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Hearing Letter 22: The Claim and Issue Chart

When to Use It

Build this before you draft the complaint, and keep it open while you write it. A due process complaint is a pleading, and a hearing officer can only decide the claims you actually state. This chart forces the two moves that separate a pleaded case from a grievance: it makes you name each claim as the kind of claim a hearing officer can rule on, and it ties that claim to the provision it arises under and the proof that carries it.

An IDEA case is built from a short list of claim types, and each rests on its own provision: identification and child find, evaluation and reevaluation (34 C.F.R. §§ 300.301 to 300.311), eligibility, IEP content (34 C.F.R. § 300.320), placement and least restrictive environment (34 C.F.R. §§ 300.114 to 300.117), implementation, and the procedural violation. The procedural violation runs on two separate theories, and the chart makes you name which one you are on. For a FAPE remedy, a procedural violation counts only where it impeded your child's right to a free appropriate public education, significantly impeded your right to participate, or caused a deprivation of educational benefit (34 C.F.R. § 300.513(a)(2); 20 U.S.C. § 1415(f)(3)(E)); if a procedural claim meets one of those three, mark which one. But a procedural violation that does not clear that bar is not worthless: a hearing officer may still order the district to comply with the procedural requirements going forward (34 C.F.R. § 300.513(a)(3)), and the same facts may support a state complaint. So route each procedural claim - a FAPE-remedy theory, a compliance-order theory, or both - rather than discarding it.

One more reason to chart before you plead. In New York the district carries the burdens of production and persuasion in the impartial hearing, except that a parent seeking tuition reimbursement bears both burdens on the appropriateness of the unilateral placement (N.Y. Educ. Law § 4404(1)(c)). That allocation does not mean you prove nothing: you still must establish the requested relief and comply with disclosure regardless of the order of proof. What you leave off the chart tends to fall out of the case because a party generally may not raise at the hearing an issue that was not raised in the complaint unless the other side agrees (34 C.F.R. § 300.511(d); 8 NYCRR § 200.5(j)(1)(ii)).

Use it with: H-Tool 39 (the claim inventory) and H-Tool 44 (drafting the complaint as a pleading).