“Defensible” IEP Procedures: A Legal Perspective

This article successively (a) highlights differences between the legal and professional lenses in relation to IDEA issues; (b) provides an update the previous (2017) analysis of judicial case law on the frequency and outcomes for procedural denial of FAPE in the IEP process; and (c) discusses the implications of this updated legal analysis. The 100 court decisions. sampled based on the same procedure of the predecessor analysis for the more recent 9.9 years yielded 185 relevant rulings. The findings included that (a) the most frequent focus of the 185 relevant rulings was parental participation; (b) the percentage in favor of parents was slightly higher for the rulings specific to the IEP components of the IEP (30%) than those for IEP development, revision, and effectuation (25%), other parental participation (23%), and the members of the IEP team (22%); and (c) the overall outcomes predominated in favor of school districts on a 3:1 ratio for the rulings, which moderated to slightly less than a 2:1 ratio for decisions on a best-for-parents conflation procedure. The message was to clearly differentiate legal requirements from professional best practice, so that the focus is on parental collaboration and student outcomes rather than on legal defensibility.