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Extended School Year Services

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and its regulations do not unequivocally require school boards to provide students with disabilities with special education and related services during traditional school vacations. However, when students with disabilities need extended school year (ESY) programming in order to receive a free appropriate public education, school boards must deliver such programs. Even though most students with disabilities do not require services during school vacations, those with severe disabilities sometimes require programming of this sort. The IDEA and its regulations are silent as to the situations in which school boards must provide ESY programming, but the courts have offered some direction, as summarized in this entry.

Required Option

Courts in three federal jurisdictions quickly established the principle that programming beyond the traditional school year must be an available option. In the first of these cases, a federal trial court in Georgia, later affirmed by the Eleventh Circuit, held that state practices that effectively limited educational programming to 180 days per year violated the IDEA (Georgia Association of Retarded Citizens v. McDaniel, 1981, 1983, 1984). Noting that the IDEA requires the full consideration of the unique needs of each child, the court asserted that any policy that prohibited or inhibited such full consideration violated the statute.

Around the same time, the Fifth Circuit, in a case that originated in Mississippi, stressed that the IDEA did not tolerate policies or practices that imposed a rigid pattern on the education of students with disabilities, but instead favored the development of individualized education programs (IEPs) based on an individual evaluation (Crawford v. Pittman, 1983). The court emphasized that categorical limitations on the length of special education programs were not consistent with the IDEA. Likewise, a federal trial court in Missouri, in an opinion later affirmed by the Eighth Circuit, acknowledged that any policy that refused to consider ESY programming violated the IDEA (Yaris v. Special School District, St. Louis County, 1983, 1984). Subsequent courts recognized the notion that ESY programming is required when it is needed to prevent substantial regression, if the time required for students to recoup lost skills will substantially impede their progress toward meeting the objectives contained in their IEPs. This principle first surfaced in a suit from Pennsylvania in which a federal trial court reasoned that some students with severe disabilities suffered substantial regression during vacation periods and that the time required to recover lost skills was significant (Armstrong v. Kline, 1979, 1980, 1981). The court was convinced that these students would not be given a free appropriate public education unless they received services beyond the traditional 180-day school year.

Defining the Regression Standard

Later opinions refined the regression/recoupment standard. The Fifth Circuit postulated that an ESY program is required when the benefits accrued during the school year may be significantly jeopardized in the absence of a summer program (Alamo Heights Independent School District v. State Board of Education, 1986). The Sixth Circuit observed that regression in the past does not need to be shown to justify the need for ESY programs (Cordrey v. Euckert, 1990). That court acknowledged that the need for ESY programming can be established by expert opinion based on a professional individual evaluation of the student's needs. Naturally, past regression would help demonstrate the need for an ESY.

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