EdLaw
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (20 U.S.C. §1400 et seq.)
The special-education statute behind every IEP in US public schools (originally the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975; IDEA since 1990, last comprehensively reauthorised 2004). It conditions federal funds on states providing a free appropriate public education to children with disabilities. This folder extracts the EdTech-relevant core: the definitions, the evaluation/IEP machinery, the statutory confidentiality provision, and the Department of Education's Part B confidentiality regulations that put flesh on it.
Applicability to EdTech
- Technology enters IEPs as "assistive technology": an assistive technology device is "any item, piece of equipment, or product system … used to increase, maintain, or improve functional capabilities of a child with a disability" (§1401(1)), with "assistive technology service" covering evaluation, provision, training and technical assistance (§1401(2)). Every IEP Team must "consider whether the child needs assistive technology devices and services" (§1414(d)(3)(B)(v)) — a product written into an IEP becomes something the district is legally committed to provide.
- IEP and evaluation data is a distinct confidentiality regime: §1417(c) requires protection of "the confidentiality of any personally identifiable data, information, and records collected or maintained" under the Act, in accordance with FERPA (§1417(c)), and ED's Part B rules — now in this folder in full — go beyond baseline FERPA in four ways a vendor has to support:
- An access log with no school-official exemption. §300.614 requires a record of every party obtaining access — name, date, purpose — excepting only parents and the agency's own authorised employees. A vendor is not an authorised employee of the agency, so access by vendor staff is loggable, and the log has to be producible to the district.
- A named responsible official, trained staff, and a public list. §300.623 requires confidentiality protection at "collection, storage, disclosure, and destruction stages", one official responsible at each participating agency, training for all persons collecting or using the information, and a current listing of names and positions with access, maintained for public inspection. Where a district treats a vendor as a participating agency's extension, these are the terms that appear in the DPA.
- Consent before disclosure outside participating agencies. §300.622(a) requires parental consent before personally identifiable information goes to anyone other than officials of participating agencies — unless the information is in education records and FERPA already authorises the disclosure. Sub-processors are the thing to check against this.
- Destruction on request. §300.624 requires the agency to tell parents when the information is no longer needed, and to destroy it at their request — with only the short permanent-record list (name, address, phone, grades, attendance, classes, grade level, year completed) exempt. A product that cannot delete IEP-derived data on request cannot support this.
- "Universal design" has the Assistive Technology Act meaning (§1401(35)) and appears in state-level procurement preferences.
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| DEFINITIONS.md | 20 U.S.C. §1401 — all definitions |
| EVALUATIONS-AND-IEPS.md | §1414 — evaluations, eligibility, IEPs (incl. the assistive-technology consideration), placements |
| ADMINISTRATION-AND-CONFIDENTIALITY.md | §1417 — administration and the confidentiality mandate |
| PART-B-CONFIDENTIALITY.md | 34 CFR §§300.610–300.627 in full — ED's Part B confidentiality rules: notice to parents, access rights and the record of access, amendment and hearing, consent, safeguards, destruction, children's rights, enforcement, and the Department's own use of personally identifiable information |
Scope note: FAPE and state/LEA eligibility (§§1412–1413) and procedural safeguards (§1415) can be added with the same tooling when needed.
Key obligations at a glance
- IEP Teams must consider assistive technology for every child (§1414(d)(3)(B)(v)).
- Personally identifiable IDEA data must be kept confidential in accordance with FERPA (§1417(c)).
- A record of access for every party other than parents and the agency's own employees (34 CFR §300.614).
- Safeguards at collection, storage, disclosure and destruction, a responsible official, training for everyone who touches the data, and a publicly inspectable list of who has access (§300.623).
- Parental consent before disclosure outside participating agencies, unless FERPA already permits it (§300.622(a)).
- Notice and destruction when the information is no longer needed (§300.624).
Enforcement
ED's Office of Special Education Programs supervises states (funds conditions); parents enforce through the §1415 due-process machinery and the courts. Vendors feel IDEA through district obligations and contract terms, not direct liability.
Licence
The corpus reproduces 20 U.S.C. §§ 1401, 1414 and 1417 verbatim from the govinfo.gov United States Code, 2024 edition, and 34 CFR §§ 300.610–300.627 (Department of Education) verbatim from the eCFR. It is a work of the United States Government. 17 U.S.C. § 105(a) (govinfo, United States Code 2024 edition, title 17 § 105, read 2026-10-01) provides: "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."
The Government Publishing Office's Public Domain & Copyright Notice (govinfo.gov/about/policies, read 2026-10-01) adds: "By virtue of the foregoing, public documents can generally be reprinted without legal restriction. However, Government publications may contain copyrighted material which was used with permission of the copyright owner." It also says that "whenever a work is published consisting predominantly of work of the U.S. Government, the copyright notice (if any) must identify those parts of the work in which copyright is claimed per 17 U.S.C. § 403."
Conditions: none attach to the text itself. The one formal point is § 403: if the public pages ever carry a copyright notice, it must identify the parts in which copyright is claimed (the corpus's own curation) and not cover the reproduced federal text. The corpus names the source in its Sources section and in each fact document's {.meta} provenance lines, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).
Related
- FERPA — §1417(c) incorporates it; Part B adds stricter rules for special-education records
- Section 504 / 508 — the civil-rights accessibility side of the same population
- PPRA — evaluations touching protected categories can trigger both regimes