COPAA filed an amicus brief in the Third Circuit in DM v. WATCHUNG HILLS REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL BOARD OF EDUCATION. The brief urges the court to reverse the decision of the United States District Court. 

COPAA Amicus Committee Co-chair Catherine Merino Reisman and COPAA Legal Director Selene Almazan wrote the brief. COPAA member, David Giles, represents the family.

D.G.M. is a young man with a mild intellectual disability who, by his senior year of high school, had held two jobs he found and secured on his own, served as an elected officer of a youth leadership organization, managed his school’s basketball team for three years, and set a goal of attending college and working in sports management, physical education, or coaching. For his post-senior year, the District proposed an IEP that placed him in two special classes—a Career Academics Class and a Structured Learning Experience of entry-level work sampling at local retailers—and that contained not a single goal for either one. The District Court held that this omission caused no substantive harm to D.G.M. and did not impede his parents’ participation, because his parents attended the IEP meeting and voiced their concerns. 

First, for a student in the last years of IDEA eligibility, transition is not a peripheral component of the IEP. Transition is the point of the document. Congress declared that IDEA exists to prepare children with disabilities “for further education, employment, and independent living,” 20 U.S.C. § 1400(d)(1)(A), defined transition services as a “results-oriented process” built on “the individual child’s needs, taking into account the child’s strengths, preferences, and interests,” id. § 1401(34), and required every IEP from age sixteen forward to contain “appropriate measurable postsecondary goals” and the transition services needed to reach them, id. § 1414(d)(1)(A)(i)(VIII). Measurable annual goals are the mechanism that connects those postsecondary goals to the services the district will actually deliver. 

In this case the transition program is the student’s entire educational program, an IEP with no goals for it cannot be “reasonably calculated to enable [the] child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances,” Endrew F. ex rel. Joseph F. v. Douglas Cnty. Sch. Dist. RE-1, 580 U.S. 386, 399 (2017), because there is no progress the IEP is calculated toward.  Second, IDEA’s guarantee of parental participation is a guarantee of participation in “the decisionmaking process,” 20 U.S.C. § 1415(f)(3)(E)(ii)(II), not merely of attendance at a meeting. Parents cannot meaningfully decide whether to accept, contest, or supplement a program whose aims and content the IEP does not disclose and that the district’s own staff could not describe. An IEP with no goals for the program leaves parents nothing to monitor for the entire year.

Third, the stakes are concrete. National longitudinal data show that young adults with intellectual disabilities enroll in postsecondary education and obtain employment at rates far below their peers, and that postsecondary education is associated with markedly better employment and earnings outcomes. Congress has responded by emphasizing ambitious, individualized transition planning for exactly these students. A rule that excuses an IEP with no goals for a student’s transition year, so long as district witnesses later testify that the program would have provided some benefit, would undercut that design and the Endrew F. standard alike. The judgment should be reversed.