Entering Children into Special Education

Host: What is the process for entering children into special education?
Rene Hackney: There is a long process for becoming eligible for special education services. It often involves two separate meetings, several months apart. The first meeting and these meetings are called different things with different systems, but where I was it was called an eligibility meeting, where the family and the social workers and the psychologists and the speech language professionals would meet and decide whether a child was eligible for the testing services. If they ruled out things like attendance and family issues and thought that this really was a special education issue, they go ahead and move forward with the evaluation process. There are federal guidelines, I believe it is the 90 days from that first meeting till the second meeting, in the second meeting everyone meets again to review the results of all the evaluations that have happened and to determine whether the child meets the criteria for being in one of the programs.



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