ABSTRACT

Schools must maintain the special education requirements specified by the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) of 1997. A federal standard included in Part B of IDEA holds schools accountable for providing sufficient staff to effectively support needs of individual special education students. Although the laws are generally known, the paper trail associated with each special education student is extensive; therefore, it is difficult for school systems to keep track of current records. According to the National Education Administration, “[teachers] feel particularly burdened by requirements to complete unnecessary or redundant administrative forms -- repeatedly supplying the same data or information that has a compliance rather than instructional purpose” (www.nea.org/specialed). Special education teachers generally have more than two times the amount of work than the regular teachers usually have.(www.nea.org/specialed/ideareauthpriorities.html).
The current process for tracking the exhaustive workload associated with Individualized Education Programs (IEP) is unorganized. This, in turn, leaves schools at higher risk for lawsuits because they are not meeting certain standards that they are accountable for by law. Thus, IEP’s may contain outdated information and the needs of special education students are neglected. (The term student(s) will refer to special education students for the remainder of the document, unless otherwise noted.)
For this reason, the goal of our application is to help manage and organize IEP’s. We will develop a database system that will make the organization of students and their associated IEP’s more efficient. The application will allow teachers and administrators the appropriate level of access to IEP’s in the database with the use of the application’s tools. The tools will consist of student management, IEP queries, graphs and statistics, progress reports, and in the future, test requests and reporting.
Our approach is to make a template IEP available in the database. However, we aren’t going to test or evaluate students to determine their specific IEP. In addition, we cannot solve the problem of unclear or ambiguous language of the IEP’s; and we will not determine the services that each student needs. Once the IEP’s are written and services are determined, our application becomes more valuable. The implementation of the database will provide parents with more solid information on their special education students. And in addition, provide a more consistent way for school systems to abide by the standards of law.