There’s Tuition Reimbursement in the Fine Print: Part 1
The “Management Needs” section of a child’s IEP (Individualized Education Plan) has tremendous potential as a vehicle for creating legally enforceable rights and increasing the likelihood of tuition reimbursement. As such, parents of children with special needs would do well to pay attention to this section and employ it to their advantage.
The purpose of the management needs section is to specify (and, just as important, guarantee) the accommodations, modifications, and supports that the student requires to remain on task, engage in lessons, retain information, complete coursework, and so forth. A classical example of one such accommodation would be preferential seating in the front of the classroom.
But what can the management section do for a parent contemplating tuition reimbursement?
Unlike, say, an IEP’s annual goals, which are aspirational and depend — in part — upon the student’s active participation, an IEP’s management needs are specific guarantees of in-class offerings that must be immediately available from the very first day of school. And, because they are implemented by classroom teachers in the course of their regular duties, management needs also raise fewer budgetary or staffing concerns than, say, increasing a student’s regimen of related services. As such, CSEs (Committees on Special Education) often regard the “management needs” section as a convenient place for compromise, where parental input may be incorporated at relatively low cost to the district. Mindful parents can use this to their advantage and extract all manner of legally enforceable guarantees.
The key, then, is to motivate the CSE to adopt additional accommodations and modifications, regardless of the type of classroom setting. For example: If a child is said to need “continuous direct instruction,” that now becomes a right that the CSE has affirmatively guaranteed by inclusion in the IEP. The deprivation of or failure to provide that right becomes a legal issue.
Anything included in the management section is a qualitative guarantee — whether or not the CSE realized that they were actionable (i.e., that the parent could file an impartial hearing to enforce their implementation). The following hypothetical testimony at a hearing would be a valuable discovery concerning the implementation of an IEP that provided for continuous direct instruction:
Witness: Our teachers follow the workshop model; they demonstrate the material, and then the kids work independently and in small groups.
Attorney: Are children ever expected to work without a teacher’s supervision?
Witness: Yes; a teacher is always present in the classroom, but students are expected to work independently at times.
Here are a few additional examples of management needs that a parent can request to create a likely Catch-22 for their district:
Spelling will be excluded from the assessment of homework assignments: Sometimes there may be an internal contradiction within the IEP between goals and management needs. In this case, if a goal specifies that “spelling performance will be measured through homework,” then the CSE was caught asleep at the wheel — clearly one section was not truly appropriate for the child's needs.
The Student will be issued a daily report card: This is a prime example of a necessary tool (a daily update to parents) that a CSE will have trouble rejecting as unnecessary. Once it’s on the IEP, the district must comply — but the school is virtually guaranteed to fall short along the way.
If you or someone you know has used an IEP’s Management Needs — or perhaps another similar mechanism — to their advantage, please let us know in the comments!
In our next blog, we will discuss how CSE failures to meet IEP requirements are used to assess tuition reimbursement cases.
Marc Gottlieb
Partner
195 Montague Street
14th Floor
Brooklyn Heights, NY 11201
Marc@GottliebFirm.com
(646) 820-8506