Acronyms are supposed to make life easier — so you don't need to remember “Individualized Education Program” or “Committee on Special Education.”
But what happens when the acronyms start coming at you fast and furious? The signposts along the winding road of special ed are plastered with IEP. CSE. FAPE. LRE. IDEA. ICT. OT. SETSS. RSA. And many many more.
Acronyms are the language of bureaucracy, and when I first started on this journey I usually nodded when I heard one and went home and looked everything up. I felt ”out-jargoned” and kind of gave up, and told myself I was too busy anyway. That was six years ago.
This guide would have been handy back then. It unspools in the order these terms might introduce themselves — starting at the beginning, moving through what happens when services don't show up, or the school placement is not right, and ending with the legal machinery that kicks in when you and the DOE can't agree.
To collect this glossary I spoke to lawyers and policy experts. Lloyd Donders, a special education attorney, came to this field after fighting for his own son's IEP. I spoke to Michele Kule-Korgood, who has practiced special education law in New York City for 32 years and was a special education teacher before that. And I spoke to Dr. Josh Feder, a developmental pediatrician who has worked in autism since 1979 and who is autistic himself.
What I found is that the acronyms aren't the hard part. The hard part is what they hide.
Note: I organized this glossary in dictionary style, inspired in part by the DOE’s document subpoena sent to our son’s school, pictured below. I thought it was charming that they took the care to make sure we understood the pronunciation of “Suh-Pea-Nuh.”
IDEA — Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (ī-dē-ē-ā, not the word "idea" — it's always spelled out) noun 1. the federal law, passed in 1975, that guarantees every child with a disability the right to a free appropriate public education. 2. the 4-letter word you cling to when the school tells you, politely, that "we don't do that here."
FAPE — Free Appropriate Public Education (fāp) noun 1. the promise IDEA makes to every disabled child: a public education, free of charge, appropriate to their individual needs. 2. "Free" in the same way a "free puppy" is free. We pay for it with our taxes — and before 1975, families of disabled children paid those same taxes while their kids were legally denied a seat in the classroom.
Child Find noun 1. the legal obligation of every school district to identify, locate, and evaluate every child with a disability — whether or not a parent has ever asked. 2. the part of the law that says schools should spot struggling kids early, while parents spend years being told, "Let's just wait and see."
Evaluation noun 1. the formal testing process — cognitive, speech, occupational therapy, and more — the DOE must complete within 60 days of your written consent, before your child can receive an IEP. 2. the thing the law says schools must initiate when they suspect a disability ("child find"), but which, in NYC, somehow gets turned into, "We can't do anything until you, the parent, put it in writing."
IEE — Independent Educational Evaluation (ī-ē-ē) noun 1. a private evaluation of your child, paid for by the school district, when you disagree with the DOE's own assessment. 2. the "genie in a bottle" you earn when the district finally evaluates your child and calls it good enough: a full, independent work-up — paid for by the same people who skipped evaluations and now insist they've already offered a "free appropriate public education."
CSE — Committee on Special Education (sē-es-ē) noun 1. the NYC DOE body that convenes your child's IEP process — a team that includes you, your child's teachers, a school psychologist, and a district representative. 2. the "team" meeting where everyone assures you they're on your side, then gently explains why there's no recent evaluation, no data on what's not working, and no way to consider that program you actually asked for — but they'd be happy to put it in the notes "for next year."
IEP — Individualized Education Program (ī-ē-pē) noun 1. a legally binding agreement — created at the CSE meeting — that spells out your child's disability classification, current levels of performance, annual goals, services, placement, and accommodations. Once signed, the DOE is legally required to implement it. 2. Michele Kule-Korgood told me what she wishes every parent walked in knowing: you are a full member of the IEP team, with equal standing. You don't have to sign at the meeting. You can request changes, file for due process if you disagree, and call a new meeting at any time — you don't have to wait for the annual review. 3. the one document that's most difficult to look at — your child's inabilities laid bare before you.
LRE — Least Restrictive Environment (el-ar-ē) noun 1. the legal principle that children with disabilities should be educated alongside non-disabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate for them — not a specific place, but a standard applied to every placement decision. 2. Michele Kule-Korgood, who spent years as a special education teacher before 32 years as an attorney, told me LRE is frequently turned against the children it was designed to protect. Schools sometimes invoke it to justify putting a child in a general education classroom without adequate support, then cite LRE when parents push back — what Michele calls using a civil rights protection as a procedural ceiling rather than a floor.
Section 504 noun 1. a civil rights law that entitles students whose disabilities affect their access to education to accommodations — even if they don't qualify for an IEP. 2. the minimalist safety net — accommodations for students who don't qualify for an IEP but still need school to meet them halfway. We’ll have more on this.
Related Services noun 1. the therapies and supports written into an IEP — speech, OT, PT, counseling — that exist to help a child benefit from their educational placement. 2. the speech, OT, PT, and counseling that are supposed to make the classroom workable — and that parents spend years tracking in logs, asking: "Is this actually happening the way it's written here?"
RSA — Related Service Authorization (ar-es-ā) noun 1. a voucher the DOE issues when it cannot find a provider for a mandated service — speech therapy, OT, PT — directing you to find your own provider and submit for reimbursement at the DOE's rate of $45 per 30-minute session, against a private market rate of up to $300 per hour. 2. the DOE's solution to a problem it created. Lloyd Donders explained it to me: the city set reimbursement rates so low that providers left the system, which created a shortage, and then handed parents a voucher to go find providers who no longer exist. "The DOE created the provider shortage," Lloyd told me, "by setting rates so low that providers left the system. Then it blamed parents for not finding providers."
SETSS — Special Education Teacher Support Services (sets) noun 1. itinerant special education instruction — a licensed special education teacher who comes to your child's classroom or pulls them out for additional support. One of the most common services written into NYC IEPs. 2. one of the most frequently undelivered services in the system, for the same reason as RSAs — not enough providers willing to work at DOE rates. If your child's IEP includes SETSS and they're not receiving it, Lisa Isaacs told me to document it in writing to your CSE immediately. "A paper trail matters," she said. "It matters even more if you end up in due process."
OT — Occupational Therapy (ō-tē) noun 1. therapy addressing fine motor skills, sensory processing, handwriting, and daily living tasks. 2. the quiet engine behind "ordinary" things — zippers, shoe-tying, handwriting, playground ladders, and not crashing into every doorway — that shows up as 30 minutes on the IEP and about 30,000 minutes of practice, prompts, and chewing gum in real life. For us, OTs have been a godsend, a magic key for insights that have helped us mitigate dysregulation and improve our homelife immeasurably.
ABA — Applied Behavior Analysis (ā-bē-ā) noun 1. a therapy based on the science of behavior and learning — the dominant treatment for autism in the United States for the past two decades, and one of the most debated. 2. the intervention that now comes with its own economy — clinics, billing codes, and utilization reviews, and, sadly, fraud — prescribed in hours per week even in places where actually getting those hours means chasing a mirage across insurance networks and waitlists. Note: there are alternatives.
BIP — Behavior Intervention Plan (bē-ī-pē) noun 1. a plan developed as part of the IEP process for children whose behavior is interfering with their learning, designed to identify why the child is behaving a certain way and what adults should do in response. 2. the document that's supposed to change adult behavior first — reminders to notice triggers, adjust demands, and teach skills — but too often turns into a list of what the child must stop doing, followed by a note that "we may need a more restrictive placement" if it doesn't work.
FBA — Functional Behavior Assessment (ef-bē-ā) noun 1. the evaluation that comes before the BIP — examining what triggers a behavior, what function it serves for the child, and what happens after it occurs. 2. the school's official attempt to answer "What is this behavior doing for the child?" — somewhere on the spectrum between a thoughtful analysis of environment and demand… and a checkbox form that concludes, once again, that the function of the behavior is "escape" or "attention” — not what it really is: “communication.”
Placement noun 1. where your child is educated — a general education classroom, a special education class, a District 75 school, or a private special education school. 2. the single word that quietly carries everything: class size, peer group, supports, bus ride, stigma, friendships, and your commute — decided in a meeting where the law says it's about "least restrictive environment," and your notes show it was mostly about what seats the district actually has.
ICT — Integrated Co-Teaching (ī-sē-tē) noun 1. a general education classroom with two teachers — one general ed, one special ed — serving a mix of students with and without IEPs. 2. a model Michele Kule-Korgood told me is frequently misused in ways most parents never see. Principals sometimes fill all 26 seats with at-risk students who don't have IEPs, turning what should be a mixed environment into a large special education class in everything but name. "The model breaks down completely," she said. "The children with IEPs who were supposed to benefit from a truly mixed classroom never get that."
D75 — District 75 (dē-sev-en-tē-fīv) noun 1. New York City's citywide special education district, serving students who need specialized settings. 2. the place families are told is "too restrictive" right up until the moment their child is in crisis — then suddenly becomes the only option on the table, complete with long bus rides, separate buildings, and the uneasy feeling that "more support" and "less inclusion" arrived as a package deal.
IESP — Individualized Education Services Program (ī-ē-es-pē) noun 1. the legal document specifying free special education services a child is entitled to while attending a private or religious school at their family's expense. 2. the paperwork that follows your child to the school you actually picked — a promise that speech, OT, and counseling will appear alongside tuition bills and religious holidays, assuming you can find someone the DOE will contract with at the rate it's willing to pay.
Due Process noun 1. the formal legal mechanism for resolving disputes between parents and the DOE — a hearing before an impartial officer who reviews evidence and issues a binding decision. 2. the point in the journey where "working with the school" quietly turns into drafting affidavits, collecting invoices, and learning more special-education case law than you ever planned to, all in the hope that a stranger will agree your child needed help long before you filed.
IHO — Impartial Hearing Officer (ī-āch-ō) noun 1. the official who presides over your due process hearing — now a full-time employee of OATH, the city's administrative trials agency. 2. the person who hears months (or years) of your child's story in a few hours of testimony and exhibits, then decides whether the DOE must fund the education you already scrambled to arrange — part judge, part traffic cop for a backlog of cases that was never supposed to be this big.
OATH — Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (ōth) noun 1. the New York City agency that now runs special education hearings — along with restaurant fines, parking violations, and noise complaints. 2. the place where your child's education now shares a docket with illegal e-bikes and loud rooftop bars — a tribunal importing courtroom polish and case-management software into a system that still can't quite keep up with how many families had to file in the first place.
SRO — State Review Officer (es-ar-ō) noun 1. the first level of appeal above the IHO — an independent officer within the New York State Education Department who reviews hearing decisions. 2. the distant voice in Albany you meet only in writing — part quality control, part reality check — who can turn your "win" into a remand, your "loss" into a partial victory, or your 200-page record into a single line about why the IHO should take another look.
Carter Case noun 1. a tuition reimbursement case — named after a 1993 Supreme Court decision — in which parents who placed their child in private school at their own expense seek reimbursement from the DOE. 2. the legal script behind a very practical family decision: you enroll your child where they can actually learn, then spend the next year proving to a hearing officer — and sometimes a state reviewer — that you weren't reckless, just tired of waiting for a placement that never quite materialized.
Connors Funding noun 1. the legal mechanism that allows families who can't afford to pay private school tuition upfront to receive direct DOE funding rather than waiting for reimbursement. 2. the safety valve for families who can't float a year's tuition on faith — turning "pay first, argue later" into "prove your case, then the DOE pays the school.” So access to an appropriate placement depends a little less on your credit limit and a little more on the record you build.
Pendency noun 1. the automatic right, triggered the moment you file for due process, for your child to remain in their current placement — at the DOE's expense — while the case is pending. 2. the "stay-put" rule that freezes your child's education in place while the adults argue — a lifeline when the current program is finally working, and a trap when you've outgrown it but need that very same program to be expensive enough to fund the next fight.
Fee-Shifting noun 1. the provision under IDEA that allows parents who win a due process case to have their attorney's fees paid by the DOE. 2. In most countries, if you sue someone and win, THEY pay your lawyer. In America, YOU pay your own lawyer no matter what. In the 1970s, Congress started carving out exceptions for civil rights cases that say "if you win, the other side pays your lawyer’s fee." That is fee-shifting. IDEA's fee-shifting provision is why a special ed attorney can take your case knowing they'll get paid by the DOE if you win, instead of by you.
3602-C noun 1. the New York State law that preserves the individual right to special education services for children in private and religious schools — a right Congress eliminated at the federal level, but New York never changed. 2. the quirk of state law that turns New York into an outlier — the reason a child in yeshiva or parochial school can still demand speech, OT, or counseling as an individual right, not just whatever "equitable services" happen to be on the district's menu that year.
PNI — Parental Notice of Intent (pē-en-ī) noun 1. the written notice a parent must submit to their CSE by June 1 each year to receive IESP services the following school year. 2. the annual "Dear DOE, it's not you, it's us" letter — a formality with real teeth, where a missed deadline or a stray sentence about being "satisfied" can be read later as a waiver, even though most parents thought they were just doing the right paperwork on time.
FOIL — Freedom of Information Law (foil) noun1. New York's public records law — the tool parents and attorneys use to get data the DOE doesn't volunteer. 2. the slow-motion conversation you have with a bureaucracy on paper — a way to ask, politely and repeatedly, how many cases they've lost, how long families are waiting, or where the money went. Months later, you’ll receive a PDF that sometimes answers the question that was asked.
Note on sources: Paraphrased information from Lloyd Donders and Michele Kule-Korgood are drawn from original interviews conducted by Lighthouse in 2026. Statistics from the NYC Comptroller's 2023 report "Course Correction" are sourced directly from that document. Due process filing and appeal data provided by Lloyd Donders from his FOIL research.