Case Study: Special Education Management

The Client:
Cambridge Public Schools (CPS), Cambridge, MA
District Type: Medium Urban
Total SPED Students: 1,250

The Project:
EasyIEP™ Implementation

The Challenge:
School administrators sought a way to promote consistency and efficiency of IEPs for the 1,250 special education students across this urban district’s 93 schools.

“IEPs were written the old fashioned way – handwritten or typed by a team of people. There was little consistency to the IEPs that were written, and pulling data together for reports was very time consuming.”

Richard Whitehead
Special Education Program Manager
Cambridge Public Schools

The PCG Approach:
In January 2001, Public Consulting Group (PCG) introduced its EasyIEP™ web-bases solution for creating and managing IEPs and special education information to CPS. Beyond simply improving the consistency of the CPS special education process, EasyIEP™ allowed teachers and administrators to become more efficient. Student information entered in EasyIEP™ is saved in the database and stored permanently, creating a virtual file cabinet. As a child progresses from one grade to the next, his or her previous IEP information remains in the system. Subsequent annual reviews can be written in a fraction of the time, using historical data as the starting point. CPS has also benefited from EasyIEP™’s compliance symbols, which alert users of approaching or missed deadlines and help district staff to better manage their caseloads.

“EasyIEP™ provides a more consistent approach to documenting due process and completing IEPs. We have found that EasyIEP™ is user friendly and the error checks embedded in the system ensure that our staff writes consistent, valid IEPs.”

Richard Whitehead

The Result:
In more than six years since EasyIEP™ was introduced, CPS users have created more than 7,000 IEPs and over 17,000 special education documents. The IEP process is now fully compliant and ‘parent
friendly.’

For Cambridge Public Schools, all parties – from parents to teachers and administrators – have benefited from EasyIEP™’s consistent and efficient approach. Ultimately, though, the true beneficiaries are the students, each of whom now has not only an IEP that truly reflects his or her needs, but also a teacher with more time to stay student-focused.