North Dakota

The published process

Placement during a dispute

"During the due process hearing, your child will remain in the current educational placement. The “stay put” rule applies unless:" the notice's stated exceptions apply, which begin "you and the school district agree to another placement;" and "your complaint involves an application for initial admission to public school, then your child, with your consent, must be placed in the public school until the completion of all proceedings;". In discipline appeals the notice states separately: "When an appeal has been made by either you or the school, your child must remain in the interim" alternative educational setting, as its Child's Placement During Appeals section describes. — Notice of Procedural Safeguards, retrieved Aug 25, 2026

Independent evaluation at public expense

"An independent educational evaluation is an evaluation by a qualified examiner who is not an employee of the school district responsible for educating your child. You may ask for an independent educational evaluation at school district expense if you disagree with an evaluation completed by the school district. You are entitled to only one independent educational evaluation at public expense each time you disagree with a specific evaluation or reevaluation that is conducted or obtained by the school district." On what the district must then do: "If the school district does not agree with you that an independent evaluation is necessary, it may either initiate a due process hearing to show that its evaluation was sufficient or pay for the independent evaluation. The school district will not have to pay for an independent evaluation if the hearing is concluded in the district’s favor. You may still get an independent educational evaluation at your own expense." — Notice of Procedural Safeguards, retrieved Aug 25, 2026

Who may be present, and what record is made

The notice lists hearing rights including "the right to bring an attorney who can give you advice, except that ND state law does not authorize non-attorneys to represent parties at a due process hearing;", "the right to bring one or more individuals who have knowledge or training about children with disabilities;", "the right to a written, or, at your option, an electronic verbatim record of the hearing; and,", and "the right to written, or, at your option, electronic findings of fact and decisions." On who attends the hearing itself, the comparison table states: "Hearing is confidential unless the parent chooses to open it to the public." At the resolution session, the school convenes "a meeting with the parents and relevant members of the IEP team", and "“Relevant members” of the IEP team means those individuals who have specific knowledge of the issues contained in your complaint." — Notice; Dispute Resolution Options, October 2023. Recording of IEP Team meetings, as distinct from hearings: not stated in the sources reviewed (the notice and the dispute-resolution comparison were searched); district policies may address it.

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 filing a state complaint: "The incident related to the complaint must have occurred within one year from the date that the complaint is filed." The comparison table states it as: "A state complaint must be filed within one (1) year of the date when the individual was aware of the alleged violation(s)."

On the complaint decision: "If your complaint does meet the requirements, it will be investigated and a decision given to you within 60 calendar days from the date your complaint is received by both the school and the NDDPI. This timeline may be extended under certain circumstances." The comparison table states: "The final report will be provided within sixty (60) calendar days of receiving the complaint, subject to allowable extensions."

On requesting a due process hearing: "The request must be made within two years from the date the alleged action occurred. Exceptions to this timeline are if the school misled or withheld information from the parent."

On responses to a hearing request: where no prior written notice was given on the subject, "the school must, within 10 days, send you a response that includes:" the four items the notice lists. Where the school requests the hearing, the parent's response is due "within 10 calendar days of receiving the complaint notice."

On the resolution session: "The school district will convene a meeting with the parents and relevant members of the IEP team within 15 days of when the school district receives the parent's due process complaint to discuss the facts on which your complaint is based." "The school district has 30 days from the time the complaint is filed to resolve the complaint to the satisfaction of the parents, after which a due process hearing can occur." And: "If the school fails to hold the resolution meeting within 15 days of receiving your due process complaint or fails to participate in the resolution meeting, you may seek the intervention of the hearing officer to begin the due process hearing timeline."

On the hearing decision: "An impartial hearing officer will issue a decision not later than 45 calendar days after the expiration of the 30 calendar day period for resolution meetings or, not later than 45 calendar days after the expiration of an adjusted time period as determined by the hearing officer."

On expedited (discipline) hearings: "the resolution meeting must occur within 7 calendar days of receiving the due process" complaint, per the notice's expedited-hearing provisions, and "The decisions on expedited due process hearing are appealable through civil action within 90 calendar" days.

On disclosure of evidence: "At least five business days before a hearing, school districts and parents must disclose to each other all evaluations of the student completed by that date as well as recommendations based on those evaluations that they intend to use at the hearing."

On civil action: "If you disagree with the decision, you may bring a civil action within 90 days from the date of the hearing officer’s decision." The comparison table describes the post-decision step differently, as an NDDPI appeal process "thirty (30) calendar days after the written decision"; both are reproduced as published and the difference is recorded in the change log.

On records access: the notice states the right to inspect and review education records "within 45 calendar days of your request."

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. Built from tools/packets/north-dakota-packet.txt: the full text layer of the Notice of Procedural Safeguards, appended mechanically, and the one-page Special Education Dispute Resolution Options comparison (October 2023), transcribed from its fetched text layer, both captured Aug 25, 2026. Findings recorded rather than smoothed: (1) the notice's own imprint reads "Publication Date: March 2018" while the file is posted under a 2023 name and carries the current state superintendent's title — both recorded, neither reconciled; (2) the comparison table states that after a hearing decision "NDDPI does offer an appeal process thirty (30) calendar days after the written decision" while the notice describes the post-decision step as a civil action "within 90 days from the date of the hearing officer’s decision" — both reproduced as published; (3) the state-complaint one-year window is stated from the incident date in the notice and from the date the individual became aware of the violation in the comparison table; (4) the office's zip is published as 58505 in the comparison table and 58505-0440 in the notice; (5) the NDDPI Dispute Resolution page returned an empty body at the network layer on capture, so it is listed as pending rather than quoted; (6) recording of IEP Team meetings is not addressed in the sources reviewed, and that absence is recorded rather than filled; (7) the comparison table's four columns interleave in the PDF text layer, so quotations drawn from it are single contiguous spans within one column wherever the extracted order permits. Capture pending: the Dispute Resolution page, the State Complaint Procedure Manual (2023), the Mediation Procedure Manual (July 2025), the Parent Guide to Special Education, the SFN request forms, and the Spanish-language notice. 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. The Spanish notice is dated marzo 2018 and the English October 2023 — the difference is recorded as a finding, not reconciled. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-08-26. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Sep 3, 2026 · Four Pathfinder and P&A phone numbers recovered; the extraction tradeoff behind them is gone. Four contact lines this page quotes from the notice’s Other Resources list — "Bismarck: (701) 328-2950", "Toll Free: 1-800-472-2670", "Minot: (701) 837-7500", "Toll Free: 1-800-245-5840" — had failed every fidelity check since this page’s recipe was written, and the reason was a choice the recipe made under duress. The capture tool passed pdftotext a flag that deleted page breaks instead of neutralising them, which in -raw mode fused the running head "Notice of Procedural Safeguards" onto the last sentence of roughly 20 of the document’s 23 pages. To escape that, the recipe used plain mode, which reads the page boundaries cleanly but drops the hyphen and space inside a line-wrapped phone number, so the Pathfinder and Protection & Advocacy numbers never entered the packet. A systemic defect was traded for a local one, and the local one was recorded in the recipe as the accepted cost. That flag was removed from the capture tool on 2026-09-03. With it gone the trade is no longer necessary: measured rather than assumed, -raw now fuses the running head no more often than plain does on this document — once, in each — and reads the contact list correctly. This page’s packet is re-cut with -raw and both pages now verify in full, at 0 failures. No source text changed, no phone number changed, and nothing on this page was reworded; what changed is that the evidence now holds the numbers the page was already quoting. Reviewer: owner-directed working session, 2026-09-03. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Sep 25, 2026 · Dispute Resolution link repointed; the old address is gone. NDDPI no longer publishes a separate Dispute Resolution page: the address this source map linked, www.nd.gov/dpi/students-parents/DisputeResolution, returned HTTP 404 on 2026-09-25 over both HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1. The same material now sits in a Special Education Dispute Resolution section of the department's Special Education program page, which links both documents this page is built from (the Notice of Procedural Safeguards and the Dispute Resolution Options comparison) along with the facilitation, mediation, state complaint and due process materials. The source map row now points there. That page is still listed rather than captured, so nothing on this page is quoted from it. Both captured sources were re-fetched the same day by recipe (digest 0b64bcea0f32), unchanged since 2026-09-03, and the page verifies against them at 0 failures; no quotation, contact or date on this page changed. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed 2026-09-25. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Oct 24, 2026 · Office renamed in the state's notice; quotations updated (attended drift resolution). Recaptured first-party under recipe tools/recipes/north-dakota.json (digest 0b64bcea0f32), two sources. What moved, and which kind of drift it was: quotations the source now states in different words. NDDPI revised its Notice of Procedural Safeguards at the same address, between the Sep 25, 2026 and Oct 22, 2026 captures, to rename the office throughout: "Office of Specially Designed Services" now reads "Office of Special Education", and "Director of Specially Designed Services" now reads "Director of Special Education". The one-page comparison, Special Education Dispute Resolution Options, makes the same change in its contact block. Nothing else in either document moved: the notice's imprint still reads "Publication Date: March 2018", and the mailing addresses, phone numbers and email are unchanged under the new name. The five quotations on this page that name the office were requoted to the new wording; the office name in the docket, the lede and the footer's independence statement was updated to match; and the source map carries the new retrieval date and records the revision under an unchanged imprint. First detected by the nightly review on Oct 22, 2026 (FA-Q-20261022-01). Internet Archive captures: to be added. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter (review confirmed 2026-10-24). Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Oct 28, 2026 · Internet Archive captures recorded. Captures requested this date by an automated capture pass; no human review is claimed for this entry. No quotation, date, finding or link above was changed by it. Each capture below was requested through Save Page Now and then confirmed to play back. Captures added: nd.gov → https://web.archive.org/web/20261028045846/https://www.nd.gov/dpi/education-programs/special-education; Notice of Procedural Safeguards → https://web.archive.org/web/20261028050002/https://www.nd.gov/dpi/sites/default/files/documents/SpeEd/Guidelines/Parental%20Right2023.pdf; nd.gov → https://web.archive.org/web/20261028050139/https://www.nd.gov/dpi/sites/www/files/documents/SpeEd/Guidelines/Parent%20Guide%20to%20Special%20Education%202018.pdf; nd.gov → https://web.archive.org/web/20261028050710/https://www.nd.gov/dpi/sites/www/files/documents/SpeEd/NDDPI%20Mediation%20Procedure%20Manual%20July%202025.pdf; nd.gov → https://web.archive.org/web/20261028050757/https://www.nd.gov/dpi/sites/www/files/documents/SpeEd/Special%20Education%20Dispute%20Resolution%20Options.pdf; nd.gov → https://web.archive.org/web/20261028050845/https://www.nd.gov/dpi/sites/www/files/documents/SpeEd/State%20Complaint%20Procedure%20Manual2023.pdf. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.