A lot of what lands in front of impartial hearing officers (IHOs) boils down to two questions: did the school district trip over the procedural rules, and did the student actually get a free, appropriate public education (FAPE) under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)? The Second Circuit’s recent non-precedential decision in Ambrister v. Banks, No. 24-2852-CV, 2025 WL 2775936, 125 LRP 28747 (2d Cir. Sept. 30, 2025), takes a swing at both.
The student had been offered a placement at the Horan School, a District 75 program for children with special needs. The parent had instead enrolled the student at the private iBrain school and sought tuition reimbursement, first in her due process complaint and then on appeal. She lost before the IHO, lost again before the state review officer (SRO), lost a third time before the district court, and now the Second Circuit has affirmed.
On the procedural side, the parent argued she had been shut out of the decision-making process because the prior written notice of the public school placement did not arrive until a March 30, 2022 letter – even though the individualized education program (IEP) had been issued on February 11, 2022, and was supposed to be implemented by February 21, 2022. The court agreed that the timing was off, but said the lapse did not amount to a denial of FAPE. By the time the late notice went out, the student had already been offered a placement at Horan for the 2021–22 school year, and the parent had already rejected that school for that year. The parent also never explained what she would have done differently with timelier notice, and, as the court pointed out, she had filed her due process complaint objecting to any District 75 placement before the placement letter ever reached her.
On substance, the parent’s pitch was that the proposed IEP failed to provide FAPE because it did not include music therapy, hearing education services, or vision education services. The Second Circuit sided with the district court, which had affirmed the administrative decision that those particular services were not needed – the goals they would have addressed were already covered by other services in the IEP. Communication gains were to come through sign language support and speech-language therapy. As for visual tracking, focus, movement, and self-care, the IEP folded those into physical and occupational therapy exercises, with five 60-minute occupational therapy sessions and four 45-minute physical therapy sessions per week. 2025 WL 2775936, at *3. The parent also raised complaints about the lack of air conditioning at Horan and the adequacy of its service areas, but the court noted those points had not been raised in the due process complaint. Same with the argument that the public school system had predetermined the denial of music therapy through a blanket policy of always refusing it – the court said no such policy had been shown to exist.
The parent’s last set of arguments turned on Horan itself: that the school lacked the personnel to deliver what the IEP called for, and that the student, who has cerebral palsy, would be grouped with students with autism. The court called the staffing concern speculative, pointing to testimony from Horan’s assistant principal that the school could implement the IEP and would contract with outside service providers if it had to. On the grouping point, the court – citing the non-precedential order in J.C. v. New York City Department of Education, 643 F. App’x 31, 33 (2d Cir. 2016) – said “grouping evidence is not the kind of non-speculative retrospective evidence that is permissible.” 2025 WL 2775936, at *4.
Taken together, the strands of the decision share a common thread: a procedural slip that comes after the parent has already rejected the placement and filed for due process is not, on this record, a denial of FAPE; an IEP can satisfy FAPE without every requested service so long as the underlying goals are met by the services it does include; objections that were never raised in the due process complaint do not get a second life on review; and arguments about staffing and grouping at the assigned school, where the testimony is that the IEP can be implemented, are treated as speculative rather than as proof that FAPE was denied.