Special Education April 2014 | Page 10

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

In 1974, Congress enacted the FERPA to address concerns regarding the confidentiality and accessibility of student records. This act was put in place to

(a) ensure that parents and students would have access to their educational records and

(b) protect students' rights to privacy by not releasing records without consent.

Response to Intervention (RTI)

In 2004, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) made a number of significant changes to the federal special education law. The main changes was that IDEIA prohibited state educational agencies (SEA) from requiring that local educational agencies (LEA) use a discrepancy model to identify students with learning disabilities (LD). Instead permitting them to use a process whereby students are identified if they have failed to respond to scientific, evidence-based instruction or some other alternative research-based procedure.

This would also require that school disctricts use a response-to-intervention (RTI) procedure rather than a discrepancy model.

The procedures to identify students with LDs should focus on assessments that are instructionally relevelant. This procedure became known as RTI!

For more information on these acronyms please visit

http://nichcy.org/

nclb

ferpa

rti

IDEia

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