Introduction:
One of the most active areas of litigation in K-12 education is in special education, an area of litigation that has risen steadily since the 1980s. While the primary focus for analyzing litigation trends has been court cases, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides two administrative, decisional dispute resolution mechanisms. The first, the due process hearings (DPH) system, has received much of the attention and published analysis to date, in part, because DPHs are a preceding step to filing a case in court; thus, trends in DPHs function as a direct indicator of litigation activity in its narrow sense of adjudication. Unlike DPH, the second decisional dispute resolution mechanism, the state complaint procedures (SCP) system, which is an investigative rather than adjudicative avenue, has garnered far less attention than DPH. This analysis offers an exploration of frequency trends in SCP as an initial step for improved information about this alternative decisional mechanism as part of the systematic efforts for more effective dispute resolution in the special education context.