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The 193rd General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

AN ACT PROVIDING ACCESS TO INFORMATION FOR PARENTS OF A CHILD WITH SPECIAL NEEDS.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Court assembled, and by the authority of the same as follows:

The fourth paragraph of section 3 of chapter 71B of the General Laws, as appearing in the 2006 Official Edition, is hereby amended by adding the following 3 sentences:- To insure that parents can participate fully and effectively with school personnel in the consideration and development of appropriate educational programs for their child, a school committee shall, upon request by a parent, provide timely access to parents and parent-designated independent evaluators and educational consultants for observations of a child’s current program and of any program proposed for the child, including both academic and non-academic components of any such program. Parents and their designees shall be afforded access of sufficient duration and extent to enable them to evaluate a child’s performance in a current program and the ability of a proposed program to enable such child to make effective progress. School committees shall impose no conditions or restrictions on such observations except those necessary to ensure the safety of children in a program or the integrity of the program while under observation or to protect children in the program from disclosure by an observer of confidential and personally identifiable information in the event such information is obtained in the course of an observation by a parent or a designee.

Approved October 10, 2008