The importance of reading, organizing, analyzing, and evaluating your child's school records cannot be overemphasized. The information in these records provides the basis upon which crucial decisions will be made concerning your child's education. In this article, a step-by-step process for analyzing and revising/updating your child's school records is described.

How to Analyze and Correct Your Child's Records in Four Steps

Using the Four-Step Record Decoder process and accompanying form, you will become thoroughly familiar with your child as seen through the close up lens of her school records. When you've completed the process, you will know whether the information in your child's file paints an accurate picture of her learning needs and strengths. The first article on school records explains how to obtain your child's records from the school.

When you have obtained your child's school records, often a stack of documents an inch or more thick, what will you do with them? How can you begin to make sense of all this material written about your child? The four basic steps -Organize, Read, Analyze, and Evaluate - are described in detail below: You may also wish to download the Four Step Record Decoder (pdf), which is designed to help you record pertinent information as you organize, read, analyze, and evaluate your child's school records.

Step 1: Organize

1. After obtaining the complete set of records from the school system, separate the documents into two sets:

Records that describe your child (such as teacher reports, psychological evaluations, social history, IEPs, etc.)

Other documents or correspondence of an administrative nature (for example, the minutes of an eligibility committee meeting, consent forms, etc.). These administrative documents and correspondence help you keep track of your contacts with the school system.

2. Make an extra copy of the records. This way you will have an "original" that remains untouched, and a copy that you can mark, cut, paste, and use in whatever way is most helpful to you.

3. Arrange each set - descriptive reports and other documents - in chronological order.

4. Secure the pages in a folder with a clip or in a loose leaf notebook so that if you drop them you won't have to back up three steps.

5. Number each report and make a chronological list that you can add to as new records are generated. The list might look like this:


Educational Reports of Jessica Lee
Report
Date
Reporting Person

1. Psychoeducational evaluation
5/3/04
Angelica Connor

2. Teacher's report
5/5/04
Cathy Porterman

3. Social history reports
5/12/04
Patricia Roberts

4. Psychiatric evaluation summary
6/8/04
Dr. Marcia Ortiz

5. IEP
6/14/04
Dru Dunn

6. Psychological evaluation summary
8/23/04
Dr. Ronald McPherson

7. Teacher's report
9/14/04
Dru Dunn

8. Psychologist's memorandum
9/14/04
Barbara Hager

Step 2: Read

1. Read through the entire record to get overall impressions and tones of the school's view of your child.

2. In the margins of your working copy, put a question mark beside the statements or areas of the reports you do not understand or with which you disagree.

Step 3: Analyze

1. Now reread the reports and underline the phrases or sentences you feel best describe your child's strengths, those that describe your child's problems, and those that describe the way she learns. As you underline, write in the margin of the report, opposite the passage you've underlined:

"S" for a description of your child's learning strengths
"P" for a description of learning problems
"LS" for a description of the style or way your child learns.

2. Using the Four-Step Record Decoder or a similar chart you make, list the phrases or sentences about your child's strengths ("S") and problems ( "P" ) by the following developmental categories. Under the last category, "Learning Style," you will list all of the "LS" phrases and sentences.

Movement
Communications
Social relationships
Self concept/independence
Perception/senses
Thinking skills
Learning Style

3. After each phrase or sentence describing your child's strengths, problems, or style of learning, put the source of the information, and the date of the document in which the phrase or sentence appears. Often you will find trends beginning to emerge. The same observation, expressed in similar language, may occur in several reports, and/or over a period of time.

4. The last section of the Four-Step Record Analysis form is titled "Recommendations." In this section, list any recommendations made by each evaluator or teacher. Recommendations might include services needed, preferred classroom environment, optimum class size, most desirable type of school setting; or recommendation for further testing, specific teaching materials, or equipment.

Step 4: Evaluate

Using the question mark notations you have made in the margins and your overall sense of the records from your analytical work with them, evaluate them to determine if they are:

When you've completed the process, you will know whether the information in your child's file paints an accurate picture of her learning needs and strengths.

Accurate. Do the reports and portions of the records correspond with your own feelings, perceptions, observations, and assessments of your child?

Complete. Are all the documents required by the school system for the eligibility, Individualized Education Program (IEP), and placement decisions available in the file? These can include a medical report, social history, psychological examination, educational report, and other documents that may be required by your local or state guidelines.

Bias-Free. Are the reports free from cultural or racial bias? Do they take into consideration the effect your child's disability might have had upon the outcome of the results of the tests?

Non-judgmental. Do the reports reflect a respect for your child and your family? Do they avoid the use of language that judges rather than describes? Examples of judgmental statements include: "She is fickle." "He is incorrigible." Examples of descriptive statements include: "She is inconsistent in stating what she likes and dislikes." "He will not respond to directions to stop disruptive behavior."

Current. Are the dates on the records recent enough to give a report of your child's present behavior and functioning? Records generated within the past three years are generally useful for making good decisions. Older ones should be used with caution.

Understandable. Is the language used meaningful, clear, and understandable to you? If technical terms (jargon) are used, have they been defined or made understandable to the non specialist? (Example of an unclear statement: "She appears to have a psychological learning disability, calling for treatment involving a moderation of the special focus on interpersonal sensitivity she has received so far." What does that mean?)

Consistent. Is there consistency among the descriptions of your child given by each evaluator or teacher? Or do you find contradictions and differences of opinion? Considering the record as a whole, does it make sense and lead logically to the recommendations that are made?
Correcting Defects in Your Child's Evaluation Reports

You can select one of two paths to attempt to correct the defects you find in the evaluations.

Informal

Ask school officials to:

Remove the faulty information from the record, or
Undertake additional evaluations, or
Add materials you provide to the file, or
Possibly just clarify for you the deficiencies you see in the evaluation findings

Formal

Should the informal approach fail, you can seek to resolve your difficulties through a more formal approach.

If your problem involves earlier evaluations that are now part of your child's official school file, you can seek to amend the records through the formal process for amending records, described in the previous article.

If your concern is the inadequacy of the school's most recent evaluation, you can request that an independent evaluation of your child be made at public expense.

Obtaining an Independent Evaluation

Both federal and state law provide parents the opportunity to obtain an independent evaluation of their child when they believe the school's evaluation is inadequate. An independent evaluation is one made by professionals not employed by the school system. Sometimes these evaluations may be conducted by county or state departments of health. The steps you should follow to secure an independent evaluation are outlined in your state regulations. But remember: an evaluation paid for at public expense must be conducted by an evaluator who meets the licensing criteria of the school system.

School officials do not always agree to pay for an independent evaluation. Before they can deny your request, however, they must hold a due process hearing and must prove to the hearing officer the appropriateness of their evaluation. Otherwise, the school system cannot deny your request for an independent evaluation. Remember: You don't have to prove that the school's evaluation results are incorrect before asking for an independent evaluation-you are entitled to an independent evaluation if you merely believe that the school system's findings are inadequate. If school professionals don't wish to pay for the independent evaluation, they must initiate a hearing procedure to justify denying the request.

An alternative to the independent evaluation at public expense is the independent evaluation at private expense. There are several reasons you might choose to pay for an evaluation out of your own pocket:

Both federal and state law provide parents the opportunity to obtain an independent evaluation of their child when they believe the school's evaluation is inadequate.

You can personally choose the professionals who will make the evaluation. This allows you to select the specialist most appropriate to work with your child, and often gives you greater confidence in the findings.

You can control who sees the results. When an independent evaluation is made at public expense, the findings must be considered by the school system in making educational decisions regarding your child. Further, the independent, publicly financed evaluation may be presented as evidence in a due process hearing. If you feel that the independent evaluation is also incorrect, you have no way to stop its being used by the school system or the hearing officer.
Although there are benefits to paying for your child's evaluation, you must weigh these benefits against several potential costs before you make your decision.

The dollar outlay. Complete educational evaluations may cost $1,500-2,000 or more. (When the evaluation confirms the school system's findings, it may still be beneficial. It gives more reason to believe the initial testing results. But it's an expensive way to secure such confirmation.)

Another cost occurs if you introduce findings from your own specialists, and these findings are given little or no significance by the school officials or hearing officer. If your school administrators take the attitude that parents can "shop around until they find a psychologist or other professional who will say exactly what they want to hear," the benefits of the evaluation you pay for may not equal their costs.

One last word about obtaining your own evaluations. Never have the evaluation results sent to school officials before you have examined them. You may discover that to do so works to your child's disadvantage. Discuss the evaluation findings with the professionals who developed them first. Then, and only then, decide whether you want the results sent to the school system or the hearing officer.

Four-Step Record Decoder.
This is a ready-to-print pdf designed to help you record pertinent information about your child's school records.

As a parent of a child with learning disabilities, you have a special interest in knowing what is in your child's school records. This is true because of the significant information these records offer you about your child and also because of the emphasis schools place on these records when making educational decisions. If any information in your child's records is inaccurate, biased, incomplete, or inconsistent, this material may well result in inaccurate decisions regarding your child's right to special education services. For these reasons you must know how to obtain, interpret, and correct these records and how to use them effectively in school meetings. This article will give you an overview of your rights to your child's records.

SchwabLearning.org Series


Your Child's School Records: Article 1 of 2

Second in series: How to Analyze and Revise Your Child's Records
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act

Schools are required by federal and state laws to maintain certain records and to make these records available to you upon request. The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) establish the minimum requirements school systems must meet in maintaining, protecting, and providing access to students' school records. State laws will sometimes go beyond these minimum requirements and provide parents with additional rights to review, modify, or seek other changes in these records. Be sure to obtain a copy of your own state's and school district's school records laws and procedures by contacting your school district's director of special education.

Obtaining Your Child's Records from the Local School

Getting copies of your child's school records should be fairly easy. While federal law does not specifically require school systems to provide parents with copies of these records, in practice most school systems do so upon request.

Types of Files

Begin by asking the school principal about the location of your child's various files or records. These will include:

Cumulative file. The principal will have your child's cumulative file, which you will want to see and copy. Often the cumulative file contains little more than a profile card with personal identification data and perhaps academic achievement levels, some teacher reports, and report cards.


Confidential file. Also accessible to parents, the confidential file may be kept at your child's school, or in a central administrative office where the special education program offices are located. The file is called confidential because access to the information is limited to certain individuals. Your child's confidential record includes all of the reports written as a result of the school's evaluation; reports of independent evaluators, if any; medical records that you have had released; summary reports of evaluation team and eligibility committee meetings; your child's Individualized Education Program (IEP); and, often, correspondence between you and school personnel.


Compliance file (some schools). Some school systems keep the reports of eligibility meetings, correspondence between the parents and school officials, and other similar documents in a separate compliance file. The contents of the compliance file demonstrate that the school system has met the timelines, notification, and consent regulations required by IDEA.

Discipline file (some schools). Some schools may also maintain a separate file regarding discipline issues involving long-term suspension or expulsion.
A good bit of detective work is sometimes required to understand your school system's individual filing system!

Getting Copies of Records

School districts usually require parents to sign a "release of information" form before they will provide copies of schools records. You can often obtain that form through your child's school, or by simply writing a letter to the school principal or special education director, requesting a copy of school records. In many school districts, parents can go to the district's special education offices and fill out a form to request their children's records.

School districts usually provide the first copy of records for free. If they do charge a fee, the fee can be only for the cost of reproducing and mailing the records, not for personnel time or other costs. Again, check your local policies and procedures for your district's process.

Records Open to Parents

Because of the importance of your child's records in determining special education services, you should review and correct them annually ...

Once you have gained access to your child's records, does this mean you can see any and all records pertaining to your child? Which records is the school system legally required to show you? Under FERPA, schools must show parents all records, files, documents, and other materials that are maintained by the school system and contain information relating to their children. This includes all records referring to your child in any personally identifiable manner - that is, records containing your child's name, Social Security number, student ID number, or other data making them traceable to her.

The following are excluded from the records schools must show you:

Notes of teachers, counselors, and/or school administrators, made for their personal use and shown to nobody else (except a substitute teacher)

Personnel records of school employees
Examining and Correcting Your Child's Records

Even when you have your child's records in your hands, you may wonder what you've got. The language of the educators, psychologists, educational diagnosticians, and other school professionals is often difficult to understand. If this is the case for you, all you need to do is ask someone to help you. The law requires school personnel to explain the records to you when you do not understand them. Or you may take a friend or a knowledgeable professional with you to help review the records and explain confusing parts. When you do this, however, you will be asked to sign a form giving that person permission to see your child's records.

As you review the records, you may find places where information given about your child or family conflicts with your own assessments. If left unchallenged, this material could lead to decisions about your child's educational program that are not in his or her best interest. To prevent this from happening, you can follow two paths.

First, you can informally ask the principal or the director of special education to delete the material, giving your reasons for the request. Often school officials will honor the request and no problem arises.

You may also write down your objections to a particular record and have that attached to the record.
If you strongly believe the report does not belong in your child's record, and the schools refuse to remove the requested material, you have a right to a formal records hearing. Your state and local school district policies will tell you how to follow the more formal process for amending your child's records.

Controlling Who Sees Your Child's Records

FERPA and IDEA prohibit schools from disclosing your child's records to anyone without your written consent. The only exceptions are:

School officials, including teachers, in your child's district with a legitimate educational interest as defined in the school procedures.

School officials in the school district to which your child intends to transfer (Before the records are sent, however, you will want to review them and challenge their content, if necessary.)

Certain state and national education agencies, if necessary, for enforcing federal laws

Anyone to whom a state statute requires the school to report information

Accrediting and research organizations helping the school, provided they guarantee confidentiality

Student financial aid officials

People who have court orders, provided the school makes reasonable efforts to notify the parent or student before releasing the records

Appropriate people in health and safety emergencies such as doctors, nurses, and fire marshals

Law enforcement and judicial authorities in certain cases

With the exception of the people listed above, schools must have your permission to release material from your child's records to anyone other than yourself. When requesting release of the records, the school must tell you which records are involved, why they have been requested, and who will receive them. Likewise, if you want someone outside the school system to see your child's records, you will be asked to sign a release granting such permission. All of these rules have been instituted to protect your privacy and that of your child.

When Your Child Reaches 18 or Goes to Post-secondary School

When your child reaches the age of 18 or enters a post-secondary educational institution such as a vocational-technical school, a college, a university, or trade school, most rights to records previously available to you are transferred to your child. The only parts of the record your child will not have the right to see are your financial records and any statements or confidential recommendations your child has waived the right to see. This means if you wish to review the school records of a son or daughter who is 18 or who is attending post-secondary school, she must first sign a waiver permitting you to do so.

The law requires school personnel to explain the records to you when you do not understand them.

IDEA gives parents of children with disabilities, including learning disabilities, special consideration when transferring record rights. The law grants states the authority to develop individual policies which take into account the type and severity of the child's disability and the child's age when transferring record rights from parents to their children. Thus, if your child with disabilities has reached age 18 or is about to reach 18 and is in secondary school, you should find out, by asking the director of special education in your school district, if your state has a policy that allows you continued access to your child's records. If not, you and school personnel may want to develop a waiver form which your child can sign allowing you continued rights to review, to control access to, and to seek changes in those records.

When You Move

If you should move, your child's school records will, of course, move with you. To be certain your child's new school receives only relevant and current records, you will want to examine the entire contents of the folder and identify specifically the material you want forwarded. Most school systems will honor your request and send only the information you want released. However, you should note that many states require schools to transfer records about any disciplinary violation; you do not have the option of excluding that information.

Should the school wish to send material you want withheld, you can initiate a records hearing procedure to prohibit them from doing so. In any case, before you move, always review your child's school folder. You will want to eliminate the irrelevant, inaccurate, and dated material or attach your critique to those records you believe should have been removed but were not.

Because of the importance of your child's records in determining special education services, you should review and correct them annually, whether or not you move. You should also be certain you have a duplicate copy of all the material in the official files. Then, if the records are lost, you will have copies to replace them.

A Final Note: Thick Records

Classroom teachers have been heard to comment, "When I see a thick set of records for a child new to my class, I know trouble is coming." This is another reason for your diligence in reviewing your child's records periodically. Many reports, especially those written several years previously, give little if any information that will be useful in current decisions about your child. A careful weeding out of irrelevant documents can help to avoid the thick record syndrome.

The next article on school records explains how to analyze and update/revise your child's records.


©Schwab Learning 2004 Created: 9/16/2004

About the Contributor(s)

Deidre Hayden has more than 20 years' experience in the field of special education. As director of two federally funded parent information and training centers, she developed partnerships between parents of children with disabilities and professionals. Ms. Hayden works as a writer and consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more articles by Deidre Hayden.