I am here to express my opposition to the proposed regulations 

Governor Kaine has made his position very clear.  Unless there is some incredibly persuasive explanation why the regulations have to be changed to diminish the role of parent's involvement in key educational decisions, he says we're going back to the drawing board.  We need to go back to the drawing board.  The impact of these proposed regulations will diminish decades of hard work that has established FAPE for students with disabilities.  The current regulations are superior to the proposed regulations and do not require the wholesale revisions that is being proposed by the VDOE.  I urge you to reject the proposed regulations in its entirety.

 Examples of some of the major issues include:

• ·        eliminating parental consent to end some or all of a child's special education and/or related services

• ·        Increasing the federal time frame for eligibility from 60 calendar days to 65 business days.  That is an additional 3-5 weeks.
• ·        adding limitations to when schools need to provide PWN
• ·        eliminating statewide referral procedures and timelines for Child Study Committees
• ·        adding the arbitrary refusal of LEAs to convene an IEP meeting if the LEA thinks a parent's request is unreasonable
• ·        shifting the responsibility for the entire due process hearing system exclusively under the supervision of the VDOE
• ·        allowing schools to amend a parent's due process complaint but not allowing parents to amend a school's complaint
• ·        allowing VDOE to remove itself from being a party in a due process
• ·        inappropriately using federal authorities to add restrictive and unnecessary eligibility criteria for some disability categories
• ·        allowing school personnel to "diagnose" (versus "identify") autism if the child is over 3 years old when they have no qualifications to do so
• ·        eliminating the use of short term objectives except for those pre-determined children being educated under the VAAP system
• ·        eliminating the due process implementation plan
• ·        reducing the number of progress reports provided to parents that measure the status of a  child's education  removing parental input from the functional behavioral assessment team
• ·        eliminating LEA requirement to submit copies of school policies and procedures to the VDOE for approval

Thank you

Mary Lynn