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Tool 52: The Parent-Concerns Letter: Getting Your Version Inside the IEP Itself

THE RULE

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) does not treat your view of your child as background noise. It makes your view a required input.

In developing each child’s IEP, the IEP Team must consider four things (34 C.F.R. § 300.324(a)(1)(i)-(iv)). They are the strengths of the child; “[t]he concerns of the parents for enhancing the education of their child”; the results of the initial or most recent evaluation; and the academic, developmental, and functional needs of the child. Your concerns sit second on that list, in the same breath as the evaluation results. The team does not get to skip them.

The IEP itself must open with a statement of your child’s present levels of academic achievement and functional performance. That statement must include how the disability affects your child’s involvement and progress in the general education curriculum - the same curriculum other children get (34 C.F.R. § 300.320(a)(1)(i)). For preschool children, it must say how the disability affects participation in appropriate activities (34 C.F.R. § 300.320(a)(1)(ii)).

Present levels are not decoration. Every annual goal must be designed to meet the needs that result from the disability and that are described there (34 C.F.R. § 300.320(a)(2)(i)(A)-(B)). Services follow the goals (34 C.F.R. § 300.320(a)(4)). What is not in present levels tends not to become a goal, and what is not a goal tends not to become a service.

Two more rules make the written version matter more than the spoken one.

First, the finished IEP must be accessible to every regular education teacher, special education teacher, and related-services provider responsible for carrying it out. Each of them must be informed of their specific responsibilities (34 C.F.R. § 300.323(d)(1)-(2)). Teachers read the IEP. They do not read the minutes, and they did not hear you talk.

Second, “consider” is not “adopt.” Prior written notice attaches when the district proposes or refuses to initiate or change your child’s identification, evaluation, educational placement, or the provision of a free appropriate public education (34 C.F.R. § 300.503(a)(1)-(2)). So when the team refuses a change you asked for - a goal, a service, an evaluation - the district owes you written notice describing what it refused, why it refused, what it relied on, and what other options it considered and rejected (34 C.F.R. § 300.503(b)(1)-(3), (b)(6)). A refusal to print your words in present levels sits closer to the line. Ask for the notice anyway; if the district’s position is that none is owed, put that answer in your same-day email. Tool 26 and Letter 4 in Appendix A cover the notice itself.

You also have the right to participate in the meeting where all of this is decided (34 C.F.R. §§ 300.322(a), 300.501(b)(1)).

WHY IT MATTERS

You see the 18 hours the school does not see. Homework at 8 p.m. The stomachache on Tuesday mornings. The three tries it takes to get out of the car. The word read aloud in the kitchen for the first time. No evaluation captures those hours. If your account never reaches the paper, it lives only in the memory of the 6 people who were in the room - and those people change.

Next fall, a new teacher opens the IEP. She reads present levels. That paragraph is now the official story of your child. If it says “Maya is a happy student who enjoys reading with peers,” the new teacher plans for that child. If it says “Maya read 14 correct words per minute in March, up from 12 in October, and homework that is scheduled for 20 minutes routinely takes 90,” the new teacher plans for the child you actually have.

There is a second reason, and it arrives later. If this ever becomes a dispute, an investigator or a hearing officer reads the document. They cannot hear the meeting. A concern that appears nowhere in the IEP is a concern the district can honestly say it never had to answer. A concern quoted in present levels - with a date on it - is a concern the district must explain.

This tool is 20 minutes of writing that decides which of those two records exists.