How do I request a special education evaluation?

Quick answer

Ask in writing. Email the principal, copy the district's special education director, say you are requesting an initial special education evaluation under IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and name what you have seen.

That is the whole mechanism. Under 34 C.F.R. § 300.301(b), "Either a parent of a child or a public agency may initiate a request for an initial evaluation." No form is required and no diagnosis is required. You do not have to sit through a round of classroom interventions first, and the RTI section below is the reason.

Two answers are possible. The district asks for your consent to evaluate, or it refuses and owes you prior written notice explaining why.

Your request does not start the 60 day evaluation clock. Consent does, and the gap between the two has no federal deadline in it.

The letter

Copy this, fill the brackets, send it from the address the school already has for you.

The observations do the work, so put dates and counts on them. "Missed nine assignments in October" is a fact somebody can check. "Struggling" is not.

Do not name a disability category. A request to test for autism is a request the district can answer narrowly. Ask for all areas related to the suspected disability instead, which is § 300.304(c)(4)'s own phrase and the thing that keeps the testing wide.

Send it by email, because the timestamp is the point, and why to put requests in writing covers the rest of the argument. Fill in the district's online referral form too if one exists. A Section 504 evaluation is a different request under different law, and the 504 plan template page carries that version of the letter.

This letter obliges nobody to agree with you. It creates a dated request the district has to answer one way or the other.

Who the letter goes to

Federal law names no addressee. Read § 300.301 end to end and nothing in it says who at the school has to receive a parent's request.

So send it to two people. The principal runs the building. The district's special education administrator runs the evaluation clock, is usually the person who sends the consent form, and is the person a state complaint investigator will ask about your request, which is why the second name on the email matters more than it looks.

Some states write that second person into the rule. In Virginia the special education administrator has three business days from receiving a referral to start the process, send it to the school based team, or refuse it in writing, under 8VAC20-81-50.

Do not send it only to the teacher. A forwarded message is a weaker record than one you addressed yourself.

Routing changes nothing about the answer itself. What it changes is how fast the answer comes and how easily you can prove the date you asked.

What happens after you send it

Consent is the next document. Under 34 C.F.R. § 300.300(a)(1)(i) the district has to give you notice and get your informed consent before it evaluates.

Read that form before you sign it. It is consent to test, and § 300.300(a)(1)(iii) says so directly. "Parental consent for initial evaluation must not be construed as consent for initial provision of special education and related services." Two forms, two decisions, months apart. When the school needs your consent covers the wider rule.

Refuse consent to evaluate, or never answer, and § 300.300(a)(3) lets the district use mediation or a due process hearing to try to override you. It may. Nothing in the rule requires it to.

The second consent works differently. Once your child is found eligible, § 300.300(b) requires your consent before services start, the district cannot override a refusal, and it does not violate its duty to provide a free appropriate public education (FAPE) by leaving out services you declined.

Signing the first form starts testing and nothing else.

How long the school has

Sixty days from the day the district receives your consent, under 34 C.F.R. § 300.301(c)(1)(i). Unless your state set a timeframe of its own, in which case that one governs, under § 300.301(c)(1)(ii).

The unit matters as much as the number, and § 300.11 defines it. "Day means calendar day unless otherwise indicated as business day or school day." Sixty calendar days is two months with the holidays inside it. Sixty school days is most of a semester.

Half the states run the federal 60 calendar days. The other half set their own, and the spread is wide enough that any single number printed as national would be wrong for twenty five states.

Read the third column rather than the second. Two states can both say ninety days and mean different months, because one starts counting when you write and the other starts counting when you sign.

Your state's number is not printed on this page. How long a school has to evaluate covers the federal rule in more detail, your district's procedural safeguards notice has your state's version in writing, and the state pages are where the state by state work lives.

Now the part nobody mentions. Between the day you send the letter and the day a consent form arrives, federal law sets nothing. The Office of Special Education Programs said so in 2011. "Although the IDEA and its implementing regulations do not prescribe a specific timeframe from referral for evaluation to parental consent, it has been the Department's longstanding policy that the LEA must seek parental consent within a reasonable period of time after the referral for evaluation, if the LEA agrees that an initial evaluation is needed." LEA is the local education agency, which is your district.

Twenty five states fill that gap themselves, from three business days in Virginia to thirty days in Florida. The other twenty five set no number, so the only pressure on that stretch is the pressure you apply.

A reasonable period of time is not a deadline you can count. That is why the follow up email below carries a real date.

The school does not need your request

Section 300.111 is child find, and it puts the duty on the state and the district rather than on you. All children with disabilities residing in the state have to be "identified, located, and evaluated."

One clause inside it answers the most common brush off. Child find reaches children "who are suspected of being a child with a disability under § 300.8 and in need of special education, even though they are advancing from grade to grade," at § 300.111(c)(1). Passing grades are not an answer to a child find question. Neither is good behaviour.

So a district that already suspected something and waited for a parent to write in was late before your letter arrived.

Child find has no clock. Nothing in § 300.111 gives you a date, a form or a person to hold to it. Your written request does, which is why you write one even in a case where the district should have moved first.

When the answer is "let's finish RTI first"

RTI is response to intervention. MTSS is a multi-tiered system of supports. Both describe a school running progressively more intense help inside the general classroom and watching whether it works.

Both are lawful. Section 300.307(a)(2) requires every state to permit a process based on the child's response to scientific, research-based intervention as part of how it identifies a specific learning disability.

What neither can do is hold your request. Section 300.309(c) says the district "must promptly request parental consent to evaluate the child" and "must adhere to the timeframes described in §§ 300.301 and 300.303," and it names two triggers. One is a child who has not made adequate progress after an appropriate period of instruction. The other is written flat at § 300.309(c)(2). "Whenever a child is referred for an evaluation."

The Department of Education put the rest in writing in 2011, in a memorandum to every state director of special education. OSEP Memorandum 11-07 is titled "A Response to Intervention (RTI) Process Cannot Be Used to Delay-Deny an Evaluation for Eligibility under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)." The sentence to quote back is this one.

The memo names the exact move as well. It calls it inconsistent with the evaluation provisions for a district "to reject a referral and delay provision of an initial evaluation on the basis that a child has not participated in an RTI framework."

Know what the memo is before you send it. Guidance to state directors, signed by the Director of the Office of Special Education Programs on January 21, 2011. It is not a regulation, it carries no penalty, and it sets no deadline. It is the Department's own reading of its own rules, and the investigator who reads your state complaint works for a state director who got a copy.

The intervention data is still worth having. Section 300.304(b)(1) tells the district to "use a variety of assessment tools and strategies," and eight weeks of progress monitoring from a targeted reading group is real evidence about your child. The framework is fine. The delay is the problem. Can the school make my child wait for RTI goes further into that fight.

Quoting the memo produces no consent form on its own. It produces a consent form or a refusal, and a refusal is something you can take somewhere.

If the district says no

A no is a refusal, and a refusal triggers a document. Under 34 C.F.R. § 300.503(a)(2) a district that refuses to start an evaluation owes you prior written notice. Prior written notice covers the seven things federal law puts inside that letter.

Item three is the one that matters here. The notice has to describe "each evaluation procedure, assessment, record, or report" the district used as the basis for the refusal. A refusal that names no records is the district telling you in writing that it read nothing. The same OSEP memo says a district denying an evaluation request has to explain the refusal and give "the information that was used as the basis for this decision."

Two routes run from there, and both are slow.

• A state complaint. The state education agency has 60 days under 34 C.F.R. § 300.152(a) to investigate and issue a written decision, and the violation has to have happened within the year before you file, under § 300.153(c). How to file a state complaint.
• A due process hearing. Evaluation is one of the four subjects a parent may file on, under § 300.507(a)(1). What a due process hearing is.

One thing is not a route in, and parents try it constantly. An independent educational evaluation at public expense exists under § 300.502(b)(1) only "if the parent disagrees with an evaluation obtained by the public agency," so how to get an independent evaluation at public expense is the page for after the testing rather than instead of it.

Neither route produces testing next week. Both produce a decision about whether the refusal was lawful, which is a different thing.

Private evaluation, school evaluation

You can pay for a private evaluation whenever you like. Nobody's approval is needed and you do not have to tell the school first.

What that report buys is narrower than most parents expect. Under § 300.502(c)(1) the results of a parent-obtained evaluation "must be considered by the public agency, if it meets agency criteria, in any decision made with respect to the provision of FAPE to the child." Considered. Not adopted, not binding, and not a finding of eligibility.

Eligibility runs on the district's own evaluation, and § 300.304(b)(2) forbids using "any single measure or assessment as the sole criterion" in that decision either way. A private neuropsychological report is one measure. The district is entitled to run its own testing even when the one you paid for is good.

So the split is this. The school evaluation is free, it decides eligibility, and you choose neither the evaluator nor the tests. The private one is yours, you pay, you pick who does it, and it lands in the file as something the team has to look at.

Paying for it shortens nothing. The district's duty to evaluate does not go away, and its clock runs exactly as it would have.

If nothing comes back

Two weeks of silence is enough. Send this.

Put a real date in the blank. "As soon as possible" is not a date, and the date is the only part of that email anyone can miss. Reply inside the original thread, to the same two people, so the first request sits underneath it.

Neither email changes the answer. Both make the answer dated and written.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Asking out loud and leaving it there. A hallway conversation has no date on it, and the district has nothing it is obliged to answer.
• Asking for a category. "I would like him tested for autism" invites a narrow answer. All areas related to the suspected disability, at § 300.304(c)(4), does not.
• Waiting for a diagnosis first. Section 300.301(b) asks for a parent's request and nothing else.
• Reading the consent form as a decision about services, when § 300.300(a)(1)(iii) makes it consent to test.
• Accepting "she is passing" as the end of it, when § 300.111(c)(1) covers children who are advancing from grade to grade.
• Counting the 60 days from the day you wrote. It runs from the day the district received your consent.

Where this goes next

• You want to know what the testing has to cover. What testing should include.
• You want the deadline question on its own. How long a school has to evaluate.
• The school is running interventions and will not schedule testing. Can the school make my child wait for RTI.
• The answer was no. Prior written notice.
• The testing happened and you disagree with it. How to get an independent evaluation at public expense.
• You want the team at a table rather than in an inbox. Requesting an IEP meeting.

An advocate writes the request against your child's actual file, names the areas the school would otherwise leave out, and reads the resulting report before the eligibility meeting. Advocates are not attorneys. They cannot file a lawsuit or represent you at a due process hearing. Most advocates on our directory charge $75 to $150 per hour, and you can find advocates in your state.

What this page does not settle

Whether your child qualifies. The request produces testing, and testing produces a group decision that can go either way. Section 300.304(b)(2) rules out deciding it on any one test, which cuts both directions.

Your state's clock is not here. The four in the table above show how far apart the rules sit. They are not a lookup for your district.

And an evaluation that is complete, correct and on time can still end in "not eligible." That happens often, and it is not the end of the road. Section 504 has a wider definition of disability and a different process behind it, which is what IEP vs 504 plan is for.