While you and your children are enjoying the last unofficial weeks of summer, our attorneys have been busy working on your cases and getting ready for another successful year. If your child attends a private special education school/program and you are hoping to be reimbursed for this placement a 10 Day Notice of Intention is part of the required legal process for tuition reimbursement.
On Monday, August 24th our offices filed over 1000 of these individualized notices.This written notice is required by law to be filed with the school district ten days before a parent's removal of their child from the public school. This means 10 days before the child starts at his or her private school. The notices have to: (1)inform the school district of the specific reasons that the parent(s) disagree with the IEP and program recommendation made by the CSE; (2) as a result of these disagreements they intend to place their child at the XYZ private school; and (3) the parents intent to seek tuition reimbursement for this placement. The school district has ten business days to address these concerns. Starting last year, Mayor diBlasio initiated a policy whereby a district could recommend settlement based on the notice alone. We are told that the NYC DOE will continue to follow this policy and will inform us within 15 days of receipt of this notice whether they are going to settle the case based on the notice alone. The goal in our firm is to have the school district read this notice and be convinced that they should settled the case for tuition reimbursement. If the district does not agree to settle a case, we then have to file for an impartial hearing. Settlement can also happen once the full hearing request is filed. Our team does everything possible to avoid an impartial hearing. Check your email regularly; once we hear back from the DoE, your case manager or the paralegal assigned to your case will be reaching out with next steps. Please note: If your child has a 12-month IEP, your notice was filed in June.