¶ … Individuals With Disabilities Education Act: Compliance Hearings
Compliance Hearings: IDEA
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
IDEA is the driving force behind fairness and access for millions of students with special needs. Although it has opened the door for many, there are still instances of noncompliance among school districts. Is the current use of compliance hearings the best way to ensure that students with special needs are receiving the best quality education? Why or why not?
It is true that IDEA has done a lot to make education more accessible and favorable for children with special needs (Imber et al., 2013). Working complementarily with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, IDEA has led to the development of a federal monitoring and compliance system that has made school districts not only more compliant with the provisions of IDEA, but also more focused on maximizing the education outcomes of students with special needs (AASA, 2013). Compliance hearings have resulted in an increased propensity on the part of school districts to improve the academic outcomes of students with special needs or risk oversight and penalties (AASA, 2013). If a district, for instance, following a compliance hearing is found to be noncompliant with one or more statutory requirements for students with special needs, it risks losing federal funds and being subjected to intensive monitoring from federal and state education...
Such hearings have thus gone a long way towards ensuring that students with special needs are receiving quality education.
I, however, do not think that compliance hearings are the best way to maximize the educational outcomes of students with disabilities. There are a number of reasons for this. First, such hearings expend huge chunks of school districts' resources and this impedes on the districts' ability to provide enhanced academic services to children with special needs (AASA, 2013). It is estimated that on average, a district involved in a compliance hearing spends $10, 512 in legal fees, and one required to compensate parents for attorney fees incurs $19, 241 in such fees (AASA, 2013).
If individual personnel and district officials are too busy fighting the legal actions of one parent or a group of parents, then it is likely that they are spending less time and financial resources enhancing the learning outcomes of the rest of the learners. Moreover, such hearings often take lots of time, and it could take months for a decision to be reached. All these take a substantial amount of time, dollars and emotional capital, which could otherwise be put in activities geared at enhancing the academic outcomes of learners.
Additionally, owing to the publicity and attention that such hearings receive from the media, it is possible that they could affect the personnel involved psychologically. In a 2014 study seeking…
