Indiana

The published process

Placement during a dispute

"Generally, during any of these proceedings, the student remains in his or her current placement, unless you and the public agency agree to a different placement." Exceptions apply where "the proceeding involves the student's initial admission to school" or "the proceeding involves a disagreement about the student's IAES". — Indiana Department of Education Notice of Procedural Safeguards, Student’s placement and status during due process proceedings, retrieved Aug 25, 2026.

Independent evaluation at public expense

"You have the right to request an independent educational evaluation of your child at the school's expense if you disagree with the school's evaluation." If requested, "the school must, within 10 business days of receiving your request, either:" "notify you in writing that it will pay for an IEE, or" "initiate a due process hearing to have a hearing officer decide if the school's evaluation is appropriate." "You are entitled to only one (1) IEE at public expense each time the school conducts an evaluation with which you disagree."

Who may be present, and what record is made

You and the school have the right to: "Be accompanied and advised by legal counsel or by individuals with special knowledge and training with respect to special education or the problems of students with disabilities"; "Present evidence, confront, cross-examine, and compel the attendance of any witnesses"; and "Obtain a written or electronic verbatim transcript of the hearing". As a parent, you additionally have the right to: "Decide whether your child (who is the subject of the hearing) will attend the hearing" and "Have the hearing opened or closed to the public". Recording of CCC (IEP-team) 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 the Notice of Procedural Safeguards except where noted.

On the state complaint. To file, "within one year of the alleged violation". "A written complaint report will be issued by IDOE within 40 calendar days of receiving the complaint, unless an extension has been granted." On reconsideration, "the Director's final decision shall be made within 60 days of the date the original complaint request was received by IDOE." (Special Education Complaint (511 IAC 7-45-1))

On mediation. "Once assigned to a mediator, IDOE Office of Special Education (OSE) expects mediation to occur within 30 calendar days." Where mediation is used to resolve a complaint, "the mediation must be completed within 20 calendar days of the date the parties agree in writing to engage in mediation." (Special Education Mediation (511 IAC 7-45-2))

On requesting a due process hearing. To file, "within two (2) years of the date you knew or should have known about the alleged action forming the basis of your dispute with the public agency", with limited exceptions for misrepresentation or withheld information.

On the resolution meeting and period. "Within fifteen (15) calendar days of receiving notice of your due process hearing request, and prior to the initiation of a due process hearing, the public agency must convene a meeting" that the notice calls a resolution meeting. If an agreement results, "either you or the public agency may void the agreement by notifying the other party in writing within 3 business days for the date the agreement was signed." Absent resolution, "the due process hearing may proceed" once "30 calendar days of the date the public agency received your request for a hearing" have passed, and "The 45-calendar day timeline for the due process hearing begins at this point."

On the hearing decision. "The hearing officer must conduct the hearing and issue a written decision within 45 calendar days from either: (1) the date that you and the public agency agreed in writing to waive the resolution meeting, or (2) the 30th calendar day following the public agency's receipt of your request for a hearing" if the issues were not resolved during that period.

On appeal. "Your petition for judicial review must be submitted within 30 calendar days of the date you receive the written decision from the hearing officer." (Appeal (34 CFR §300.514 and §300.516; 511 IAC 7-45-9 and 7-45-10))

On discipline and expedited hearings. "An expedited due process hearing means that the due process hearing is conducted and the decision rendered within 20 school days from the date the request for a hearing is received by the public agency. The hearing officer's decision is due within 10 school days after the hearing is conducted." "A resolution session must occur within 7 calendar days of the date of the hearing request unless you and the public agency agree to waive the session or participate in mediation instead." (Expedited Due Process Hearings and Appeals (34 CFR §300.532; 511 IAC 7-45-10))

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: IDOE’s Dispute Resolution overview page and its three linked sub-pages (mediation, complaint, due process hearing), fetched directly; and the Indiana Department of Education Notice of Procedural Safeguards, August 2025 (updated), downloaded directly as a PDF and text-extracted with pdfplumber across all 25 pages. Findings recorded rather than smoothed: (1) due process hearings filed on or after July 1, 2025 moved from IDOE to a separate state agency, the Office of Administrative Law Proceedings (OALP), under Indiana Code 20-35-14 — complaints and mediation remain with IDOE’s Office of Special Education, so Indiana now runs a split structure rather than a single-agency one; (2) Indiana’s own Board of Special Education Appeals (BSEA) "is no longer in existence" per IDOE’s Due Process Hearing page, though its past decisions remain posted — this BSEA is unrelated to Massachusetts’s currently active board of the same initials, a naming collision worth flagging explicitly; (3) the notice’s own Resources appendix shows a text-extraction artifact in which two adjacent two-column resource listings (Joseph Maley Foundation paired with IN*SOURCE, and Indiana Family to Family paired with Ability Allies) have their address, phone, and fax lines interleaved by column in a way that cannot be reliably disambiguated from the extracted text alone; the overview page’s own cleaner, single-column listing of IN*SOURCE’s contact information is used instead for the docket’s parent-center row; (4) IN*SOURCE is named directly in both the overview page and the notice as Indiana’s parent training and information center, alongside several other named advocacy and legal-services organizations; (5) the notice’s own text was not fully updated for the OALP transition throughout — some passages still describe hearing officers and hearing procedures in IDOE-centric terms, while the Resources section and hearing-request-address instructions reflect the OALP change; both are quoted as published rather than reconciled; (6) resolution-meeting agreements reached during the due process track carry a distinct three-business-day void window, comparable to features seen in other states’ mediation agreements, but in Indiana’s sources this window attaches to the due process resolution meeting rather than to mediation agreements generally. Capture pending: the full text of Article 7 (511 IAC 7-32 through 7-50) beyond the excerpts quoted in the notice; the Navigating the Course guide; the Spanish-language notice; sample mediation, complaint, and due process hearing request forms; and the Indiana Hearing Procedural Manual. Internet Archive captures: to be added. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-08-25. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.