← All tools

Tool 6: The Private-School and Homeschool Route to a Public Evaluation

THE RULE

If you placed your child in private school with your own money, you did not give up the free evaluation. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the school district where the private school is located must “locate, identify, and evaluate” all children with disabilities enrolled by their parents in private schools inside that district - including religious schools (34 C.F.R. § 300.131(a)).

Read that again: the duty belongs to the district where the school building sits, not the district where you live. It applies even if you live in a different state from the school (34 C.F.R. § 300.131(f)). The district must run child find for private-school children in a way similar to what it does for its own students (34 C.F.R. § 300.131(c)), on a comparable timeline (34 C.F.R. § 300.131(e)). The evaluation is the district’s cost, not yours: the regulation treats individual evaluations as a child find expense, and the district may not count that expense against the money it must spend on services for private-school children (34 C.F.R. § 300.131(a), (d)).

Homeschooling is state-dependent. Federal commentary leaves the treatment of home schools to state law (71 Fed. Reg. 46,540, 46,594 (Aug. 14, 2006)). The general child-find duty reaches children with disabilities residing in the state, including children who attend private schools (34 C.F.R. § 300.111(a)(1)(i)). But state law determines whether a home school is treated as a private school and which public agency receives the referral. Check the 50-State Companion before sending. If responsibility is unclear, send the request to the agency your state identifies, copy any other district that may be responsible, and ask both to identify the proper recipient in writing.

Now the honest paragraph. The evaluation is the full one, at no cost - that part is identical. What follows is not. A parentally-placed private school child has no individual right to the services the child would receive in public school (34 C.F.R. § 300.137(a)). Instead, the district where the school sits must spend a proportionate share of its federal IDEA funds on this group of children (34 C.F.R. § 300.133(a)), decides - after consulting the private schools - which children receive which services (34 C.F.R. §§ 300.134, 300.137(b)), and writes a “services plan,” a thinner cousin of the IEP, for the children it designates (34 C.F.R. §§ 300.132(b), 300.138(b)). Some eligible children receive services this way; some receive none. The full right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) attaches through the public schools, which must make FAPE available to all eligible children residing in the state (34 C.F.R. § 300.101(a)).

WHY IT MATTERS

Private-school and homeschool families often pay for private evaluations out of their own pockets because they assume they are outside the public system. The child find door was open the whole time.

A free evaluation has value even if your child never sets foot in a public school. It tells you what is actually going on. It gives the private school’s teachers, and your tutors, something to work from. It produces an eligibility determination on the record. And it starts a paper trail that matters later if you re-enroll in public school, or if you ever pursue tuition reimbursement (Tool 41). If the district says no, the refusal comes to you in writing - and that document has its own uses (Tool 26).