Early last Fall, DRC became aware that the Maine Department of Education intended to promulgate emergency special education regulations that were likely to have a very negative impact on services for students with disabilities. DRC helped organize families and advocates to attend the public hearing on the emergency regulations organized by DOE that occurred in December 09. The December 21st DOE hearing addressed all three pending sets of revisions to the proposed regulations-- hundreds of pages of changes --in only 2 hours of public testimony. DRC and MEAA (Maine Education Advocacy Alliance, of which DRC is a member) worked together to ensure that all of the significant points about the proposed regulations were covered without repetition during this short hearing, including advocate's concerns about the way that the “emergency” process was being used to make changes on issues addressed and agreed upon by the Legislature's Education and Cultural Affairs Committee just last session.
DRC staff also provided interviews about the proposed regulations with the Portland Press Herald, Kennebec Journal ,Sun Journal, and Capital Weekly and contacted members of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee about the emergency regulations. The Education and Cultural Affairs Committee members were not aware of the DOE rules package until DRC told them about it, and they were concerned because it contained changes they had so recently addressed.
DRC staff knew that the Emergency regulations and the new proposed regulation package would have to go before the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee this session. So DRC began to contact members of the Committee, especially its Senate Chair, Justin Alfond, to push that the rules package be moved through as quickly as possibl e. The emergency rules, which could cause harm to children, would remain in effect until they were legislatively reviewed. DRC also convened a meeting of disability advocates at its offices to plan for the session. At this meeting, a diverse group of advocate stakeholders agreed on eleven items on which they would focus their energy, and agreed that they would not provide significant opposition to other issues, even if they did not necessarily agree with them , so as to maintain focus on the important issues.
DRC attended each of the numerous and lengthy work sessions on the bill containing the proposed rules , LD 1741, met individually with legislators and provided reams of legal research and back ground information to Committee members and advocate colleagues . In the end, of the 11 items the group agreed to focus on, the outcome was very positive. There were unanimous votes by the Committee on : 1) elimination of the implementation date for pre-referral; 2) agreement to move the date for initiation of transition services to 9th grade rather than age 16, 3) agreement to use multiple information sources to determine eligibility under the Other Health Impaired category, 4) agreement to keep the evaluation timeline for 3-5 year olds at 60 calendar days.
All but the first of these indicate a win on the part of the advocates in the sense that a negative result for children with disabilities was avoided. The Committee also agreed to convene a work group to address changes to the eligibility standard and abbreviated school day that advocates strongly opposed. Those changes will go into effect until the workgroup reports back to the legislature on them next session. DRC has a seat on this work group.
The Committee compromised on statute of limitations (SOL) of 2 years for both complaint and due process. This compromise, while not ideal, prevents a more significant proposed loss on the complaint SOL. The Committee also compromised on a cap for contracted services at 140% Mainecare rate for these services, with the rate to be determined as of the effective date of the legislation. That change passed unanimously, representing a significant improvement over the proposed rate equal to 100% of the current Mainecare rate. Advocates were very concerned that this change would result in greatly reduced services availability as providers could not provide the services for that price .
After all of that work in the Committee, LD 1741 passed on the House and Senate floor without issue and was signed by the Governor. | 
