Steve Hirase

Dixie Huefner

Jerry Christensen

Emily Johnson

Ginger Rhode

Ken Hennefer

Approval of the April 21 minutes was deferred to the next meeting.

Jack Rudio provided some materials on mediation and conciliation for the group to consider including in the user's manual section on additional resources. Jerry and Emily will review these before the next meeting. Anyone else who would like to see them is welcome to do so. Some of the items, however, must be returned to the MPRRC eventually.

Note: The meeting scheduled for Monday, May 11 was cancelled, pending clarification from the planning committee on several items concerning the draft user's manual.

Steve reported that he asked the planning committee what is to become of the draft state rules and user's manual sections the task forces have compiled. He said that USOE personnel will review the drafts for correctness and completeness, and that, in fact, this process has already begun. He said that nothing was said about involving outside consultants in this process. He then asked whether the task forces should be writing specific items for the PAR monitoring checklist; the answer was "yes". To the question, "should the task forces indicate where (e.g., IEP form, prior notice form) information for checklist items should be found?", the planning committee answered "no". The committee did encourage task forces to include examples and suggestions for best practice, with the understanding that items in these sections are not subject to compliance monitoring.

The group discussed the advisability of continuing to meet and work on drafting the user's manual, given that the final federal regulations are not yet available. It was recognized that this may necessitate editing our draft, if there are differences between the draft and final regulations in the area of procedural safeguards. It was noted that, if we postpone meeting until the final regulations are published, we may have difficulty getting the task force together over the summer months, and consequently, in getting our draft completed before school begins in the fall. Another factor was our belief that little is likely to change in the procedural safeguards area. After weighing the alternatives, the group reached consensus that the better plan is to forge ahead. In keeping with this, we decided to hold an all-day meeting on June 3, following our scheduled afternoon meeting on June 2. We agreed, in addition, that it would be a good idea to embed code characters, specifically "???" in our draft wherever there is information that we think may need to be reviewed at a later date.

Ginger Rhode indicated her intention to attend all future Procedural Task Force meetings if at all possible.

We then turned to a review of the revised draft of the user's manual section dealing with surrogate parents. Jerry will post the new revisions on the listserv, and Steve will incorporate them into our master document. A lively discussion on timelines was sparked by our previous decision to specify a 15-day timeline on assignment of a surrogate parent, beginning from the date of the initial referral. The question was, "how do we make the surrogate parent timeline compatible with the timelines for referral/decision to evaluate and consent/evaluation?" State rules from Utah and Washington were discussed, but we were unable to find anything in federal law or regulations to support specific timelines for these events. Dixie and Emily will see what they can dig up on this topic; the decision on whether to include a timeline for surrogate parent assignment was tabled until we have more information.

Another discussion centered around establishing a definition of "conflict of interest". Dixie will try to determine whether a legal standard has been established for this term, and we will revisit the issue in light of what she finds.

Since the discussion of user's manual items is taking more time than we had anticipated, we agreed to focus on completing two pieces, "checklist items" and "explanation of checklist items", for all the procedural safeguards areas before attempting to draft examples, FAQs, etc. In this way, we hope to get these targeted parts completed by the close of our June 3 meeting.

We recommend to the planning committee that all glossary terms be identified by formatting wherever they occur in the body of the user's manual. Our draft will use an asterisk in parentheses, "(*)" before each such item, and we encourage other task forces to consider using this convention.

Two meetings have been scheduled, as follows:

* Tuesday, June 2, 1998, 1:00-4:00 p.m., ULRC.

* Wednesday, June 3, 1998, 8:00 am until we're finished, Murray SD Offices.

It is crucial that all members have "checklist items" and "explanation of checklist items" drafted for their assigned sections before the June 2 meeting. Please refer to the current PAR monitoring checklist (distributed by Emily at the 2-4-98 meeting) for examples of questions. In general, all checklist items should be yes/no questions, stated in clear, objective terms, i.e., requiring no inference on the part of the PAR monitor.