Georgia

The published process

Placement during a dispute

"From the time a due process complaint is filed until it is resolved, your child stays in his or her current educational placement, unless you and the school agree otherwise. This is often referred to as “pendency” or “stay put.”" — IDEA Special Education Due Process Complaints/Hearing Requests, a national CADRE guide linked from GaDOE, January 2014, retrieved Aug 28, 2026. Not addressed on GaDOE’s own dispute-resolution pages directly.

Independent evaluation at public expense

Not stated in the sources reviewed. Neither the GaDOE Dispute Resolution overview page, the GaDOE Mediation Requests and Formal Complaints page, nor the two CADRE national guides captured (Written State Complaints; Due Process Complaints/Hearing Requests) addresses independent educational evaluations at public expense.

Who may be present, and what record is made

"Parents have the right to a record of the hearing, the findings of fact, and hearing decision at no cost to them." Generally, "parents and school staff, their attorneys, witnesses, and others whom they invite may attend the due process hearing." "a parent may choose to allow members of the public to observe the hearing." — IDEA Special Education Due Process Complaints/Hearing Requests, a national CADRE guide linked from GaDOE, January 2014. Recording of IEP meetings, as distinct from due process hearings, is not stated in the sources reviewed.

The three rows above answer the questions an experienced adviser raises first, from the state’s own published documents, or record that a question is not answered in them.

Timelines, as stated in the sources

All quoted; none calculated. From GaDOE’s Dispute Resolution page except where noted.

On mediation: No specific numeric mediation timeline is stated: the comparison chart’s "time limit for filing" and "timeline for resolving the issues" columns both read "None specified" for mediation.

On formal complaints: "One year from the date of the alleged violation" to file. "Sixty days from receipt of the complaint unless extended for unusual circumstances" to resolve. The national CADRE guide adds: "A written decision is made no later than 60 calendar days after the written state complaint was received by the SEA, unless the timeline is extended." (GaDOE Dispute Resolution Comparison Chart; IDEA Special Education Written State Complaints, a national CADRE guide linked from GaDOE, January 2014)

On requesting a due process hearing: "Two years from when the party knew or should have known of the problem with limited exceptions".

On the resolution session: "System must convene a resolution session within 15 days of receipt of the due process hearing request unless both parties agree in writing to waive the session or agree to use mediation. The resolution period lasts for not more than 30 days."

On the hearing decision: "45 days from the end of the resolution session unless specific extensions to the timeline are granted". The national CADRE guide states the hearing officer "must mail a copy of the hearing decision to each party no later than 45 calendar days from the beginning of the hearing timeline or, if the hearing officer granted an extension to the hearing timeline, by the end of that extension." (GaDOE Dispute Resolution Comparison Chart; IDEA Special Education Due Process Complaints/Hearing Requests, January 2014)

On appeal: Not stated with a specific number of days in the sources reviewed. The national CADRE guide notes generally that "In many states, appeals must be filed in a short period of time, such as within 30 or 60 calendar days after the hearing officer’s decision" — without stating Georgia’s own figure.

On discipline and expedited hearings: "A resolution meeting must occur within 7 calendar days, unless you and the school district both agree in writing not to have a resolution meeting, or to use mediation instead." "The hearing must be held within 20 school days of the expedited hearing request being filed." "The hearing officer must issue a decision within 10 school days of the date of the hearing." "Your child must remain in the educational setting chosen by his or her IEP team until the hearing officer issues a decision or the time period for the disciplinary action expires, unless you and the school agree otherwise." (IDEA Special Education Due Process Complaints/Hearing Requests, a national CADRE guide linked from GaDOE, January 2014, Expedited Hearing Requests)

What any of this means for a particular situation is for the agency and its processes to determine.

Change log

Aug 25, 2026 · Page created (pilot). Captured first-party: the Georgia Department of Education’s Dispute Resolution overview page (including its own comparison chart) and Mediation Requests and Formal Complaints page, both retrieved via browser rendering since the standard fetch tool returned only page metadata for these JavaScript-rendered pages; and two national CADRE parent guides linked from GaDOE’s dispute-resolution page (Written State Complaints; Due Process Complaints/Hearing Requests, both dated January 2014), downloaded directly and text-extracted since the standard fetch tool returned no content for these PDF files. Findings recorded rather than smoothed: (1) Georgia does not publish a single, consolidated, state-authored Notice of Procedural Safeguards, unlike every other state page built so far; its own dispute-resolution page carries a comparison chart and narrative text, and the linked "parent guides" are generic national CADRE publications, not Georgia-specific, and are labeled as such throughout this page; (2) independent educational evaluation at public expense is not addressed in any of the four documents captured for this page; (3) no specific numeric mediation timeline is stated, matching several other states; (4) no specific numeric appeal-filing timeline is stated for Georgia specifically; the CADRE guide only describes a general range other states may use; (5) the parent center identified for Georgia, Parent to Parent of Georgia, comes from the CADRE guides’ regional-contact page rather than from a GaDOE-authored source naming it directly. Capture pending: the IDEA Special Education Mediation and Resolution Meetings CADRE guides, the downloadable comparison-chart PDF (captured only via its on-page HTML rendering), the full text of State Education Rule 160-4-7-.12, the Special Education Legal Aid Providers list, and the Dispute Resolution Brochure/Booklet. Internet Archive captures: to be added. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-08-25. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Aug 26, 2026 · Languages row added. A *Languages in these sources* row was added to the docket, generated from a 51-jurisdiction survey of what each state publishes in languages other than English (research/languages.json; method and findings in research/languages-report.md). The state's own pages were re-fetched for this survey on 2026-08-26; no URL is recorded that was not observed in fetched page content or confirmed by fetching it directly. Absence recorded as a finding: no translation of the notice was found in the sources reviewed. What was searched is set out in research/languages-report.md. This records what the state publishes, not a judgment about the state. An earlier draft of this survey entry contained an error about this state; it is corrected on the record in research/languages.json and research/languages-report.md. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-08-26. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Aug 28, 2026 · Quotation correction, and a capture method replaced. Five quotations taken from GaDOE’s Dispute Resolution Comparison Chart carried a terminal period this page supplied rather than the source: "One year from the date of the alleged violation", "Sixty days from receipt of the complaint unless extended for unusual circumstances", "Parent or system", "Two years from when the party knew or should have known of the problem with limited exceptions", and "45 days from the end of the resolution session unless specific extensions to the timeline are granted". Each cell ends without punctuation in the source; the periods have been moved outside the quotation marks, where the page’s own sentence punctuation belongs. No wording changed. A sixth quotation, "Any individual or organization.", keeps its period, which GaDOE does publish: the chart is punctuated inconsistently, that one cell carrying a period while the cells around it carry none, and the inconsistency is the state’s rather than this page’s. The error came from the capture, not from reading: the Aug 25, 2026 capture was taken through a rendered browser, which flattened the chart’s rows into running prose and separated the cells with periods that were then read as the cells’ own. Findings recorded: (6) GaDOE punctuates the cells of its comparison chart inconsistently; (7) the two GaDOE pages are not in fact JavaScript-dependent, as the Aug 25 entry recorded — the full page content, comparison chart included as a real table, is served in the same response a plain HTTPS request already receives, inside the page’s Next.js data island, and the earlier note that the standard fetch tool returned only page metadata described the shell rather than the response. Both pages were re-captured today over plain HTTPS by a recorded, re-runnable recipe (tools/recipes/georgia.json), which renders chart cells separated by a pipe so that no punctuation can be attributed to a source that did not publish it. Sources re-checked Aug 28, 2026, all four unchanged in wording. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-08-28. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Aug 29, 2026 · Mailing address now rests on a capture. No wording on this page changed. The page gives the Department's mailing address on Jesse Hill Jr. Drive, and that address, though correct and published by GaDOE, sat outside the region of gadoe.org this project was capturing: the Department publishes it in the site-wide footer rather than in the page content or the contact block. Nothing noticed until a postal-address check was added to the fidelity checker on 2026-08-29, which is the point of adding one. The capture recipe now includes the footer address node, all four Georgia sources were re-fetched, and every quotation and contact fact on this page verifies against the new capture.