“For years we’ve been under a Federal Consent Decree requiring stringent tracking of our special education department for all procedural requirements under IDEA,” said Carolyn Schwartzbord, Assistant Superintendent of Ravenswood City School District in California. Goalbook has launched two important features to improve the cumbersome reporting process for special educators: a “Service Delivery” module, which tracks service minutes online for teachers, therapists and specialists and automates the reporting for administrators and a “Timelines” module which tracks the multiple dates and deadlines special educators must meet throughout the year. School districts often have difficulty implementing the required program, and teachers are left to spend significant amounts of time on paperwork and compliance in addition to their teaching requirements. Goalbook has helped me become a more effective teacher.”įederal laws also define a strict set of regulations for special education, with 814 compliance requirements in total. “Every day I look at my students’ data, and I am able to plan more specifically around what I want to focus on with my students. “We now receive so much more data from everyone on the students’ IEP teams,” said Susan Hoyer, a special education teacher at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School in lllinois. Schools that use Goalbook report having more efficient IEP meetings, improved communication, reduced paperwork, and significantly higher compliance rates. Goalbook creates a living, breathing profile for students with special needs, providing an easy-to-access IEP summary, and empowering all team members with a forum to communicate and share student data securely, and in real-time. Though IEPs are intended to be helpful plans, they are often static documents that are updated only several times a year, and are not even accessible to many educators who work with the student. The student’s “team” is generally comprised of the student’s teachers, special educators, administrators, and parents. According to federal regulations, special education students must have a signed Individual Education Plan, or IEP, that is reviewed annually to determine how well a district’s program is meeting a student’s unique needs. Thirteen percent of America’s public school students receive special education services. We see far too few tools and services for this important demographic.” “This represents an important shift in the way we organize the delivery of education to students with special needs. “The importance of Goalbook’s innovation can’t be overstated,” said NewSchools CEO Ted Mitchell. The investment will be used to scale the company and develop a best-in-class “Goalbook Toolkit,” an online set of individualized goals, fully aligned to the Common Core State Standards, which will include assessments, instructional resources, and videos to aid special education teachers. The NewSchools investment leads a $915K Seed Round, which included Rethink Education, Ed-Mentor, Patient Capital Collaborative, Greg Gunn, Steve Shulman, and Joe Gleberman. October 18, 2012-Oakland, CA- NewSchools Venture Fund today announced a $200,000 investment in Goalbook, the first social and mobile platform for special education teachers and administrators to manage student individual learning plans. Innovative platform enables everyone on the student’s team to collaborate and celebrate student progress.
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