You are worried about your child. You see them struggling to read, stumbling over math homework, and spending way too long each evening on homework. Even when they complete their work, they expend an extraordinary amount of effort to produce it. Something isn’t right.
In some schools, the teacher may tell you that the district has a program that offers interventions to struggling students and tracks the child’s response to these interventions—extra reading orfor example. This kind of program is called RTI, “Response to Intervention.” RTI can be very effective at offering support and can be all that some children need. But it is not offered in every school and is not always sufficient.
The IDEA prescribes remedies when parents disagree with an evaluation conducted by the school, but the law is strangely silent on what happens when the school simply declines to evaluate, with or without giving a reason. Another option would be to obtain an Independent Educational Evaluation , a private evaluation paid for by the family, which the school district is required to consider in making decisions about a student’s eligibility forand services. The district may pay for an IEE, but only when a district evaluation has been completed and the parents disagree with its findings.