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Hearing Letter 15: Complete-File Records Demand Before Filing

When to Use It

Send this once you are moving toward a due process hearing and before you draft the complaint, because the complaint you can plead is only as good as the record you are holding when you write it. This is a pre-filing completeness sweep, and it is not the same document as either earlier records letter. Manual I Tool 84 asks for inspection for a school-year purpose; Volume I’s H-Letter 1 demands the disciplinary-hearing file after a suspension is proposed. This one asks for the entire educational record, both files, before litigation, so that no page the district relies on is a page you have not read.

Ask for two files by name. The cumulative file is the general school record. The special-education file is the CSE record: the referrals, the evaluations, every IEP and prior written notice, the meeting minutes, the progress monitoring, and the service and attendance logs. New York incorporates the federal education-record rules at 8 NYCRR § 200.5(d)(6). The district must permit inspection without unnecessary delay, before any meeting or hearing when access is requested for that purpose, and no later than 45 days after the request (34 C.F.R. § 300.613(a)). You may also ask for the list of the types and locations of records the district keeps (34 C.F.R. § 300.616). A copying fee is allowed, but not one that effectively keeps you from exercising the inspection right (34 C.F.R. § 300.617). Section 200.5(j)(1) governs the limitations period, not record-access timing.

Send it to: the district’s special education office or CSE chairperson and the records access officer.