Learn how to organize the legal papers associated with the education of your special needs student.
For lawyers
Documents in the hearing process: preparing to meet your lawyer. When parents ask an attorney or lay advocate to advise them about their child's rights under IDEA, the first thing the adviser must do is review all the relevant documents. How should you organize them?
We ask parents to send copies of
all their documents in strict chronological order before we meet so we can read them and get as full a picture as possible about who the child is and what has been done for him or her in the special education system. Unless the attorney or advocate asks you to do so, don't try to organize your documents by category (e.g., placing all the IEPs in one file, all the evaluations in another, all the correspondence in another, etc.). The most efficient way for the advocate or attorney to get the picture and the history is to see the development step by step. Note that in the sequence of those documents, an IEP should be placed according to the date of the Team meeting that developed the IEP.
Because any document might eventually have to be introduced as an exhibit at a hearing or in court, we ask that parents not write any comments on them. (You can point out particular items or ask questions by using sticky notes.)
You should also give the attorney or advocate a chronology of the events that have led you to consult with him/her - not an extremely detailed description of every thing that happened, but an outline that will give the advisor a perspective on what led to your child's current situation.
Finally, you should give your attorney or advocate a list of all the key people that have been involved with you or your child, with full names, addresses and phone numbers if you can find out that information.