The purpose of this article is to provide special educators with significant and perhaps surprising recent lessons in special education law. These lessons under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act range from the threshold issues of child find and eligibility through the central obligation of…

This article highlights the trends in state laws and judicial rulings specific to identification of and interventions for students with dyslexia.

Teachers and parents often find special education law complex and confusing. As one step for a basic foundation in special education law, a previous "TEACHING Exceptional Children" article (Zirkel, 2005) provided a snapshot of the "top five case concepts" based on 10 decisions from the Supreme Court. Each of these decisions…

For this 18th article in the series reviewing recent court decisions concerning appropriate school psychology practice from both professional and legal perspectives, the topic is the IDEA's obligation of providing a comprehensive initial evaluation. More specifically, the focus here is determining eligibility for a gifted child with emotional and…

This article provides a current, comprehensive, and concise overview of the law specific to students with dyslexia in K-12 schools. It consists of (a) an overview of the applicable legal framework, which includes the federal foundation in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, (b) a compact…

The modern meaning of "child find" under the IDEA is almost entirely a matter of court decisions, because the legislation (§ 1412[a][3][A]) and the regulations (§ 300.111) are limited to the historical obligation to "locate, identify, and evaluate" students with disabilities. More specifically, in interpreting and applying this…

This article provides a systematic and impartial analysis of the law, including hearing and review officer as well as judicial decisions, specific to the intersection of response to intervention (RTI) and school districts' ongoing affirmative obligation of child find. The results reveal that this intersection has not been the subject of…

Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) is one of the low-incidence physical disabilities that the literature has not addressed in relation to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and its case law applications. To help fill the gap, this relatively brief article provides (a) an introduction of PWS from legal sources; (b) an overview of the IDEA,…

Specific learning disability (SLD), although moderately declining in recent years, continues to account for the highest enrollment among the eligibility classifications under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; Zirkel, 2013b). The recognition of response to intervention (RTI) in the 2004 amendments of the IDEA as an approach for…

The legal dimension of response to intervention (RTI) has been the subject of considerable professional confusion. This brief article addresses the issue in three parts. The first part provides an update of a previous iteration that compared 12 common conceptions, referred to here as the "lore," with an objective synthesis of the…

This article provides a concise and objective synthesis of the federal legislation, regulations, and agency policy interpretations; state laws; and case law, including hearing officer and complaint investigation decisions, concerning specific learning disability (SLD) identification since the 2006 IDEA regulations. The results reveal wide latitude…

A persistent problem in the professional literature in school psychology and related fields, such as special education, is the insufficient treatment of legal issues in terms of not only quantity (e.g., Zaheer & Zirkel, 2014) but also quality (e.g., Zirkel, 2014). The quality dimension is illustrated in the coverage of the Supreme Court's…

This article provides an up-to-date and comprehensive canvassing of the judicial case law concerning the responses to students with concussions in the public school context. The two categories of court decisions are (a) those concerning continued participation in interscholastic athletics, referred to under the rubric of "return to play"…

For this eighth article in the series reviewing recent court decisions concerning appropriate school psychology practice from both professional and legal perspectives, consider the summary of the concussion-related case below and the questions-and-answers after it. The overlapping issues in this case are child find, evaluation, and eligibility of…

A comprehensive search identified 42 court decisions from late 1996 to early 2014 concerning the primary modern meaning of child find under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)--whether the district had reasonable suspicion of eligibility and yet did not evaluate the child. The findings from a systematic analysis of these court…