1. Timeline
A Notice of Request for Review and the Request for Review that are prepared by a parent must be served on the Board of Education of the school district the same way the Notice of Intention to Seek Review was served, no later than 40 calendar days after the date of the decision of the impartial hearing officer (IHO) you are requesting be reviewed. However, if a school district already initiated an appeal of the IHO decision against the parent by serving the parent with a Request for Review within the same 40-day timeline, the parent would not need to follow the instructions below. Instead, the parent may respond to the school district's Request for Review in an Answer or Answer with Cross-Appeal as described in Section II of this guide.
2. A Notice of Request for Review (Form B / Form B)
A copy of this notice should be attached as a cover page to your Request for Review. The heading, or caption in this document should record the same parent and school district names in the upper left-hand corner as those that were listed on the Notice of Intention to Seek Review. The body of the Notice of Request for Review must contain the words exactly as they appear on Form B, and must be signed by you at the bottom.
3. Request for Review
The Request for Review is the document in which you state your reasons that you are seeking review of the Impartial Hearing Officer's decision. You are permitted to use the form Request for Review that has been created by the Office of State Review, but you are not required to use this particular form when writing your Request for Review. Form Request for Review. You may examine a completed example of a form Request for Review and use it as a guide for filling out your own form. Sample form Request for Review. If you prefer not to use the form created by the Office of State Review, you may use an alternative format of your own design, provided it meets the minimum requirements listed below. Some parties choose to use a narrative format when drafting a Request for Review and you may wish to examine an example of this alternative format to guide you in preparing your own appeal. Sample narrative Request for Review. While there is no standard or required form for a Request for Review, the Request for Review must be prepared in accordance with the following directions:
a. The Request for Review must be typewritten using standard double-spacing, in 12-point Times New Roman font, on standard 8 1/2 by 11 inch white paper, and no longer than 10 pages. Margins should be no smaller than 1 inch.
Please Note: If you file using the e-Filing System in the Office of State Review, you are no longer required to submit a hard copy with the Office.
If you opt to file a hard copy by mail, to facilitate processing, the Office of State Review encourages parties to use regular staples only to fasten pages together and strongly discourages parties from using binding systems for papers submitted to the Office of State Review (i.e. comb binding, velobinding, tape binding, etc.)
b. A caption or heading should appear in the upper left hand corner listing the same parental and school district parties that appear on the Notice of Intention to Seek Review and the Notice of Request for Review.
c. Begin the Request for Review by identifying yourself as the parent or person in parental relationship to the child.
d. State the child's age, and the name of the school, if any, which the child is attending.
e. Make a clear and concise statement of the issues/IHO rulings that you would like the State Review Officer to review and the reasons that the IHO's decision should be reversed or changed, with each issue/IHO ruling numbered and set forth separately. Any issue/IHO ruling that you wish to challenge but do not identify in your Request for Review will not be addressed by the State Review Officer and it will be assumed that you are abandoning that issue or ruling of the IHO.
f. Explain to the State Review Officer what part(s) of the hearing officer's decision you disagree with, and why you disagree with the hearing officer's decision. Also explain the hearing officer's failure to or refusal to rule on/decide an issue and if you would like the State Review Officer to review that issue. When possible, you should refer to the evidence in the record, such as the page numbers from the written transcript of the hearing or written documents which were presented at the hearing, to support your argument. For example, "Tr. pp. 365-70" means that the State Review Officer should focus on or be convinced of your point that you are writing about by looking at pages 365 through 370 of the hearing transcript, and "Parent Ex. Q at p. 8" means that the State Review Officer should focus on or be convinced by the information on page 8 of Parent's documentary exhibit Q.
g. If you object to the way in which the IHO conducted the hearing, you should state your objection, and if possible, you should refer to any pages of the written record of the hearing which relate to your objection.
h. Indicate what relief or remedy you are seeking by bringing the appeal. At the end of the Request for Review, you should explain to the State Review Officer what you would like to see happen. You may ask the State Review Officer to reverse or change the IHO's decision and, for example:
- order that your child is eligible for special education; order that a different evaluation/assessment of your child be conducted;order your child's type of classroom setting or other special service(s) be changed (or not be changed); order that extra special education services be provided by the school district to your child to make up for a lack of services that the district should have provided to your child in the past; and/or order that you be reimbursed for private school tuition because you obtained the specialized schooling/programming that your child needed after the district failed to provide your child with appropriate special education.
The items above are several examples of relief that parents have sought from State Review Officers and is not the only relief you may request. You must decide what you believe the school district should be ordered to do to help your child and explain what you would like the State Review Officer to order.
i. You are not required to refer to portions of Federal or State laws or regulations to support your argument that the decision of the hearing officer should be overturned or amended; however, if you wish you may do so in the Request for Review.
j. You may also submit a separate document detailing your legal arguments. The separate document is a "Memorandum of Law." Your Memorandum of Law in support of your Request for Review should be typewritten, standard double-spacing, in 12-point Times New Roman font, on standard 8 1/2 by 11 inch white paper, and no longer than 30 pages. Margins should be no smaller than 1 inch.
4. Affidavit of Verification (Form D / Form D)
In this verification form you, as the petitioner, make an oath in front of any person authorized to administer oaths in New York State (such as a Notary Public or Commissioner of Deeds) that the statements in the Request for Review are true to the best of your knowledge. You will usually find a Notary Public or a Commissioner of Deeds in a government office, a bank, or by searching the internet for a notary in your area. More recently, New York State has established procedures that permit a notary with the appropriate licence to perform the notary services remotely.
