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D.C. Letter 12: The Hearing Chronology Built From the Ieps

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When to Use It

Same discipline as any hearing chronology: one document to a line, earliest to latest, so a felt sense that nothing changed becomes a chronology a hearing officer can read down the page. What is D.C.-specific is the clock the evaluation and eligibility entries are measured against, and it is easy to get that clock wrong by importing a figure from somewhere else.

The substantive yardstick behind the IEP-content entries is federal and does not move state to state: an IEP must be reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child's circumstances (Board of Education v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176 (1982); Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1, 580 U.S. 386, 399 (2017)). A goal copied forward from the prior IEP, sitting beside flat or missing progress data, is the clearest picture the chronology can build of a program not reasonably calculated to produce progress.

The D.C.-specific line is the evaluation and eligibility timeline. The LEA must complete an evaluation and determine eligibility within 60 days of parental consent, not from the date of referral, a rule current since July 1, 2018 and amended October 30, 2018 (D.C. Code 38-2561.02(a)(2)(A); 5-A DCMR 3005.4(b), checked August 13, 2026). Before consent, the LEA must begin making reasonable efforts to obtain it within about 10 business days of the referral and must obtain it, if it can, within 30 days of the referral, and an oral referral must be documented within three business days. A still-circulating "120 calendar days" figure on OSSE's own Child Find one-pager is stale; do not let it anchor a line on this chronology. Every consent date, referral date, and evaluation-completion date should be checked against the 60-day-from-consent rule, not the old figure.

Use it with: DC-Tool 17 (reading the IEPs and progress data) and DC-Letter 15 (the compensatory-education worksheet the chronology feeds).