PWN - What, Why, and How it Can Benefit You

PWN tells you a lot.  If the district has real reasons for their denial of a service it wil be included.  If they don't have any good reasons to deny your child a service, such as budget constraints or just because they can (in their opinion), then it is your green light to go the next step - either a compliance complaint or an Alternate dispute resolution, Mediation only, or Due process request.

http://www.specialeducationadvisor.com/using-prior-written-notice-as-a-tool/comment-page-1/#comment-105321

Prior Written Notice or PWN

Prior Written Notice from http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/34/300.503

§ 300.503
Prior notice by the public agency; content of notice.
(a) Notice. Written notice that meets the requirements of paragraph (b) of this section must be given to the parents of a child with a disability a reasonable time before the public agency—
(1) Proposes to initiate or change the identification, evaluation, or educational placement of the child or the provision of FAPE to the child; or
(2) Refuses to initiate or change the identification, evaluation, or educational placement of the child or the provision of FAPE to the child.
(b) Content of notice. The notice required under paragraph (a) of this section must include—
(1) A description of the action proposed or refused by the agency;
(2) An explanation of why the agency proposes or refuses to take the action;
(3) A description of each evaluation procedure, assessment, record, or report the agency used as a basis for the proposed or refused action;
(4) A statement that the parents of a child with a disability have protection under the procedural safeguards of this part and, if this notice is not an initial referral for evaluation, the means by which a copy of a description of the procedural safeguards can be obtained;
(5) Sources for parents to contact to obtain assistance in understanding the provisions of this part;
(6) A description of other options that the IEP Team considered and the reasons why those options were rejected; and
(7) A description of other factors that are relevant to the agency's proposal or refusal.
(c) Notice in understandable language. (1) The notice required under paragraph (a) of this section must be—
(i) Written in language understandable to the general public; and
(ii) Provided in the native language of the parent or other mode of communication used by the parent, unless it is clearly not feasible to do so. 

(2) If the native language or other mode of communication of the parent is not a written language, the public agency must take steps to ensure—
(i) That the notice is translated orally or by other means to the parent in his or her native language or other mode of communication;
(ii) That the parent understands the content of the notice; and
(iii) That there is written evidence that the requirements in paragraphs (c)(2)(i) and (ii) of this section have been met.
(Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1415(b)(3) and (4), 1415(c)(1), 1414(b)(1))

IN PLAIN ENGLISH:

This must be done if the District chooses to discontinue a service, add a service, evaluate a child, change placement, or deny a service or placement that a parent requests for their child who is in special education.

It must include:
>What they will or will not do
>Why they are doing or not doing it
>A description of what they use to make that decision - evaluations, reports or records that were used to make the decision
>A copy of the "Parent's Rights" (Procedural Safeguards)
>Places to get help understanding the rights
>What other options were considered and why they were rejected
>Anything else that they used to decide what they would do

It must be understandable and in the person's native language or that the parent can have it interpreted so that they understand it.

I have found that the district avoids saying anything relevant in the PWN's.  They don't want to give reasons - the favorite catch phrase in our district is "we respectfully decline to ....".  But it is not respectful and it is not appropriate to simply decline a parent's requests for their child's educational needs.  Fortunately we can demand more information and that information has been very helpful to me in the past, since they don't generally have any sound reasoning behind their "no", and this becomes apparent in the PWN.  Without sound reasoning they will have a hard time defending their refusals at Due Process.

EXAMPLE: Letter Re: Prior Written Notice

This isn't like the sample letters I have written, it is more an idea of how to go with this sort of letter. Since a response to a letter of Prior Written Notice could be about so many different services or assessments, etc. it becomes apparent why I have chosen to use our letter as an example rather than offering a sample. I believe that if one goes with a generic sort of letter in this case, one will get a generic sort of response which is not at all meaningful or helpful. Just a warning - my sarcastic sense of humor comes through in this particular post, but not in the meat and potatoes of the letter. Our director of special education has a name so close I couldn't help but use the pseudonym Dr. Do-Little. =)
"Chlöe"


Address
City, State, Zip
September 29, 2010


Dr. Do-Little
Director of Special Education
Unified School District
Address
City, State, Zip

RE: My Beautiful Child – D.O.B. 00-00-0000
Letter of Prior Written notice dated 9/24/2010

SENT VIA FAX AND MAIL

Dear Dr. Do-Little,

The purpose of this letter is to determine your reasoning behind denying my daughter, further outside speech therapy. In your letter of Prior Written Notice you simply state that you “respectfully deny” the request. Even with the additional two hours per week of therapy that she was receiving through Speech and Language Center for four months she was not able to meet all of her speech and language goals in the past. Now another expert has recommended that in order to overcome the issues of her Central Auditory Processing Disorder and gain from her education she requires two hours per week of Speech and Language Therapy outside of school hours, yet the district continues to say “no”.

I would think the district would take the recommendations of this expert seriously, especially considering that she is the district’s expert. I point this out to make it clear that although the district has repeatedly referred to this evaluation as an Independent Educational Evaluation it is not. It is the initial evaluation for CAPD offered by the district. This evaluation was only offered after several phone calls and my instructing district personnel on the fact that although district personnel have stated that CAPD had already been tested for, it had not since there is no district personnel legally qualified to test for CAPD. The only person qualified by law to administer testing for CAPD are audiologists, not school psychologists or speech therapists as I have been told by district personnel. Those people are only legally qualified to administer a screening test for CAPD, and given the significance of her CAPD I do not believe that the district was making even a minimal effort to screen for CAPD or it would have been revealed years ago when it could have been addressed with less difficulty and expense. In fact, had this been addressed early on, as it should have been, the district may have saved itself several thousands of dollars in overall special education expenses since from what I can gather, my beautiful daughter’s need for special education lies primarily, if not completely in her processing difficulties.

In addition, I do believe it is against the rules set forth in IDEA to conduct an IEP meeting without decision makers in attendance. Ms. DiGoo-Goo was not able to answer the question of additional speech therapy at the meeting, when in fact I believe you could have foreseen that the question might come up since the recommendation had been made in the report that the district was in receipt of well in advance of the IEP meeting on September 00, 2010.

Finally, I would ask that the district provide more than a cursory response in its Prior Written Notice, the law is clear that the district must provide an explanation, with factors that are relevant to the district’s refusal to provide necessary services as demonstrated by the expert who reported on this need in my daughter’s IEP meeting. Can you point to literature and/or other experts who would disagree with the expert the district referred us to? If so, I would wonder why the district would have referred us to her in the first place, but I believe we are owed more than a baseless opinion before we are willing to accept that this is the correct way to treat this educational condition.

Please get back to me at your earliest possible convenience and respond to my questions as well as letting me know how you intend to proceed to meet my daughter’s auditory processing disorder and speech and language issues since it is obvious that the IEP offer will not meet her needs at this time. When she was offered the services in her current IEP the district did not even realize that she had CAPD and so the district is apparently not willing to address this issue without adding further services to help her to overcome a condition that can be overcome with appropriate services.

Should you have any questions regarding this correspondence, please feel free to contact me. 000-000-0000.

Sincerely,


Really Tired of the District Avoiding It's Duty to Educate our kids

cc: My attorney

Prior Written Notice - Can this Travesty be a Blessing in Disguise?

I got a letter from our SPED Head today. SPED Head is a friend's somewhat affectionate nickname for the director of special education. We just got a new SPED Head in our district. She was moved over from another department, not because she had any special knowledge of special education, but probably because she just hadn't pissed off a ton of parents in her former position. I met with her in July and she told a good story of wanting to see that morale improved with the parents and that the kids got what they needed to the best of her ability. In other words, she said what she was expected to say, used a tone that implied she cared, and then proceeded to do exactly what has been done prior to her taking the position. In other words, nothing that benefits our kids.

So the letter I got today....it was what is called a letter of "Prior Written Notice". These letters really have little to do with "prior" but they are written and of some sort of notice. Ours was to tell us that they were not going to give our older daughter the two hours of outside speech therapy that was recommended by the expert in her evaluation done by a company contracted by the district since this particular evaluation can't be done by any of our district personnel (no one employed by the district is qualified to perform the evaluation). The letter said "the district has strongly considered your request and at this time respectfully denies your request". Okay, I suppose the use of the word "strongly" is supposed to make me think they care more this time than any time in the past when they have only "considered" my requests. And as for the "respect", I don't know, but this seems pretty disingenuous to me. I mean how can one be respectful and at the same time refuse to deliberate using facts in their duty to educate our children?

For some reason, this particular letter raised my curiosity. I decided to look up what this letter is supposed to do. I found out it is supposed to include:
1) a description of the actions proposed or refused by the school district - which it did
2) an explanation of why the action was proposed or refused - which it did not
3) a description of any other options considered and the reasons those options were rejected - did not - all that was included was that they would only do what they are already doing which was below the recommended level of service recommended by the expert they chose and they paid
4) a description of each assessment procedure, test, record, or report used as a basis for the action proposed or refused - nope not included, because there was no basis for their response except that they don't want to pay for the services
5) a description of any other factors relevant to the action proposed or refused - nope, again because there is no relevant reasoning behind their response except that they don't want to offer the services ($$$$$)
6) a statement that parents of a child with a disability are protected by the procedural safeguards - the statement is there but it is meaningless since the district ignores said procedural safeguards.

I write about this because I know from talking to other parents that this is the norm. The Prior Written Notice almost never includes any explanation for districts' decisions. I have never heard of one that includes sound reasoning behind district decisions, they probably exist, but we don't hear from parents in the districts who do this correctly because they are getting their kids' needs met.

I'm not fully sure of where to go from here. I know I could file a compliance complaint but the truth is, the CDE will not apply any meaningful sanctions for this type of infraction. And that is even if they don't just find for the district because there is really little incentive for the state to actually hold districts accountable to obey the law. Once I know more I will come back to this issue and share what might work, but in the meantime if any of you know of a way to push this issue I would love the input, if districts can really be forced to use meaningful deliberation rather than just saying "no" to every request with no thought then we might have a way to get meaningful services for our children.