard. N.D. Admin. Code § 67-23-01-03 (“Timelines - Exception to sixty-day time frame for initial evaluation”): “The district must evaluate a referred child within sixty calendar days after obtaining parental consent for the evaluation unless: 1. An extension is necessary because of extreme weather that prevented or interfered with the evaluation and the extreme weather condition is documented; or 2. Either party establishes to the satisfaction of the department that access to a qualified evaluator is so limited that the evaluation cannot occur in the initial sixty days. The evaluation period, including an extension for the circumstances described above, may not exceed ninety calendar days.“

Practical reading:

• Calendar days, not school or instructional days. There is no summer tolling and no holiday tolling in North Dakota - unlike Pennsylvania (22 Pa. Code § 14.123(b)) or Indiana (511 IAC 7-40-5). A consent signed in late May runs straight through the summer. The NDDPI parent notice states it flatly: “Initial evaluation must occur within 60 calendar days from the time the school receives your consent.”

• The two federal exceptions still apply on top of the ND rule. NDDPI’s procedural-safeguards notice adds: “unless your child transfers to a new school district or you fail to bring your child to the evaluation“ - i.e., the 34 C.F.R. § 300.301(d) carve-outs.

• The weather/evaluator extensions are a state-created gloss, defensible under 34 C.F.R. § 300.301(c)(1)(i) (which permits a State to establish its own timeframe in place of the federal 60 days), but they are not in § 300.301(d). Two litigation hooks for the parent side: (a) the extreme-weather condition must be documented, and (b) the limited-evaluator extension requires the party to “establish to the satisfaction of the department“ - meaning NDDPI, not the district, is the gatekeeper. A district that simply notes ”staffing shortage“ in the file and takes 85 days has not met the rule’s terms.

• Ninety calendar days is an absolute outer wall. No extension of any kind pushes past 90.

• NDDPI’s FAQ adds a documentation duty for anything else: “If, because of exceptional circumstances, the 60-calendar day timeline will not be met, the IEP team must clearly document the exceptional circumstance, the timeline for completing the evaluation, and present parents with their procedural safeguards.”

• Terminology: the evaluation team’s report is the Integrated Written Assessment Report (IWAR), and eligibility is determined at the IWAR meeting. Everything downstream is measured from that meeting.

Sources: N.D. Admin. Code Art. 67-23, Ch. 67-23-01 (full text PDF, ND Legislative Branch); N.D. Admin. Code § 67-23-01-01 (Cornell LII); NDDPI - Parental Rights … Notice of Procedural Safeguards (PDF); NDDPI - Special Education FAQs.

2. Eligibility-to-IEP timeline

30 calendar days from the IWAR meeting to the initial IEP meeting. NDDPI’s IEP Guide: “A meeting to develop the initial IEP for a child must be conducted within 30 calendar days from the date of the meeting during which it was determined that the child has a disability. This determination will be noted in the Integrated Written Assessment Report (IWAR) prepared by the evaluation team at that meeting.“ NDDPI’s own monitoring instrument (item IEP-2) audits it exactly that way: ”Compare the date of the IWAR meeting date to the initial IEP meeting date… The requirement is met if the initial IEP meeting was conducted within 30 calendar days of the IWAR meeting.“ This tracks the federal floor at 34 C.F.R. § 300.323(c)(1); North Dakota adds no shorter state clock, but it does make the IWAR meeting date the trigger - so calendar the meeting, not the date the report was signed or mailed.

Two related points:

• SLD determinations carry a parent-signature step. Per NDDPI: “If you are completing an Integrated Written Assessment Report (IWAR) for a Specific Learning Disability (SLD), the parent must sign a document indicating that he or she agreed with the determination.“ That is a discrete, checkable artifact in an SLD file, and its absence is a compliance defect worth pleading.

• Deadline to implementthe initial IEP once parental consent to services is given: the cited North Dakota materials do not add a fixed number of days. The federal rule requires services to be made available “as soon as possible” following development of the IEP (34 C.F.R. § 300.323(c)(2)).

Sources: NDDPI - Individualized Education Program Guide (Aug. 2019) (PDF); NDDPI - Special Education IEP Internal Monitoring instrument (PDF); NDDPI - Special Education FAQs.