In the effort to ensure compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) , state administrators often find themselves traveling to every corner of their state to keep track of school districts that are out of compliance. This can be a daunting task, especially for larger states with many remotely-located districts. Monitoring team members have to spend hours in their cars to check up on each location, and it adds up fast.
For all the districts that don’t make it onto the short list of site visits, state administrators can only hope that they are implementing their plans to improve compliance, only to find that the results haven’t improved at the end of the corrective action process.
Stepwell’s web-based, collaborative workspace enables school district administrators to easily report progress on their plans. Instead of hoping that schools are on track, state monitors in Stepwell states can create a comprehensive strategy to provide technical assistance to districts and schools that need the most attention.
Transparent Plan Reporting
Stepwell’s user-friendly workflow automation allows district administrators to easily keep track of their district’s compliance and their plans to improve. The web-based design enables school officials to easily document and share their status and progress on their improvement plans with state monitors. Transparent progress noting and reporting tools help monitors track the progress of many districts in real time to see who is meeting their goals and who might be falling behind. If monitors notice that a district isn’t making progress toward their goals on time, they can use Stepwell’s built-in communication system to figure out whether they are simply behind on record keeping or they truly need technical assistance and support.
Creating a strategy
By creating a smooth flow of communication and transparent reporting, state administrators can create more comprehensive strategies for visiting districts in need of support. Monitors can avoid many unnecessary site visits that are simply meant to check up on districts just by verifying their progress on the dashboard. For districts that do require an in-person visit, monitors can use Stepwell’s on-demand data to prioritize which districts need site visits immediately to correct major problems and those that can get by with a simple reminder message.
After developing a strategy based on data identifying the districts most in need of a site visit, state administrators can again use Stepwell to keep records of their visits on a mobile device. Instead of having to carry around physical copies of each district’s records and fill out even more paperwork when they arrive at the location, monitors can input everything directly into Stepwell and access it from the web.
With all of these improvements to on-site visits, state monitoring teams will be able to eliminate unnecessary check ups and ensure that the visits that are truly needed are much more efficient. By developing a data-based strategy of districts requiring site visits and a clear idea of how districts are progressing on their plans for improvement, monitors will no longer have to hope that everything will magically come together at the end of their monitoring cycles.