Legal Rights of Children with Epilepsy in School & Child Care

Legal Rights of Children with Epilepsy in School and Child Care
appropriate to the needs of the student with the disability, and school districts
must provide necessary supplementary aids and services to enable the student to
be appropriately placed in the regular education setting. Similarly, the IDEA
expresses a preference for a student’s attendance at the school he or she would
attend if not disabled and for placement as close as home as possible, just as
Section 504 mandates consideration of distance of the alternate setting to the
student’s home. 34 C.F.R. 104.34(a).
5.20Q: Does a school district have any responsibility to students to help them be
placed successfully in general education?
A: Yes, as noted above, the school district must provide supplementary aids and
services. In general, Section 504 requires reasonable accommodation of a
person’s disability. A school district must provide the accommodations
necessary to enable a student to participate in general education to the maximum
extent appropriate to the student’s needs. For a student with epilepsy, the
services may be as simple as providing a staff person to administer needed
medication at specified times of the day or to administer emergency medication
in the event of a prolonged seizure or cluster of seizures. Alternatively, a student
may need a variety of other accommodations, such as a delayed school start time
and extra time for tests. For a student with epilepsy and other disabilities,
services may include special education as well as medication administration and
other accommodations, but the student may be more appropriately served under
the IDEA, which has more specific programmatic requirements, timelines and
procedural safeguards.
5.21Q: What if state law requires a licensed health care professional to administer
an emergency antiepileptic medication such as Diastat AcuDial (rectally
administered diazepam gel) and other health care services to a student with
epilepsy at school, and the school district tells the parent that the student
must go to a school ten miles away to have access to the person and the
service?
A: Unless the school district can establish that provision of a trained person to
administer emergency antiepileptic medication at the student’s school is an
accommodation that would cause a fundamental alteration to its program or that
it is not appropriate to meet the student’s needs, it would be a violation of
Section 504 to move the student to another school in order to receive this
service. The proposed removal of the student from his or her neighborhood
school because of the refusal to provide a needed supplementary service—as
well as the distance of the proposed placement—would raise serious compliance
concerns under Section 504.
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