Navigating Wisconsin's Special Education Eligibility Criteria

Introduction

Wisconsin's special education framework is built upon federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates, state statutes, and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) detailed guidelines. School districts must adhere to federal requirements for Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE), Least Restrictive Environment (LRE), and procedural safeguards, along with Wisconsin's specific disability criteria outlined in PI 11, state evaluation procedures, and DPI's standardized processes. This article consolidates these requirements and offers practical interpretation for implementation.

The Foundation: Legal and Regulatory Framework

Wisconsin's special education requirements are structured around three key layers of authority.

Federal IDEA Requirements

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) establishes national standards for key aspects of special education, including:

Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE)
Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)
Evaluations
Individualized Education Program (IEP) development
Procedural safeguards
Transition services

Wisconsin districts must meet these minimum federal requirements, irrespective of additional state rules.

Wisconsin Statutes

Chapter 115 of the Wisconsin Statutes lays the legal foundation for special education in the state. Key provisions include:

Read also: GPA Insights: UW-Madison

Procedural Safeguards: Wis. Stat. §115.792 defines parent rights and district responsibilities.
Private School Placements: Wis. Stat. §115.791 outlines evaluation requirements and district responsibilities when private school placements or reimbursement claims arise.

PI 11 Disability Criteria

Wisconsin Administrative Code PI 11 details the specific disability criteria for all eligibility categories. Teams are required to document that each criterion is met using Wisconsin-specific procedures and forms.

DPI Guidance and Model Forms

The DPI provides detailed guidance documents, bulletins, timelines, and model forms to support districts in implementing special education requirements.

Referral, Evaluation, and Eligibility: A Detailed Process

Wisconsin places a strong emphasis on Child Find, thorough evaluation practices, and documentation that is directly tied to PI 11 criteria.

Child Find and Referral

Districts have a responsibility to actively identify and evaluate students who may require special education services. This includes students in:

Private schools
Charter schools
Homeschool settings

Referrals must be submitted in writing and logged immediately. The DPI closely reviews referral logs during complaints and audits.

Evaluation Requirements

Once parental consent is obtained, evaluations must comprehensively address every area of suspected disability, using a multi-source, multidisciplinary approach. Evaluations must include:

Standardized assessments
Structured observations
Parent input
Teacher input
Functional performance data
Relevant behavioral or sensory information

Missing data or insufficient documentation of parent participation are frequent bases for DPI findings.

Determining Eligibility Using Wisconsin PI 11

To determine eligibility, the IEP team must consider two key factors:

Whether the student meets Wisconsin’s PI 11 disability criteria: The team must carefully review the PI 11 criteria for each suspected disability.
Whether the student requires specially designed instruction: Meeting PI 11 criteria alone is not sufficient for eligibility.

IEP Implementation, Review, and Monitoring

Implementation errors are common reasons for DPI corrective action, making this a critical area for district systems.

Implementing the IEP

Districts must provide services exactly as specified in the IEP, including:

Frequency
Duration
Group size
Service location
Responsible provider

The DPI frequently cites districts when service logs do not align with the IEP’s service grid.

Annual IEP Reviews

Annual IEP reviews must occur within 12 months of the previous meeting. Teams should:

Present updated progress data
Revise goals when progress is insufficient
Ensure meaningful parent participation

Reevaluations

Reevaluations must occur at least every three years, unless both the district and parent agree they are unnecessary.

School-Based Medicaid (ForwardHealth) and IEP Documentation

ForwardHealth's School-Based Services (SBS) program allows districts to bill Medicaid for health-related services provided through the IEP. These services are considered related services.

Related Services Support services (such as speech therapy, occupational therapy, or transportation) that are required to assist a child with a disability in benefiting from their educational program.

Procedural Safeguards and Parent Rights

Wisconsin incorporates many procedural safeguards directly into state statute, underscoring their importance during DPI monitoring. Procedural Safeguards are outlined in Wis. Stat.

Key Differences in Wisconsin's System

Educators from out of state or those working across regions often encounter important differences in Wisconsin’s special education system.

GoIDEA Support for Wisconsin Districts

GoIDEA offers a Wisconsin-aligned platform for managing IEP development, timelines, and documentation.

Comprehensive Special Education Evaluation

Wisconsin statutes, rules, and federal regulations address comprehensive special education evaluation. IDEA requires a comprehensive special education evaluation to focus not only on identifying at least one disability category for each student but also requires an evaluation to provide enough information to develop the content of a student’s IEP. This requirement applies to all suspected disability categories. Thus, if only the disability category criteria are used to plan an evaluation, it is unlikely that the IEP team will have the information needed to address all the required elements and document disability as defined by IDEA.

To develop IEP goals and identify all of the special education services a student may require to address their disability-related needs, the IEP evaluation team must have existing data at the time of reviewing the data or must collect new information about the student’s present levels of academic and functional skills, effects of the student’s disability, root causes, and disability-related needs that can be used by the IEP team following the evaluation.

IDEA requires evaluating each child with a disability so that: “The evaluation is sufficiently comprehensive to identify all of the child’s special education and related service needs, whether or not commonly linked to the disability category in which the child has been classified.” This means that special education evaluations do not just result in labeling; they also provide student-specific information useful for educational decision making.

Disability Category Criteria

In Wisconsin, before an IEP team can decide that a student is eligible to receive special education services, the team must have documentation that the student meets at least one of Wisconsin’s disability category criteria outlined in PI 11. The department has developed criteria worksheets for each disability category to help IEP teams address each required criteria component.

In addition to documenting the disability, the IEP team must also determine whether the student requires specially designed instruction. During the evaluation, the team must not only have enough information to decide whether a student meets the disability category criteria, but it must also have enough information to decide whether the student requires specially designed instruction as a result of the disability. A student who does not need specially designed instruction cannot be found eligible to receive special education services. Applying the eligibility criteria for a particular category of disability is not enough to answer the “need for special education” question.

One of the major shifts in “thinking” about special education evaluations the department hopes to convey is the focus on identifying student “needs” versus primarily focusing on identifying whether a student meets the criteria for a particular disability category.

Blind and Visually Impaired Criteria

The following are some additional tips specifically when considering blind and visually impaired criteria when conducting a comprehensive special education evaluation.

First, it is a best practice to have a current ocular report that is no more than three years old. Wisconsin DPI created a form PI-2015, Ocular Report for Children with a Known or Suspected Visual Impairment, that IEP teams can use to document the student’s current level of ocular functioning. Note that medical documentation for blindness or visual impairment is not required for a special education referral to be initiated; only the reasons a disability is suspected are required. In addition, because Wisconsin exceeds federal regulations related to required documentation to identify a student as blind and visually impaired, any required medical exams must be done at the public’s expense, meaning the Local Education Agency or school district, must pay for the medical exam.

The Learning Media Assessment can assist in determining the most appropriate learning media for the student, including the need for Braille instruction. Note, that for Braille provision, IDEA states, “In the case of a child who is blind or visually impaired, [the IEP team must] provide for instruction in Braille and the use of Braille unless the IEP team determines, after an evaluation of the child's reading and writing skills, needs, and appropriate reading and writing media (including an evaluation of the child's future needs for instruction in Braille or the use of Braille), that instruction in Braille or the use of Braille is not appropriate for the child” (34 CFR § Sec.

A licensed orientation and mobility specialist conducts an O&M assessment in the home, school, and community environment.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Criteria

Wisconsin’s state rule for deaf and hard of hearing begins with the following definition: “Deaf and hard of hearing means a decreased ability to detect sound in one or both ears with or without amplification, whether permanent or chronically fluctuating, which adversely affects a child’s educational performance.

In addition, the rule language requires that a student’s decreased ability to detect sound in one or both ears with or without amplification, whether permanent or chronically fluctuating, must be found to adversely affect the student’s educational performance in order for a student to meet criteria under the disability category of deaf and hard of hearing.

The Expanded Core Curriculum targets areas of functional skill development that are required of students who are deaf or hard of hearing to access the general education curriculum and achieve the Wisconsin Academic Standards. The individual areas of focus for the Expanded Core Curriculum include Communication and Language, Social and Emotional Development, Resources and Technology, Environmental Management, and Transition.

Deafblind Criteria

Wisconsin DPI proposed a rule change to include deafblind as a new disability category, and this new category went into effect on August 1, 2021. When considering deafblind eligibility criteria, note that Wisconsin has added a new rule for deafblind. IEP teams are required to have disability category criteria worksheets for both deaf and hard of hearing and blind and visually impaired available when considering the disability category for deafblind. If deaf or blindness is suspected, the educational team may contact the WDBTAP or the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Outreach Program for assistance with identifying appropriate assessments. The WDBTAP is responsible for child find and child count for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and can help schools and districts with the identification of students who may qualify to receive special education services as deafblind.

Emotional Behavioral Disability (EBD) Criteria

Wisconsin revised the administrative rule for identifying a student with an emotional behavioral disability. The new rule went into effect starting December 1, 2021, and all referrals on or after December 1, 2021, must use the revised criteria. The revised criteria defines emotional behavioral disability as “a condition in which a child demonstrates frequent and intense observable behaviors, either over a long period of time or of sudden onset because of an emerging mental health condition which includes a diagnosis by a licensed mental health professional, which adversely affects the child’s educational performance.

Wisconsin’s rule for identifying a student with an emotional behavioral disability requires objective assessments and data, allowing teams to focus on the student’s strengths and disability-related needs and limiting subjectivity and potential bias. Raises up assessment methods other than norm-referenced assessments.

Speech or Language Impairment Criteria

The rule for Speech or Language Impairment also has as a strong focus on understanding disorder within diversity, which is new terminology and encourages Speech-Language Pathologists to look past the difference versus disorder aspect to speech and language disorders within dialects and home languages. This change in terminology is significant because there is often an overlap between the characteristics identifying students with language disorders for monolingual English students and speakers of General American English and differences of speakers who are bilingual or multilingual or who speak a dialect other than General American English.

Speech-language pathologists are encouraged to utilize the Comprehensive Assessment Model that Wisconsin adopted, with permission, from the Virginia Department of Education. This model illustrates that a comprehensive assessment requires a variety of assessment tasks to be conducted. For example, norm-referenced tests are only one-fourth of the model. Collecting information from other quadrants (academic activities, SLP probes, contextualized assessments) ensures IEP teams consider the natural environment and the student’s performance within that environment. Speech-language pathologists must partner with classroom teachers and review how the student is currently performing across contexts. Speech-language pathologists need to also use “speech-language probes” and take detailed case histories, interviewing families, and educators who know the student best.

Documentation of Disability Categories

All determinations of disability categories require documentation, regardless of the disability categories a student does or does not meet. Before an IEP team can decide that a student is eligible to receive special education services, the team must have documentation that the student meets at least one of Wisconsin’s disability category criteria outlined in PI 11.36. These worksheets have recently been revised to align with the requirements outlined for all the disability categories in Wisconsin state rules.

The worksheets were reorganized to match the flow of discussion in an IEP team meeting. The revised worksheets also include an additional emphasis that a student meeting any of the criteria must have an adverse effect on the student’s educational performance. That is, IEP teams must not only document that a student meets any of the criteria, but also document that the delay or difference adversely affects the student educationally, socially, or emotionally.

A major revision made to each of the criteria worksheets was to include a prompt and space for documentation of how a student meets-or did not meet-each component of the criteria for a disability category as outlined in PI 11.36. That is, it is important for IEP teams to document the rationale for why a box is checked “yes” or “no.” This helps to ensure the IEP team has discussed each of the prompts and given thoughtful consideration before checking a box. It also provides documentation for future reference, if needed, such as in the case of a complaint investigation. Some IEP teams also attach the full summary of any individual assessments conducted as part of the collection of additional information during the evaluation. Beginning in fall 2022, these optional worksheets will become required IEP forms. Thus, IEP teams are encouraged to become familiar with using the worksheets during the 2021-22 school year. Although use of the worksheets is optional this school year, applying the new criteria described above and documenting if a student meets the criteria for any disability category is not optional. DPI will have another webinar in the spring of 2022 in anticipation of the worksheets becoming required IEP forms for the 2022-23 school year. At that time, additional guidance on the required documentation will be provided.

As IEP teams review updated disability category criteria, they must remember this is only one part of a comprehensive special education evaluation. That is, each initial evaluation or re-evaluation should be able to identify all of the student’s disability-related needs whether or not they are commonly linked to any one of Wisconsin’s twelve disability categories.

Principals are encouraged to keep in mind that the stronger a school’s and district’s equitable multilevel system of support is, the higher the likelihood that a special education referral will be made when appropriate and the easier it will be to conduct a comprehensive special education evaluation that accurately considers and identifies a student’s category of disability, as well as correctly helping with the student’s developmental and educational needs.

IEP teams should keep in mind that having a need for special education means the student needs specially designed instruction. Hence, if a child meets criteria for a disability category but does not need specially designed instruction, the student is not found eligible for special education and an IEP is not developed for the child.

Additional Considerations

Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), primary disability is the disability condition that best describes an IDEA-eligible student's impairment; the impairment that is most disabling.

IDEA Eligibility for Choice Students: Students must have been IDEA eligible prior to attending a choice school to be reported by choice schools. Even if the students have a 504, if they have never had IDEA eligibility, they cannot be reported. If the student was covered, enter the appropriate information regarding the disability. If the student was not, remove the disability submission. No choice school students are IDEA eligible unless previously considered so in a public school, so choice schools cannot take accountability for Oct. 1 counts. If PPP choice students receive special education services in a public school, then the public school claims them for Oct.

Criteria Dates: The above criteria are applied as of a specific date based on the most current data available. For WISEdata count date records, the count dates are the Third Friday of September and October 1.

FAPE: According to Sec.

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