May 2008 — Features
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Together at Last
Suggestions that the newly integrated system could become a productivity tool for teachers were met with skepticism. "No one believed that the special education teachers could adapt," Grabowski says. "But we started with a pilot project, rolling it out first to the willing. We provide support and training-even a psychologist. Now it's clear that providing a way for information to flow both ways between the SIS and the IEP system was key. We flow all the critical student ID information-name, contact information for parents, ethnicity, gender, birth date. The top of all the state IEP forms is prefilled for [teachers]. It helps with data accuracy, and it has freed the team to focus on the student."
George Saunders, product manager for SunGard's Plus Series, says the late arrival of special education to the digital party is a common circumstance among US school districts, and an understandable one.
"Special education teachers are hands-on people by nature," Saunders observes. "They work closely with students and are traditionally an especially non-technical group; they were very comfortable with pencil and paper. So back in the day, when computers first began impacting K-12 education, they were the last people the districts wanted to drag into the digital age. But eventually, the separation between the two systems became an MIS [management information systems] nightmare. To be fair, it took a fairly long time for general education to get up to speed on the technology. But now the districts are saying, ‘Okay, we're all comfortable using computers, so let's try to help these special education teachers realize that this is a far more efficient way of performing their jobs.'"
Two Kinds of Data
The reluctance of special ed teachers hasn't been the only challenge met by this particular data integration. For one thing, says Steve Benfield, chief technology officer and vice president of product management at Spectrum K12 School Solutions, SISs are essentially data collection systems of record, while a student's IEP is much more than a hunk of names and numbers.
"Foundationally, SISs are data management systems," Benfield says. "Data in, data out. The problem with this approach is that a student's IEP is a process-a very complex process with complex and changing rules. While there are federal rules, each state has different interpretations of those rules, as well as additional requirements. The IEP forms for one state look very different from the IEP forms for another state, even though some of the core data is similar. Likewise, these forms and the rules are constantly changing. So the basic problem of building an IEP system is a business process-modeling problem. This is completely different from the philosophy of an SIS."
Spectrum K12 is a Towson, MD-based provider of "individualized learning process" solutions for special education students. The company's flagship product, Encore, is a web-based special education and IEP management software suite. Designed to provide an all-in-one solution, it covers special education, limited English proficiency, RTI programs, and the requirements of Section 504-a federal law that protects the rights of students with disabilities in the public schools.
