Coronavirus and Schools: The “School Term” and the 60-day Timeline
CORONAVIRUS UPDATE
One of our district administrators presented this question: Given that the regulations allow for the 60-day evaluation timelines to stop over summer break, and that the governor said that the school year would not resume for 19-20, is it a reasonable interpretation that we are now in “summer break” as far as timelines for evaluations go?
The sixty-calendar-day timeline established in the Pennsylvania State Board of Education regulations does exclude “calendar days from the day after the last day of the spring school term up to and including the day before the first day of the subsequent fall school term.” We have given this issue a lot of thought since March 13, and especially after the Pennsylvania General Assembly suspended the 180-day requirement for the 2019-2020 school term in Act 13. Did that action effectively end the 2019-2020 “school term,” as that phrase is used everywhere it appears in any Pennsylvania law or regulation? Or did it simply suspend the 180-day requirement without affecting the meaning of “school term” in any other of its myriad uses? While we think a credible argument exists that the school term ended on March 13 for purposes of the evaluation timeline established in Sections 14.123(b) and 14.124(b) of the PA State Board regulations, we ultimately do not believe that argument would prevail without more definitive guidance from the state board or the department.
Certainly USDE made clear that it was not suspending the IDEA’s 60-day evaluation timeline. In doing so, however, it pointed out that the IDEA affords states some flexibility in defining their own timelines. The Pennsylvania state board certainly took advantage of that flexibility in excluding the summer months from the 60-day timeline. The state board or the department could interpret its own regulation to mean that the “last day of the spring school term” occurred when the governor ordered schools closed on March 13 or when the general assembly suspended the 180-day requirement on March 27. Neither the state board nor PDE has done so, however, and we believe that for an LEA to do so without a clearer expression of intent from the general assembly would be very risky. The timelines flow from a civil rights law designed to protect a vulnerable population. Courts tend, therefore, to construe this and other such laws broadly and they regard legal arguments seeking to limit these law grudgingly.
We thus recommend that the timeline continue to run until the school term, as each school board defined it for 2019-2020, closes. We have offered guidance for the completion of evaluations and reevaluations during the school closure period. That guidance recognizes, of course, that these evaluations and reevaluations will not be able to include testing and assessments (other than, perhaps, the administration of rating scales) and that any resulting report will have to acknowledge the limitations on the ability of the team to make firm recommendations concerning eligibility, continued eligibility, present levels, and current program needs.