Parental Consent

In special education, consent means your informed, written, voluntary agreement — and the process cannot lawfully start without it. The school needs your consent before evaluating your child for the first time, and again before providing special education services at all. Consent for one is not consent for the other: agreeing to testing never automatically agrees to a placement.

"Informed" is the word doing the work. Before you sign, the school must explain what it's asking to do in language you understand, including what an evaluation will involve or what services are proposed. You can ask questions, take the form home, and agree to some things and not others. Signing quickly at a meeting table is never required — "I'd like to read this at home and return it tomorrow" is a perfectly fair sentence.

Consent is also revocable: you can withdraw it in writing at any time. Revoking consent for all special education services is a serious step — it ends the IEP and the protections that come with it — so it deserves careful thought and, ideally, advice from a parent center. But the power stays with you either way. Your signature is the switch that turns this process on, and the law keeps your hand on it.