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Where to start when nothing has a name yet

Two federal laws sit behind everything in this collection. IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) is the one that produces an IEP. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act produces a 504 plan. Your child is under one of them, or both, and which one it is changes the meeting, the paperwork, the people who have to be in the room, and what happens when the district says no.

What IDEA is comes first. It sets the duty to go looking for children who may need help, to evaluate them, and to serve the ones who qualify. Read it before anything else here. Every other page in this collection borrows its vocabulary.

Then the vocabulary itself. The terms that show up in your child's paperwork are collected in one glossary, defined the way a school uses them rather than the way a dictionary does. Keep that page open during your first meeting.

Nothing in this collection is state specific. Your district will use local names for the same programs, and those names are not on any of these pages.

What the law actually promises

IDEA promises FAPE. FAPE stands for free appropriate public education. Free is the easy half. Appropriate is the word districts and parents fight over, and the FAPE article takes that definition apart in the order the parts actually matter.

That page matters more than the title suggests. When a parent says the school is not doing enough, the question underneath is almost always a FAPE question. What appropriate means for one particular child is the part to read twice, because a program can meet every procedural requirement on the checklist and still be too thin for the child sitting in the room.

FAPE under Section 504 is a different standard with the same four letters. The 504 plan article covers that version. Mixing the two is the most common way a parent ends up quoting a rule the school does not have to follow. The IDEA overview draws that line.

Telling an IEP and a 504 plan apart

An IEP changes what your child is taught. A 504 plan changes how your child reaches the same teaching. Everything else follows from that one sentence, and the side by side comparison runs it through goals, services, dispute rights, and the question of whether a child can hold both documents at once.

Which document carries more service is the other question that page settles. So is the ADHD and anxiety version of it, which is the one parents actually type into a search box.

Who sits on the IEP team is the page to read before a first meeting. Federal law names a required set of members and that article lists them. It also explains the LEA representative seat. LEA stands for local educational agency, which is your school district, and the person in that seat is the only one at the table who can commit district money.

Being on the team does not mean the team agrees with you. The membership rules tell you who has to be in the room, who can be excused, who you can bring, and what happens when a required member does not show. They do not give you a vote.

The 504 plan articles, in order

Five pages here cover Section 504 on its own. What a 504 plan is defines the document, says who qualifies, and answers whether a medical diagnosis is required. It also names what a 504 plan cannot do, which is the part most parents find out about later.

Five worked 504 plan examples show the document the way a district writes it, with a named staff member responsible for each accommodation. Read the part on strong and weak wording. An accommodation written as "as needed" is the one that quietly never happens.

Two of those examples run deeper as their own pages. A 504 plan for ADHD covers the eligibility rule districts get wrong most often, which is that the question is how a student functions without medication. Accommodations for anxiety runs through test anxiety, speaking and social situations, panic attacks, and school refusal.

The 504 plan templates are where to go once you are ready to write something. No federal 504 form exists. What a parent actually writes is the evaluation request, the accommodation proposal they carry into the meeting, the confirmation email afterward, and the letter that asks for a review. More printable paperwork sits in the resource library.

A 504 plan has a ceiling. It provides accommodations, not specially designed instruction, so a child who needs the teaching itself changed needs an IEP instead. Whether ADHD can qualify a child for an IEP picks that up where the ADHD 504 page stops.

What this collection does not cover

None of these pages gets your child evaluated. That has its own collection and it starts with a letter. How to request a special education evaluation has the wording, the two people it should go to, what the district has to send back, and what to do when nothing comes back at all.

After eligibility, the document becomes the argument. What has to be in an IEP lists the required parts, and a missing part is the most checkable problem in the whole process. Read those two collections in that order.

State rules are missing here too. Every state runs special education under IDEA and then adds its own paperwork and its own local names on top. Your district will use those names in the meeting and in every letter it sends. The glossary will still get you most of the way there.

One more thing before a first meeting. The printable meeting prep checklist covers what to ask for ahead of time, what to carry in, what to ask before you sign anything, and what to send the school the next morning. Print it. Bring it.

Where an advocate fits

An advocate reads the file, pulls the progress data, writes your concerns up before the meeting, and sits next to you while the team goes through the document. They are not attorneys. The difference between an advocate and an attorney is worth reading before you hire either one, and when hiring one is worth it depends on what has already gone wrong. Advocates are listed by state. When you are ready, talk with an advocate.