Describe the Applicable Legal Policies and Procedures to Refer a Student with a Perceived Impairment for Evaluation.

Overview
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a United States law that was created to support the learning needs of eligible children with disabilities.   This law guarantees that disabled children are provided a free appropriate public education.   Before IDEA was passed, most children with disabilities were placed in restrictive state institutions that accommodated persons with mental illness or retardation.   These disabled children were denied access to an education that they would have otherwise received had they been healthy.  
Schools that offered education services for disabled children lacked the resources to effectively educate special needs students.   In many cases, parents were not included in any planning and placement arrangements for their disabled student.
IDEA PL 94-142 Objectives and Components
IDEA, otherwise known as Public Law 94-142, “was signed into law by President Gerald Ford on November 29, 1975” (Gargiulo, 2009, p. 48) and is viewed as a “Bill of Rights” for disabled children and their families.   IDEA assures that all disabled students have access to a free appropriate public education and specially designed services developed to meet their unique needs.   Lastly, IDEA provides state and local governments with resources so that municipalities can provide materials and facilities to accommodate special needs children.  
IDEA’s support for disabled children and their families is driven by four core objectives which are: provide a free appropriate public education with an emphasis on special education and related services tailored for disabled children, provide federal assistance to state and local governments for special needs programs, assure that the rights of disabled children and parents are protected, and conduct assessments to assure that the efforts of special education programs and related services are effective in educating disabled children.
For IDEA to effectively pursue these four objectives, legislators...