Making Legally Sound Placement Decisions

The goal of this article is to assist individualized education program (IEP) team personnel to not make errors in the placement of students. To do so the authors: (1) describe what a placement decision is and who makes the decision; (2) review the placement requirements of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2006); (3) examine guidelines from the seminal cases that have addressed placement issues; (4) describe how IEP teams can avoid the most common placement errors; (5) provide a placement flowchart to help IEP teams make legally sound placement decisions; and (6) offer principles to help IEP teams make legally sound placement decisions.