Court Opinion

ID: 9632030
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 10:59:14.227165+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:31:09.080775
License: Public Domain

JOSEPH, C. J.,
concurring.
Because the majority has intelligently and cogently made its way through a swamp of statutes and regulations, I concur. I write separately to express a feeling of unease. The majority opinion rests, at least in part, on two propositions: If there is a conflict between the federal statutes and the federal regulations on the one hand and the state statutes and the state regulations on the other in respect to the educational rights of handicapped children, the federal controls; and the reviewing officer has a duty to make an independent (that is, de novo) determination of the appropriateness of a contested IEP. I think that both propositions are correct, but I cannot unreservedly accept either of them because of the linguistic swamp to which I have referred. I can do no more than point out some of the difficulties which the majority, perforce, must pass over more or less quietly.
ORS 343.175(5) provides that, after the reviewing officer has made a decision, “[e]ither the parent or the school district may appeal [sic] the order * * * to the Court of Appeals under ORS 183.480.” ORS 183.480, in turn, leads to the scope and standards of review in contested cases, ORS 183.482(8), pursuant to which we review for substantial evidence. The problem is that we are reviewing the order of the reviewing officer, and under ORS 343.175(2), “[t]he reviewing officer shall conduct an impartial review, examining the entire record of the hearing and determining whether the procedure at the *445hearing was consistent with the requirements of law.” (Emphasis supplied.) There is nothing in that language (and it is the only language describing what the reviewing officer is supposed to do) that suggests that substantial evidence has anything to do with the only order that we are empowered to review.
The instructions which the Superintendent gave, which are set out in the majority opinion, 86 Or App at 440, told the reviewing officer to review for procedural regularity and for substantial evidence. How the Superintendent got the power to broaden the ORS 343.175(2) scope of review is a mystery to me. The majority solves the problem by proceeding on the assumption that Oregon’s statutory program for the education of handicapped children was enacted pursuant to the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act, 20 USC § 1400, etseq, and that, therefore, Oregon’s statutes have to be read as if they say what the federal statutes and regulations say. That makes practical sense; I find it difficult to accept in principle.1
It is a curiosity that the Oregon statutory scheme encompasses only part of the federal scheme. 20 USC § 1415(c) provides for the reviewing officer both to conduct an impartial review and to make an independent decision. Moreover, the federal regulation, 34 CFR 300.510, quoted by the majority, 86 Or App at 442, encompasses procedural regularity and substantive validity; the Oregon statute encompasses only procedural regularity. To cap off this situation, OAR 581-15-105 goes beyond and is inconsistent with ORS 343.175.
The majority demonstrates that it is possible to get here from there. Nothing I have written should be understood as criticizing that achievement in any way. However, if in fact the Oregon statute is supposed to track the federal statute, then the legislature ought to make it do so; on the other hand, if tracking the federal statute exactly is not a condition of the validity of the Oregon law, respondents have not told us why not.

 I note that the definition of “handicapped children” in ORS 343.035(2) is linguistically quite different from the federal definition in 20 USC § 1401(1).