Regional School District 1 26-0130

Complaint Summary

Date Findings Report Sent:

November 5, 2025

Case Number:

26-0130

Grade Level:

Elementary

Person filing complaint:

Parent

School District:

Regional School District 1

Allegation(s):

  • Issue 1: The Parent alleged that the District failed to identify, locate, and evaluate the Student in all areas of suspected disability, despite repeated parent requests and evidence of need. 34 CFR § 300.111
  • The Parent’s emailed referral, dated July 31, 2025, requested a “comprehensive special education evaluation”. The Parent alleged that the District refused to move forward with a comprehensive evaluation and evaluate in all areas of suspected disability (social, emotional, functional, adaptive) and limited the consideration of the Student’s need for evaluation only to his cognitive performance. 34 CFR § 300.304(c)(6)
  • On June 18, 2025, the Parent disagreed with the scope of the evaluation conducted by the District in February 2024, and requested, in writing, an IEE. The Parent’s request for evaluation was to determine if the Student was Gifted. The Parent alleged that the District failed to respond to the IEE request as required. Note: Although the Parent disagreed with an evaluation that took place outside of the one-year look-back period of this complaint, the Parent’s request for the IEE, on the basis of the scope of the evaluation in June of 2025, falls within that one-year look-back period. 34 CFR § 300.502.
  • The Parent alleged that the District did not issue a compliant prior written notice in response to evaluation requests, refusals, or parent-provided data and that the PWN provided lacked required components.
  • The allegations were the following: “Parents’ input and private evaluations were not meaningfully considered, excluding the Parents from the decision-making process.
  • Decisions are made outside of the meeting process, without meaningful discussion or consideration. Administrators make decisions unilaterally, effectively predetermining outcomes before any team meeting occurs”. 34 C.F.R. §300.501

Conclusion(s):

  • As related to Issue 1, under 34 CFR § 300.305(a), as part of an evaluation, a district must review existing evaluation data on a student including evaluations and information provided by parents, review a student’s school-based performance and behavior, and based on that review, identify what additional data, if any, are needed to determine whether the student is a child with a disability, and to determine the educational needs of the student. In this case, the Student’s PPT did all of the above mentioned reviews, meeting the requirements of this regulation, and determined that additional data was not needed in order to make an eligibility determination for the Student. This satisfies evaluation criteria for 34 CFR § 300.305(a) and, in satisfying this, also meets the evaluation requirement of Child Find. Therefore, the District was not found out of compliance with 34 C.F.R. § 300.111(a)(1). 

  • As related to Issue 2, as discussed above, for the Student’s referral, the District was required to review existing evaluation data on the Student including evaluations and information provided by the Parents, review the Student’s school-based performance and behavior, and based on that review, identify what additional data, if any, were needed to determine whether the Student was a child with a disability and the educational needs of the Student. It had been previously established that, at the Student’s PPT meeting, the District did complete this task in that they met the requirements of 34 CFR § 300.305(a). The District was not required to conduct any further evaluation since the PPT determined that it did not identify a need for any additional data in order to make an eligibility determination. Therefore, the District was not found out of compliance with 34 CFR § 300.304(c)(6).

  • As related to Issue 3, the Parent requested that the Student be evaluated to determine if he met criteria as a student who was Gifted and, per that request, the District designed and conducted an evaluation to make that determination. Giftedness is not a disability category recognized under IDEA; it is a special education category recognized under Connecticut special education regulations (RCSA § 10-76d-9). IDEA is the federal law which gives the Parent the right to request an independent educational evaluation (IEE). The same right to an IEE does not exist in Connecticut special education regulations. Since the evaluation was not conducted to determine eligibility for a disability category under IDEA, the Parent did not have the accompanying right to an IEE. Therefore, the District was not required to respond to the IEE request in any manner. Therefore, the District was not out of compliance with 34 CFR § 300.502.

  • As related to Issue 4, in reviewing the required criteria of PWN for the notice in question, all required criteria were present with the exception of a fully adequate ‘reason for proposing or refusing to take action’. This shortfall was identified by the District, not the investigation, and presented as an inadvertent omission and was, in fact, included on a parallel PWN. For this reason, it was concluded that the District was out of compliance with 34 CFR § 300.503, however, it was found that corrective actions were not needed to ensure future compliance.

  • As related to Issue 5, the Parent’s claims for meaningful consideration or predetermination during the Section 504 process were not considered in this special education investigation. Based on the facts provided, there was no clear evidence that the Parent was not included in the IEP decision making process and District actions were documented through the PPT process. Therefore, it was concluded that the District was not out of compliance with 34 C.F.R. §300.501.

Corrective Action(s):

  • No Required Corrective Action