OurIEP Platform
Special Education Co-Design & Pilot Partnership Opportunity
The Challenge: IEP Complexity & Teacher Workload
Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) are critical legal records that guide instruction for over 7.5 million students in the United States. However, the IEP process faces two significant workflow and communication bottlenecks:
- Comprehension Barriers: IEP documents are lengthy and legalistic. Parents frequently struggle to understand their child's specific accommodations, goals, and rights, preventing them from collaborating as equal partners in case conferences.
- Modification Workload: Classroom teachers carry the manual burden of adapting standard lesson plans, readings, and quizzes to match the student-specific accommodations. This administrative process requires 1 to 3+ hours per week per classroom.
- Compliance Concerns: Ensuring that accommodations are consistently applied across all subjects is difficult to verify, posing administrative and legal compliance challenges for districts.
The Solution: A Unified, Privacy-First Platform
OurIEP is a unified intelligence platform designed to translate IEPs into actionable, plain-language insights while protecting student privacy:
- Parent Module (Phase I Build): A secure mobile and desktop application that translates complex IEP PDFs into jargon-free summaries (at a 6th–8th grade reading level), complete with caregiver guides and contextual Q&A.
- Educator Module (Phase I Co-Design): A desktop application allowing teachers to securely import assignments and automatically modify them to fit a student’s specific accommodations, while documenting compliance entirely on their local computer.
🔒 Uncompromising Privacy: 100% On-Device AI
Unlike standard generative AI engines that process data on third-party servers, OurIEP runs advanced "compact" language models (Google Gemma-4-E4B via LiteRT-LM) entirely locally on the user's hardware. No student PII or IEP records are uploaded to the cloud, making FERPA compliance an inherent architectural guarantee.
Our Grant Objectives: What We Will Accomplish
If awarded the ED/IES SBIR Phase I grant, Skybound Solutions will execute a structured 9-month development and evaluation roadmap:
Phase I (9-Month Target): Core Build & Research
- Build Parent App: Core development of the parent-facing mobile application running a compact, local language model (Gemma-4-E4B via LiteRT) entirely on-device, translating IEP PDFs to plain-English.
- Co-Design Educator Workflow: Partner with special education staff and coordinators to design browser-based mockups for automated assignment modifications.
- Feasibility Study: Run an independent usability and feasibility study with parents and teachers, co-conducted by LXD Research.
Phase II (Scaling Phase): Classroom Deployment
- Build Educator Module: Fully implement the browser-based assignment modification tool and accommodation database.
- District Compliance Dashboard: Create secure, administrative interfaces to log and audit applied accommodations.
- Wide-Scale Pilot: Deploy the entire platform across pilot districts at zero cost to evaluate impact on teacher workload and parent engagement.
The Partnership Opportunity: Co-Design Panel
Skybound Solutions (Peck, MI) is submitting a Phase I SBIR proposal to the U.S. Department of Education to fund the engineering and feasibility evaluation of this system. We have partnered with Peck Community School District as our primary pilot site, and LXD Research (led by Dr. Rachel Schechter) as our independent evaluator.
We are seeking Letters of Support from forward-thinking school districts and ISD administrators to demonstrate broad market interest. Providing a letter carries no cost or financial obligation to your district.
Providing a Letter of Support is completely non-binding and carries:
- Zero Obligation: It does not commit your district, staff, or resources to any mandatory research, pilots, or timelines.
- Zero Cost: There is no financial obligation or software licensing cost now or in the future.
- Market Interest: It simply demonstrates to federal reviewers that school leaders see clear value in secure, privacy-first technology that reduces teacher workload and helps families.