Case Study: Special Education Management

The Client:
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), Charlotte, NC District Type: Large Urban Total SPED Students: 14,550

The Project:
EasyIEP™ Implementation

The Challenge:
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), one of the top 20 school districts in the nation, began working with Public Consulting Group (PCG) in 1994. While the initial PCG project scope was to establish a process to obtain Medicaid reimbursement, by 2003, the CMS Exceptional Children's (EC) Department introduced its plan to make its Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) paperless. By this time, CMS had successfully converted the original paper process for documenting Medicaid Fee-For-Service into PCG's web-based EasyTRAC™ system.

CMS administrators recognized the benefits a web-based program could afford their IEP process, but also understood that many of their end-users would initially resist change from using paper IEP documents. Given the challenges of a large urban school district, CMS sought a vendor that not only had an excellent product, but also had an experienced team that could assist CMS with the process of converting to an electronic IEP system. The

PCG Approach:
In the fall of 2003, CMS selected PCG to implement its EasyIEP™ web-based special education management tool. PCG first used a consultative approach to examine District processes and then align those policies with the EasyIEP™ web-based special education management system. Following a special education best practices review, CMS was able to adopt technology to optimize procedures and include validation checks to ensure accuracy and completeness of student IEPs.

During the next year, PCG's project management team worked with CMS administrators to configure EasyIEP™ to meet the District's specific needs. Once development, testing, and administrator training were complete, end-user training began in September 2004. CMS was able to mandate a goal of having all IEPs entered into EasyIEP™ by January 2005.

PCG has continued to add value to CMS operations through various consulting and product endeavors such as EasyFAX™, Advanced Reporting (which now allows CMS to create their head-count reports more accurately), compliance monitoring, flexible interface, batch printing, etc. Additionally, we are in the final testing phase for running a daily automated data interfacing routine to bring data from disparate CMS data sources to our solution. This will alleviate a manual process that taxed CMS human capital and will increase efficiency and accuracy of data updates to our system.

As a result of the successful implementation of EasyIEP™, the scope of the PCG-CMS relationship was expanded in 2004 to include the development and management of electronic Personalized Education Plans (PEPs). PEPs are required for general education students who score below proficient levels on the State End-of-Grade and End-of-Course tests.

This initiative converted the existing paper-based PEP process to an electronic process that parallels the EC Department's model for the creation of student IEPs. With this comprehensive system, all student plans can be created, tracked, and managed through a single web-based database solution, resulting in efficient development, access, and assessment of student needs from general education through special education.

Our team has worked closely with CMS curriculum staff to develop the processes necessary for general education – elementary, middle, and high school students – to manage PEPs that require interventions and progress-monitoring toward student achievement. The PEPs are assessed on a regular basis; if strategies are not producing desired results, teachers are able to efficiently edit an existing plan and update it with changes via the web-based interface.

The Result:
CMS educators now use EasyIEP™ and EDplan™ to develop student IEP and PEP plans, report on student progress, monitor compliance, and create reports. End users have reported a significant reduction in the amount of time required to prepare for and attend meetings, resulting in more time to provide student-centered care and instruction – the original impetus behind CMS' plan for a webbased system.

Currently, CMS is finalizing plans to add PCG's EDplan™ to track research-based interventions provided to students. This focus on Response-To-Intervention (RTI) will leverage both the student PEPs and IEPs by enabling teachers to chart student progress toward goals with guided, user-friendly electronic graphing capabilities and to review and/or update interventions in each student's tailored education plan.