OSEP Policy Guidance for IDEA Impartial Hearing Officers

This annotated overview of the policy letters of the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) available on their website covers the period 2001 to the present. Among these IDEA policy interpretations, the selection is largely limited to those within the basic building blocks of the IDEA, free appropriate public education, least restrictive environment, and remedies, and the added category of due process hearings under the IDEA. The exclusions are for OSEP policy interpretations that are comprehensively covered elsewhere for more specialized IDEA issues, such as evaluation/reevaluation, independent educational evaluations, response to intervention, speech-language therapy, the state complaint process, and stay-put; deal with broad systemic IDEA issues, such as use of funds, maintenance of efforts, school choice/vouchers, and general state education agency supervision; conversely concern very narrow IDEA issues, such as adaptive physical education, disproportionality, students with hearing or vision impairments, and surrogate parents, or the temporary issues of the pandemic; and are at the same website but focus on other laws, such as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Moreover, although perhaps not as obvious, the focus is limited to Part B of the IDEA.