A PRACTICAL NEW YORK PARENT RESOURCE
Understand Your Child’s Special Education Rights
A practical New York special education guide for families navigating evaluations, IEPs, services, placement, discipline, and disputes. Learn what to ask, what to document, and how to take informed next steps.
More Than Information—A Parent Action Guide
Special education decisions can affect a child’s access to instruction, services, inclusion, independence, and future opportunities. Parents are essential members of the educational team, but meaningful participation requires more than attending meetings or agreeing with recommendations.
This guide explains how to prepare, identify concerns, ask focused questions, document requests, evaluate the school’s response, and determine reasonable next steps. It also helps parents understand when collaboration may be sufficient and when mediation, a state complaint, due process, an advocate, or legal counsel may need to be considered.
The goal is not to create unnecessary conflict. The goal is to help parents participate confidently, make informed decisions, and maintain a clear written record while keeping their child’s educational needs at the center of the process.
Inside the 182-Page Parent Guide
A practical roadmap for evaluations, IEPs, services, placement, disputes, and parent action.
- Special education laws and landmark cases
- Initial, requested and triennial evaluations
- Eligibility and independent educational evaluations
- Present levels, goals and progress monitoring
- Related services and missed-service documentation
- Extended School Year eligibility and disputes
- Assistive-technology evaluation, training and use
- Attendance, early pickups and missed instruction
- Placement and changes of placement
- Public and approved nonpublic-school options
- Discipline, suspension, FBAs and BIPs
- Prior Written Notice and educational records
- IEP violations and implementation failures
- Corrective and compensatory services
- Mediation, state complaints and due process
- Advocate and attorney considerations
- Parent checklists, sample letters and visual maps
Created by Clara Liriano, M.S.Ed.
Experience Supporting New York Families
Clara Liriano is a New York State Certified Special Education Teacher, Special Education Advocate, Parent Educator, and Independent OPWDD Support Broker. Her professional experience includes supporting children and families through Early Intervention, preschool and school-age special education, educational records review, IEP preparation, advocacy, and disability services.
She created this guide to make complicated special education laws and procedures easier for parents to understand and use. The guide combines legal information, practical explanations, parent action steps, checklists, sample correspondence, and visual maps in one organized resource.
Clara is not an attorney, and this guide does not provide legal advice or replace individualized advice from a qualified attorney. It is an educational resource intended to help parents become informed and prepared participants in their child’s education.