The district will assess the child in all areas related to the suspected disability, including, if appropriate, health, vision, hearing, social and emotional status, general intelligence, academic performance, communicative status and motor abilities.
The evaluation will be sufficiently comprehensive to identify all of the child’s special education and related needs, whether or not commonly linked to the disability category in which the child has been classified.
The evaluation will include information provided by the parent and a variety of assessment tools and strategies to gather relevant functional, developmental and academic information about the child that assist in determining:
Whether the child has a disability; and
The content of the child’s IEP, including information related to enabling the child to be involved in and progress in the general education curriculum (or for a preschool child, to participate in appropriate activities).
The district will ensure that assessments and other evaluation materials, including those tailored to assess specific areas of educational need, used to assess a child:
Are selected and administered so as not to be discriminatory on a racial or cultural basis;
Are provided and administered in the child’s native language or other mode of communication and in the form most likely to yield accurate information on what the child knows and can do academically, developmentally and functionally, unless it is clearly not feasible to do so;
Are used for the purposes for which the assessments or measures are valid and reliable;
Are administered by trained and knowledgeable personnel; and
Are administered in accordance with any instructions provided by the producer of the assessments.
The district will select and administer assessments to ensure that if an assessment is administered to a child with impaired sensory, manual or speaking skills, the assessment results accurately reflect the child’s aptitude or achievement level or whatever other factors the test purports to measure, rather than reflecting the child’s impaired sensory, manual or speaking skills (unless those skills are the factors that the test purports to measure).
The district will use technically sound instruments that may assess the relative contribution of cognitive factors and behavioral factors in addition to physical or developmental factors.
The district will not use any single measure of assessment as the sole criterion for determining whether a child is a child with a disability and for determining an appropriate educational program for the child.
