In the first two months of 2026, Georgia families filed 111 special education due process hearing requests — more than in all of 2021 combined. And here's the detail that should worry every district more than the volume: schools aren't losing these fights on technicalities. They're losing on fundamentals.
Georgia's numbers made headlines this spring — due process requests are up 141% over five years — but the state is a preview, not an outlier. The national picture points the same direction. CADRE, the federal dispute-resolution technical assistance center, counted 9,927 written state complaints in 2023-24 — a 22% jump over the prior year, and 79% above the previous ten-year average of 5,537. States are struggling to keep up: the share of complaints resolved within the required 60 days slipped to 81%, down from a ten-year mean of 92%.
If you lead a special education department, this is the environment you're planning next school year inside. More filings, slower state timelines, thinner federal enforcement, and families who arrive at the table more informed — and more willing to escalate — than at any point in IDEA's fifty-year history.
What districts are actually losing on
Look at what Georgia's own complaint data says districts get cited for most: failure to provide a free appropriate public education, failure to implement IEPs, and failure to properly develop, review, and revise them. Not exotic legal theory. The basics.
That pattern should reframe how leaders think about legal risk. A due process filing is rarely the beginning of a problem; it's the paper trail of one that already existed for months — the OT sessions that quietly stopped when a provider left, the annual review that slid past its date, the progress reports that said "making progress" while the data said otherwise. By the time a hearing officer sees the file, the outcome is often already written in the service logs. Or in the gaps where service logs should be.