What Happens When Schools and Parents Disagree?

Special education is voluntary. Parents do not have to agree to their child being tested, qualifying for special education, or receiving special education services.

If the dispute is the district wanting provide services to a student and the parent not wanting it, the dispute ends with the child not receiving services.

The school district does not have the right to push it further. They can try to convince the parents– but the law says that parents have the right to say no to special education. The district can use the due process procedure to push forward testing/evaluations, but not services.

You can read more about this in 34 C.F.R. § 300.300 or check out our page on parents’ rights.

Typically, IEP teams are as small as possible. No one wants to sit in more meetings than they have to. As things get more contentious though, both the school and the parent are likely to bring in more people.

For example, the head of special education for the school might start to attend meetings to provide support and reduce tensions. At times, district staff might start attending the meeting too.

On the parent’s side, parents might start to bring friends or paid advocates for meetings to help ensure that their views are heard.

Generally, the number of people in the room for a special education meeting is an indicator of the complexity of the child, the status of the relationships within the IEP team, or both.

Note that both parents and schools are allowed to bring people to IEP meetings beyond just the core folks listed in IDEA (34 C.F.R. § 300.321(a)(6)).

If issues can’t get resolved in one IEP meeting, the team might immediately put in for a follow up meeting. If the parent is not giving consent to the new IEP or is providing partial consent, the team must reconvene pretty close to immediately.

Generally, when there are team disagreements, the most common response is for meetings to get longer and more frequent. That gives both the parents and the district representatives opportunities to feel heard and to find solutions.

Many disagreements are about small parts of the IEP like the phrasing of a goal or statement about an aspect of the student’s needs. What will often happen in those cases is that the parent will not sign the IEP at the meeting. The case manager or impacted related service provider (whoever has written the problematic part of the IEP) will update that section, send it to the parent, wait for feedback, revise it again…. and the paperwork will get iterated on over email or in hard copy until both sides are okay with the language.

With bigger disputes involved due process even more paperwork will go back and forth– claims on what the school has done wrong, responses to the claims, meeting invitations, written prior notices….. 

Another common response is to do new assessments for the student. For example, if the parent is concerned about the student’s behavior and feels the school is not doing enough, a common response is for the school to do a Functional behavioral assessment. That provides new information on the student’s behavior and then the team can reconvene to discuss how to implement the findings of the behavioral assessment. 

The same thing can happen with speech, occupational therapy or any other related services. It can also happen for assistive technology and for academic areas that might not have been adequately addressed in the IEP.

In addition, at times a re-evaluation might get done early. That is common if the team is just frustrated and doesn’t feel like there is a strong understanding of the student and what they need to succeed at school. Re-evaluations are supposed to be done every 3 years but can be done as often as every year if the team wants.

If the school has more than one case manager or the district more than one related service provider in an area (like two SLPs), the people on the team could get switched out. A parent might decide that their frustration is with the case manager– and then the easiest way to handle the situation is to change case managers. Sometimes it is just a bad personality switch. Sometimes that solves nothing.

If the disagreements can’t get solved with the steps above, the parent and school might go into mediation or enter due process. For more on those processes, check out the parents’ rights page.

A big thing to know is that districts hate due process. It looks bad when the state pulls their annual report and the lawyer hours cost the district a lot of money. As a result, districts will often bend or cave if the dispute is heading to due process. For example, the district might have said no to occupational therapy services– but if the parent really pushes, many schools and districts will often cave.  Special education is, too often, a squeaky wheel field.

You can also read about due process on the IDEA website in 34 C.F.R. § 300.507.