xPress: Individualized Education Plans (IEPs)
Realities and Challenges
Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs, are critical for learners, practitioners and parents who provide tailored learning opportunities for students with special needs —and are required by federal law. Over 3 years, the A4L Community undertook the challenge to gather experts in IEP development and usage and link them to IEP application vendors to create a standardized transportable IEP data definition that could address some IEP challenges:
- Learner mobility and helping their IEP information to move with them
- The representation of complex information from numerous sources, plus avoiding current paper and pencil dependence
- Changing from one case management system to another avoiding proprietary “hooks” in applications
A critical component of any Student Records Exchange, this blueprint is now freely available to support the data portability that parents and school districts demand from the IEP products they purchase, and for software developers to build to. The SIF Data Model Implementation Specification (North America) outlines the data needed, and the (global) SIF Infrastructure Implementation Specification outlines how to move that data in a standardized manner. The data “picture” alone is worth a look! The data model is fully aligned with the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) project and contributed hundreds of new IEP information elements to their data model. CEDS is a national collaborative effort to develop voluntary, common data standards for a key set of education data elements to streamline the exchange, comparison and understanding of data within and across P-20W institutions and sectors.
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