Tuition Reimbursement

When school personnel fail to provide students with disabilities with the free appropriate public education (FAPE) called for in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the courts can grant appropriate relief (20 U.S.C. § 1415(i)(2)). One of the more common forms of relief is to provide tuition reimbursement to parents who may have obtained appropriate services privately.

The administrative and judicial proceedings concerned with contested placements under the IDEA can take months or even years before reaching final resolution of the underlying dispute. While these actions are pending, the IDEA requires that students remain in their current educational placements unless their parents and school board officials or states agree otherwise (20 U.S.C. § 1415(j)). Parents who are convinced that their child's current placement is inappropriate may not wish to have the child remain in that placement during the lengthy proceedings. Under these circumstances, parents may opt to remove their children from their current placements and enroll them in private facilities.

Under some circumstances, parents who succeed in showing that school board placements are inappropriate can be reimbursed for the cost of tuition and other expenses associated with their unilateral private placement. Initially, this relief was provided largely under case law, but the IDEA and its regulations now explicitly authorize judges and hearing officers to award tuition reimbursement (20 U.S.C. § 1412(a)(10)(C)(ii); 34 C.F.R. § 300.148).

The Supreme Court has delivered two important pronouncements regarding tuition reimbursement for parents who unilaterally place their children in private schools. In Burlington School Committee v. Department of Education, Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1985), the Court acknowledged that the IDEA allowed reimbursement as long as the parents' chosen placement was determined to be the appropriate placement for their child. The Court emphasized that when Congress empowered the courts to grant appropriate relief, it intended to include retroactive relief as an available remedy.

The Court articulated that reimbursement merely requires school boards to pay the expenses that they would have been paying all along if school personnel had developed proper individualized education programs (IEPs) from the outset. If reimbursement were not available, the Court observed, the rights of [Page 842]students to a FAPE and parental rights to participate fully in developing appropriate IEPs would be less than complete. On the other hand, the Court cautioned parents who make unilateral placements that they do so at their own financial risk, because they will not be reimbursed if school board officials can show that they proposed and had the capacity to implement appropriate IEPs.

In the Supreme Court's second case involving tuition reimbursement, Florence County School District Four v. Carter (1993), the justices unanimously affirmed that parentally chosen placements need not be in state-approved facilities for parents to obtain tuition reimbursements. In Carter, parents dissatisfied with the IEP that school officials developed for their daughter placed her in a private school that was not on the state's list of approved facilities. A federal trial court ruled that insofar as the school board's proposed IEP was inadequate, it was required to reimburse the parents for the cost of the private school placement.

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