Success Story

The Challenge

The aim of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is to empower every student to pursue further education, employment and independent living. To achieve this goal, as the adage goes, it takes a village – a community of parents, educators, health care professionals, administrators, and school staff members.

Together, they create a map for each student’s road to success. Without the right tools, however, the Individual Education Plan (IEP) can create a mountain of paperwork, often leading to inaccurate data, a convoluted paper trail, non-compliance, and a massive headache for all.

With almost 13,000 special needs students and over 1,700 faculty and staff members servicing those students, Brevard Public Schools found that its IEP paper process was just that, a major headache - often inaccurate, leading to non-compliance and a loss of funding.

As it made its way from teacher to psychologist to instructional facilitator to parent and administration, the IEP left a circuitous paper trail. With only this paper trail for tracking each IEP, there was simply no way to review and validate the data to check for compliance. Brevard realized it needed an automated solution and needed it quickly.

The Excent Solution

Excent’s IEP solution stood out from the competition because of the company’s extensive first-hand experience, its unsurpassed customer service and the solution’s robust – but user-friendly – functionality. Brevard implemented Excent’s original software solution in 2000, but adopted their online IEP solution in 2004. Within three months of online implementation, the entire community was trained and transitioning to the automated solution.

With all pertinent data on a single, web-based, integrated dashboard system, faculty and staff can input and monitor student progress across a variety of disciplines and electronic forms. Along with the validation checks built into the system, IEP’s are now done correctly; Brevard boasts close to 100% compliance.

With 24/7 secure, online access, teachers and staff can now spend their time focused on the learning needs of each student rather than on filling out reams of paperwork.

“There are many other benefits in addition to compliance,” said Jeff Pruitt, QIEP, Matrix, & Technology Resource Teacher, Brevard Public Schools.

Those benefits include the automatic inclusion of the requisite legal data, additional website links, access from home or other secure web accessible locations, as well as easy modifications to meet the state’s unique requirements. One unexpected benefit, noted Pruitt, is that while the “majority of teachers are decent IEP writers, the program itself helps them to become better writers.”

Excent also helps parents remain up-to-date on the student’s progress. Parents have online access to all forms and every progress report. If a parent, administrator, teacher or staff member wants to measure a student’s progress, they can – quickly and easily. As a result, a student’s education plan can be updated, altered and appraised to empower the student toward graduation and be prepared to pursue further education, employment and independent living.

For someone in Pruitt’s role, the seamless training on the creation and execution of IEP’s for teachers, staff, and the administration is tantamount to success. “With Excent, we’re more acute in our training; we hit specific issues, and establish measurable goals,” said Pruitt. If an issue arises at a certain school, Pruitt and his team can be pro-active in re-training the users to ensure accuracy and compliance.

Another significant benefit to using Excent is the support. If a technical issue arises, Excent support is there. “Excent support never fails to pick up the phone and always responds quickly,” Pruitt said. “They’ve definitely worked hard to keep our business.”

Based on 10 years of success, Brevard is currently evaluating the next generation of Excent’s IEP solution.

Conclusion

Excent provides monitoring at your finger tips from day one. This allows each stakeholder to monitor both summative and formative student performance and to deliver it efficiently to all levels of the district for RTI & IEP.

Excent’s unified, web-based platform

• Reduces cost and amount of time spent on the IEP with the automation of all the critical case management processes, including state child count reporting, Annual IEP Review tracking and more.
• Improves accuracy, with customized forms, letters, and reports to each district’s exact specifications
• Increases visibility throughout the entire process – once data is entered, it becomes available throughout the system to generate forms, letters, and reports
• Supports compliance with state and federal regulations as core data elements are automatically updated to reflect changes
• Empowers educators – so they can spend more time with students and less time on paperwork
• Empowers Students with an individualized and effective roadmap to success

“With Excent, we’re driving a Ferrari versus driving a Yugo.We’ve never had an issue and it’s made a world of difference,”

Jeff Pruitt, QIEP, Matrix, & Technology Resource Teacher, Brevard Public Schools.