The 45-school-day FIE timeline: how Texas districts stay compliant

One signature starts it. When a parent signs consent for an initial evaluation, Texas law gives the district 45 school days to complete a Full Individual Evaluation (FIE) and deliver the written report. Not 45 calendar days, not nine weeks, but 45 days on which school is actually in session.

How the clock counts

The count starts when the district receives signed consent. Holidays, weekends, and bad-weather closures do not count. Summer mostly stops the clock, with one exception written into the law: if consent is signed 35 or fewer school days before the last day of instruction, the report is due by June 30, and a young child transitioning from early-childhood services follows its own federal timeline. After the evaluation is delivered, a separate 30-calendar-day clock starts for the ARD committee to meet and decide eligibility.

How districts actually miss it

• The only diagnostician resigned, and the posting has been open for months. The clock does not care.
• A bilingual evaluation is needed and no bilingual evaluator exists within driving distance, so the referral waits.
• Referrals surged in October, the way they do every fall, and the existing caseload could not absorb them.
• Everyone assumed someone else was tracking the date, and nobody was.

A missed timeline is not a paperwork nuisance. It is a compliance finding waiting to happen, grounds for a state complaint, and in the worst cases the basis for compensatory services the district must fund later. Auditors and hearing officers start with dates.

How to stay inside the window

Districts that stay compliant do three unglamorous things: they log the consent date the day it arrives and compute the due date from the district calendar immediately; they secure evaluation capacity before the fall surge instead of after it; and they treat bilingual referrals as urgent from day one, because bilingual evaluator time is the scarcest resource in the pipeline.

If the capacity is the missing piece, that is the gap we exist to close. A Full Individual Evaluation from The Connecting Pod is scheduled against your district calendar, with a report date committed inside your window before work begins, at a published rate.