Indicator 13 asks whether you documented consent to invite the vocational rehabilitation counselor to the meeting. It does not ask whether anyone came, whether a referral was ever made, or whether the student heard from that agency again before graduation.
In about five weeks, transition IEPs start getting written for the students who turn sixteen this year. Most districts will treat that as a compliance exercise, because that is exactly how the federal accountability system is built — and the accountability system is about to be split across two federal departments.
What Indicator 13 counts, and what it can't
Indicator 13 is one of IDEA's compliance indicators, which means the federally required target isn't 79 percent or 90 percent. It's 100 percent. Every transition IEP, every element.
Those elements are real and they matter: a measurable postsecondary goal, updated annually, grounded in age-appropriate transition assessment; transition services and a course of study that could plausibly get the student there; annual IEP goals tied to the transition need; evidence the student was invited; and evidence of prior parent consent to invite a representative of any participating agency likely to provide or pay for transition services. States issue written findings of noncompliance to districts below 100 percent — often around September 1 — and those findings must be corrected within a year.
So a state can report near-perfect Indicator 13 performance while every one of those files describes a plan that never left the building. The indicator measures the presence of language in a document. It has no way to see the referral that wasn't sent, the agency representative who declined, the assessment that was three years old, or the "course of study" that was copied from last year because the meeting ran long and there were four more that afternoon.