The process starts with a referral for special education assessment. This will often happen during a referral or student concern meeting. Note that this is a team decision– parents or the school can want assessment, but the process only goes forward if the team is in agreement (for more on what happens when people disagree, check out those FAQs!).

Then the school will create a permission to evaluate form that lists all of the formal assessments the school plans to do. This will go home for the parents to review and sign. The school can only do the formal assessments on the permission to evaluate form. They can do more informal assessments (think spelling tests versus an IQ test– for more on informal versus formal assessments, check out this page).

IDEA says that students need to be evaluated in all areas of suspected disability. That means that the assessments on the permission to evaluate need to match what the concerns are. If there are communication concerns, you expect to see a speech and language assessment there. If there are none, you don’t want to see those on there. Students are pulled out of class for assessments– the goal is to do every assessment a student needs, but not bonus ones.

When the signed permission to evaluate form comes back to the school, they then have 60 calendar days to do the assessments and hold the qualifying/evaluation summary IEP meeting to share the results of the assessments.