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Tool 9: The eight assessments to ask for by name (and the three most often left off)

THE RULE

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) sets three rules for what an evaluation must cover.

First, the district must assess your child “in all areas related to the suspected disability,” and the regulation lists examples: health, vision, hearing, social and emotional status, general intelligence, academic performance, communicative status, and motor abilities (34 C.F.R. § 300.304(c)(4)).

Second, the district must use “a variety of assessment tools and strategies,” and it may not rest any decision on a single measure (34 C.F.R. § 300.304(b)(1)-(2)).

Third, the evaluation must be “sufficiently comprehensive to identify all of the child’s special education and related services needs,” whether or not those needs are commonly linked to the disability category (34 C.F.R. § 300.304(c)(6)).

In plain terms: the district tests everything the disability might touch. Not just the areas that are quick or cheap to test.

WHY IT MATTERS

The consent meeting is where the menu gets set. An area that is not assessed does not appear in the report. What is not in the report rarely makes it into the IEP. A narrow evaluation produces a narrow IEP, and your child lives inside that document for a year.

Fixing a missed area later is slow. It usually means a new written request, a new consent form, and a new clock. A child whose reading gets tested but whose writing hand never does gets reading goals - and nothing for the hand that cannot keep up with her thoughts.