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D.C. Tool 2: The claim inventory, and the burden that rides on each claim

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THE RULE

A hearing officer decides named claims, not a general sense of unfairness. In the District that naming step carries an extra requirement New York's manuscript never asked of you: every claim you name also gets tagged with who has to prove it, because the District's burden regime does not put the same weight on every claim.

Start with the seven places an IDEA claim lives, the same seven categories that anchor this analysis in every jurisdiction: identification, the duty to find and evaluate a child who may have a disability; evaluation, whether the district evaluated in all areas of suspected disability, with valid instruments, on time; eligibility; IEP content, whether the written program contains the goals and services the law requires; placement and least restrictive environment; implementation, whether the district actually delivered what it wrote; and procedural violations. The substantive yardstick behind most of these categories is the FAPE standard, an IEP 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)).

Now the District's addition. D.C. Code § 38-2571.03(6) sets a hybrid burden: as a default, the party who files bears both the burden of production and the burden of persuasion. But where the claim concerns the appropriateness of an existing or proposed IEP or placement, and only after the filer has cleared a low prima facie threshold, and only for complaints filed after July 1, 2016, persuasion on that appropriateness question shifts to the public agency (D.C. Code § 38-2571.03(6)(A)(i), (B)). Tuition reimbursement for a unilateral private placement is carved out of that shift entirely: on the appropriateness of the parent's own placement, the parent keeps both burdens, with a bifurcation risk if the agency's own program is found appropriate first (D.C. Code § 38-2571.03(6)(A)(ii)). Every claim in your inventory gets one of three tags: shifted, meaning it concerns IEP or placement appropriateness and can move to the agency once the prima facie bar is cleared; non-shifted, meaning it stays on the filer throughout, which covers child find, evaluation timeliness, implementation, and most procedural claims; or unilateral-placement, the reimbursement carve-out where the parent never lets go of either burden. DC-Tool 6 works through the mechanics of the shift itself; this tool is where you decide, claim by claim, which tag applies.

The procedural claim carries the same federal limiting principle it carries everywhere: in a hearing seeking a FAPE remedy, a procedural violation supports that remedy only where it impeded the child's right to FAPE, significantly impeded the parent's opportunity to participate, or caused a deprivation of educational benefit (34 C.F.R. § 300.513(a)(2)). A procedural claim that fails that test is not thereby worthless, it may still support corrective action through the OSSE state complaint (DC-Tool 1), but it does not belong at the front of a due process hearing theory.

One more District-specific wrinkle belongs in the inventory stage. When the LEA itself is the filer, for example to defend an evaluation it already conducted against a parent's independent evaluation request, the LEA-as-filer bears both burdens under the default clause. That is not the shifted-appropriateness clause, because an IEE dispute is not a dispute over IEP or placement appropriateness. Keep that distinction sharp; it decides who has to put on a case first when the LEA files.

WHY IT MATTERS

The burden tag is not a footnote here, it changes how you build the case from day one. A claim tagged shifted still requires the parent to walk in and clear the prima facie bar first, present some evidence the program or placement was not appropriate, before persuasion moves to the agency. A parent who assumes the shift means the agency proves its case from the opening bell will show up underprepared and lose the claim before the shift ever triggers. A claim tagged non-shifted, meanwhile, sits entirely on the parent's shoulders for the whole hearing: child find, implementation, and most procedural claims never move, no matter how the appropriateness claims in the same complaint come out.

The reimbursement carve-out is where this distinction does the most damage if missed. A parent who unilaterally placed a child and assumes the general shift protects that placement decision is wrong. On the appropriateness of the parent's own private placement, the parent bears both burdens start to finish, and a hearing officer may bifurcate the case, deciding the agency's program first and never reaching the private placement question if the agency's program is found appropriate. Building a case that treats the unilateral placement like a shifted claim is how a parent loses a reimbursement case that the underlying facts might otherwise have supported.

Two failures happen at the naming stage itself, same as anywhere. Under-naming leaves real claims out of the complaint and therefore out of the case a hearing officer will ever decide (DC-Tool 8 carries the rule that an issue left out of the complaint is usually left out of the hearing). Over-naming buries a strong shifted claim under a pile of weak non-shifted procedural claims that read as grievance rather than proof, and every one of those weak claims stays on the parent's own burden the whole way through.