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D.C. Letter 17: The 90-Day Civil-Action Checklist

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When to Use It

Use this the day the HOD arrives, before you decide anything else. In the District there is no second administrative tier, no State Review Officer, and no request for review. The HOD is the end of the administrative line, and the only path forward on the merits is a civil action, in practice filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (20 U.S.C. 1415(i)(2); 34 C.F.R. 300.516(a); DC-Tool 36). Get the deadline wrong here and there is no second appellate step behind it to catch the mistake.

The deadline is 90 days, and the date it runs from is the trap. It runs from the date the HOD is issued, not the date you receive it, and the two dates are not always the same. The 90 days appears to rest on the federal default alone, with no independent D.C. statute found that sets a different period, but that conclusion has not been checked against the full text of the D.C. Code and should not be treated as settled (checked August 13, 2026).

Filing the civil action is not the same project as enforcing the HOD you already won. A prevailing parent cannot sue under the IDEA to enforce a favorable HOD in any court; that route runs through the OSSE state complaint instead (B.D. v. District of Columbia, 817 F.3d 792 (D.C. Cir. 2016); DC-Tool 34). If the district simply is not doing what the HOD ordered and you have not lost on the merits, this checklist is the wrong tool; go to the state-complaint shell instead. Use this checklist when you are challenging what the HOD decided, not when you are chasing compliance with what it already awarded. And know that filing this civil action does not automatically pause or excuse the district from implementing the HOD; the enforcement track and the appeal track run independently of each other.

If your HOD gave you stay-put in a placement pending the district's own trial-court challenge, that funding holds through that stage, but it does not automatically continue through a further appeal to the D.C. Circuit; a fresh injunction motion is needed there (Andersen v. District of Columbia, 877 F.2d 1018, 1024 (D.C. Cir. 1989)). Do not assume the funding simply carries forward on its own past the trial court.

Use it with: DC-Tool 30 (reading the HOD), DC-Tool 36 (the civil action), and DC-Tool 37 (attorney fees and expert fees).