A student qualifies as disabled if they have a mental or physical disability; each such student must have an individualized lesson plan, and the aim is to make those plans as similar as possible to the plans used for students without disabilities.
School districts are required to maintain a formal office to handle complaints from parents of students with disabilities when those parents believe their child is not receiving a fair education, and parents can use a dispute process to resolve such issues.
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The law was created to give parents the primary way to seek remedies when obstacles prevent their child with a disability from getting a fair education. Eventually this act was changed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990 which can be called IDEA. The changes involved the scope of early intervention, services for children with disabilities and special education. The scope of IDEA is a legal remedy that concerns the states and their pubic schools offering good educational remedies from the beginning of a disabled child's schooling to through the high school level. The theme of IDEA evolved from EHA as the case law on the federal level tackled the problem of public schools providing those with disabilities a similar opportunity as all students have to learn and achieve at the same level that their fellow non disabled students work on a daily basis.
As recently as December 2004, significant additional amendments were made to the law. At that time, regulatory language was added further into the IDEA statutes. The details and terms are laid out in the Code of Federal Regulations in the part 300 through 301 of Title 34. To build on the original purpose of EHA and IDEA in 2004, Congress detailed the intentions of the amendments to be that each child with a disability will be given a Free Appropriate Public Education that will give them the foundation they need to become employed and live an independent life.
Before this EHA was created in law, children with special needs were being excluded completely from the public education system. There were some 1 million children with disabilities left with no access. Now more than 6 million children with disabilities are receiving the valuable educational skills they need.
