Editorial policy

The guides are researched, written, checked, and published by one person: Kyle. There is no editorial board and no roster of freelancers. That makes it obvious who is answerable when something is wrong, and it is the reason the standards below are written down rather than assumed.

Anything legal comes from the law itself, not from a summary of it written by somebody else. In practice that means:

• The IDEA statute, 20 U.S.C. 1400 et seq., and its regulations at 34 CFR Part 300.
• Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and its regulations at 34 CFR Part 104.
• FERPA and its regulations, for anything to do with school records.
• ED.gov and OSEP guidance: policy letters, Dear Colleague letters, and published questions and answers.
• State education agency regulations and procedural manuals.
• Handbooks published by state Parent Training and Information (PTI) centers.

Blogs, law firm marketing pages, and advocacy posts are used to find questions worth answering and to spot recent changes. They are never the citation. If a claim cannot be traced back to a primary source, it comes out of the guide.

If a statement drives what you do, it names its source in the sentence where you read it. Every timeline, right, deadline, and requirement is cited inline, close enough that you can check it without leaving the page. That is deliberate: a guide you cannot verify is a guide you have to take on faith, and this one does not ask you to.

Plain English comes first, then the term the school will use, then the citation. The goal is that you can hold your own in the conversation that follows, not that you can quote a regulation number back at anyone.

Statutes, regulations, and state procedures move. Every guide carries a version number and a review date, printed inside the guide itself, so you can judge how current it is instead of guessing. Anything that expires, a timeline, a form number, a threshold, carries the date it was last verified.

Guides are reviewed on a schedule and after any change large enough to matter. When one is revised, the new file replaces the old one at the same download link and in My Library, the review date changes, and nobody pays again for the update.

Federal law is the backbone of every guide, and it applies everywhere. Where states are allowed to differ, and timelines are the most common case, the guide says so plainly rather than flattening the difference into one national answer.

A state-specific number appears only when it has been verified against the statute or regulations of that state, with the citation printed beside it. If that verification has not been done, the guide ships the federal baseline and tells you to confirm the number against the regulations for your state and the procedural safeguards notice from your district. No state claim ships on the strength of a summary.

Nothing published here promises a result. Not an eligibility finding, not a service, not a particular answer at a meeting. No honest publisher can promise those, because the decision is not theirs and it is not yours alone either.

What a guide can do is tell you what the process is, what the school has to do, what you are allowed to ask for, and what happens next if you disagree. So the copy avoids urgency, fear, and adversarial framing as a matter of policy: no countdown clocks, no war language, no suggestion that the school is an opponent. You are a member of the team, and the guides are written that way.

Every guide is educational information. It explains how the special education process generally works under federal law. It is not legal advice, it is not advice about your individual child, and reading one creates no attorney-client or advocate relationship.

Letter templates are fill-in forms plus instructions you complete yourself. Nothing here is drafted around the facts of one child, and nobody here acts as your representative. Every guide names the point where a qualified special education attorney or advocate is the right call, and every guide names the free Parent Training and Information Center in your state, because knowing all of your options is part of the product rather than fine print. The formal version sits in the terms.

Software is used at several points in the work: gathering sources, drafting, layout, and checking. That includes AI tools. Rather than leave it unsaid, the same disclosure is printed in every guide and repeated here:

Various tools, including AI tools, were utilized by the shop owner to help in research and the creation of this guide.

What that does not change: every guide is reviewed and edited by the publisher before it is released, and every fact is checked against the primary source it came from, not against what a model remembers of it. Nothing goes out that a person has not read line by line, and responsibility for what a guide says sits with the publisher, not with a tool.

Guides are written by a human being, so some of them will be wrong somewhere. The policy is simple: tell me, and it gets fixed.

• Write to [email protected] with the guide title, the page, and what looks wrong. A link to the source helps but is not required.
• Every report is checked against the primary source, whether or not the person reporting it bought anything.
• Confirmed errors are corrected, the guide is re-dated, and the revised file replaces the old one at the same download link at no charge.
• Substantive corrections are noted inside the guide so you can see what changed.
• You get a reply either way, including when the original text turns out to be right.

No sponsorships, no paid placements, no gifts in exchange for coverage, and no affiliate links in the guides or anywhere on this site. When a guide names a service, an organization, or a type of professional, nothing is earned from that mention. Things are named because naming them is useful to you.

The only money that comes in is what readers pay for guides. That is deliberate, and it is what makes it possible to point you at free help before paid help.

Write to [email protected]. If you think a standard on this page is too loose, that is worth hearing too.