Legal Rights of Children with Epilepsy in School & Child Care

CHAPTER EIGHT
Dispute Resolution and Legal Remedies
8.1Q:
What is a parent’s recourse if he or she disagrees with a recommendation
made by an IEP team or with some other aspect of his or her child’s special
education program or services?
A: The IDEA includes several methods of dispute resolution including IDEA
complaints to the state department of education, mediation, due process hearings
and appeals to federal or state court. In addition, families may attempt to resolve
disputes in a more informal way with local school district administrators.
8.2Q: In what types of situations might a parent try to resolve a situation
informally, and what steps would he or she take to do so?
A: Sometimes a situation arises in which a student’s safety is at stake, in which the
IEP team is being extremely recalcitrant in the face of factual evidence, or the
student’s parents and the IEP team are at an impasse because the team is
misinterpreting a school district policy. In these situations, it can be helpful for
parents or their attorney or advocate to call or write to the compliance
representative for the district, an area supervisor, or the special education
director, depending on the situation, and ask for intervention to try to resolve the
matter. Particularly if an attorney or advocate has a working relationship with
the district’s administrators, many such issues can be resolved informally, either
at the IEP meeting level or by working directly with administrators.
For example, if a student with epilepsy needs routine administration of
medication every day, and the IEP team refuses to include medication
administration on the IEP because the team says it cannot guarantee that there
will always be a staff person available to administer the medication to the
student, the parents could immediately challenge this refusal by seeking a due
process hearing. However, this is such an obvious violation of the IDEA that a
quick telephone call to the compliance officer or the special education director
for the district might resolve the situation much more quickly, inexpensively and
effortlessly. On the other hand, if the dispute centers around the types of
accommodations the student needs for academic school work and whether the
student needs extra time for tests because of the side effects from seizure
medications, this is a more substantive dispute that turns on factual evidence,
and if the family and district cannot come to an agreement, the parents may wish
to seek mediation or a due process hearing.
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