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Tool 76: The Kindergarten Cliff: Keeping Services When the Building Changes

THE RULE

At the beginning of each school year, the district must have an IEP in effect for each eligible child in its jurisdiction (34 C.F.R. § 300.323(a)). That duty does not pause because the child is changing buildings, and it does not pause because the receiving school has never met your child.

Four rules do the work in this tool.

Placement follows the IEP, not the building. Placement is decided by a group that includes you, at least annually, based on the child’s IEP, and as close as possible to the child’s home. Unless the IEP requires something else, the child is educated in the school he or she would attend if not disabled (34 C.F.R. § 300.116(a)-(c)). The team must also consider any potential harmful effect of the placement on the child or on the quality of the services the child needs (34 C.F.R. § 300.116(d)).

Services are written with numbers. The IEP must state the projected start date and the anticipated frequency, location, and duration of each service (34 C.F.R. § 300.320(a)(7)). “Kindergarten does not have that” is not a legal reason to change a number. Tool 24 explains why those three fields are the enforceable heart of the document.

Changes require the team, or your agreement, and always notice. After the annual meeting, the IEP can be amended without a meeting only if you and the district agree (34 C.F.R. § 300.324(a)(4)(i)); if it is amended that way, you may ask for a clean copy with the changes written in (34 C.F.R. § 300.324(a)(6)). And the district must give you prior written notice a reasonable time before it proposes or refuses to change your child’s identification, evaluation, placement, or provision of a free appropriate public education (34 C.F.R. § 300.503(a)). A service that quietly shrinks in a rewritten draft is a proposed change, and it owes you notice (Tools 26 and 89).

The new staff must be told what they are responsible for. The IEP must be accessible to each teacher and provider responsible for carrying it out, and every one of them must be informed of their specific responsibilities and of the accommodations, modifications, and supports the IEP requires (34 C.F.R. § 300.323(d)). This is the rule behind the transfer sheet below.

One more, if your state ends its “developmental delay” category at age 5. Changing the label is not a paperwork task. Before the district may decide your child is no longer a child with a disability, it must evaluate (34 C.F.R. § 300.305(e)(1)). An expiring category is a reason to evaluate, not a reason to close a file (34 C.F.R. § 300.8(b); § 300.111(b); Tool 15).

WHY IT MATTERS

Nothing about an IEP transfers itself. It is carried by people, and at kindergarten every person changes at once.

The preschool team knows that your daughter melts down at transitions unless she gets a two-minute warning, that she works for 12 minutes and then needs to move, and that “she is fine” from her means the opposite. None of that is in the IEP. It lives in the heads of three adults who will not be in the building next year. In September, a kindergarten teacher meets a stranger and starts over, and the first six weeks get spent relearning what somebody already knew in May.

The services change too, and rarely upward. A child who had a full-day integrated preschool class with a therapist in the room is offered 30 minutes a week of pull-out consult, because that is what the elementary building staffs. The number moved for a scheduling reason, not an educational one. On paper, the district calls it a new IEP. In law, it is a proposed change to the provision of a free appropriate public education, and it owes you an explanation in writing (34 C.F.R. § 300.503).

The place to catch all of this is the spring IEP meeting, while the people who know your child are still employed to care about the answer.