Opinion ID: 1210963
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Issue Properly Before the District Court

Text: The issue properly before the district court was whether the AAO should have found additional IDEA violations regarding Books on Tape and awarded further relief with respect to such violations. Aplt.App. at 378. Although the AAO partially ruled in Ms. Miller's favor regarding books on tape, Ms. Miller claimed additional violations of IDEA on this issue. See Aplt.App. at 11-12 (The IDEA administrative decisions erred by not concluding that the District's failure to offer Books on Tape ... for all necessary textbook ... reading for all relevant school years constituted a failure to provide access to the general curriculum and failure to provide necessary special education services and a deprivation of FAPE.). The AAO ruled against Ms. Miller regarding her sixth grade claim, concluding that APS had not erred by declining to provide books on tape that year because the school had provided the Kurzweil system, which had the identical purpose of providing auditory access to written text. The AAO ruled in Ms. Miller's favor regarding books on tape in seventh and eighth grades. The seventh grade IEP required books on tape, but APS did not provide them, nor did APS sustain its burden of showing that their absence had a de minimis impact on provision of FAPE. The eighth grade IEP generally required access to the Kurzweil system and, more narrowly than the previous IEP, promised books on tape only for a language arts class. See Admin. R. at 142 (Literature books on tape to be ordered.). However, at the time of the due process hearing, neither Kurzweil nor books on tape had been provided. The AAO affirmed the two remedies that had been provided by the DPHO for these failures: (1) reimbursement of the cost of the WYNN software that the Millers had used to compensate for the lack of auditory access to written material, and (2) requiring APS to conduct S.M.'s IEP in the spring so that books on tape could be obtained in a timely fashion before the following school year. The AAO concluded that no systemic remedy was needed and that rearranging the timing of the IEP was sufficient to address any concerns, [t]o the extent the record shows that [APS] was not able to timely provide textbooks on tape. Admin. R. at 300-01.