Project Type
Website
Graduation Year
2026
Degree Name
Master of Science in Eduation
Program Director
Katherine Lewis, PhD
Project Description
Beyond the Benefit of the Doubt is a student-centered toolkit that helps school teams distinguish between students who require special education and students who would benefit from additional general education support. The project addresses a recurring problem in eligibility, service, and placement meetings: participants use the same words for different things, and decisions drift toward assumptions rather than documented needs. Grounded in the IDEA two-part eligibility test, Child Find, FAPE, and the least restrictive environment, and informed by 10 peer-reviewed studies and 8 legal authorities, the toolkit translates the legal standard into questions that a team can answer using collected data. Six one-page tools: a Need vs. Benefit Decision Guide, a Legal Quick-Reference Card, a Collaborative Conversation Guide, a Pre-Meeting Planning Tool, an Accommodations Log, and a Next Steps pathway, give general education teachers, special education case managers, administrators, related service providers, MTSS and SST teams, and families a shared, plain-language framework. A companion website hosts each tool in fillable form, alongside a parent planning page and a de-identified 2025 California due process decision that illustrates the standard in practice. The project also addresses equity: because over-identification and under-identification share a root cause in decisions untethered from evidence, documenting need protects students most often sorted by assumption. The intended outcome is balanced student-centered educational access, matched to real, documented need, in the least restrictive environment.