Progress Monitoring

Leader is pleased to announce our partnership with Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 (IU13). Leader will integrate IU13's Progress Monitoring software into IEPWriter. We will be highlighting the benefits of this module at our spring focus group meetings, but here is a quick preview of what it can do for you:

• Allows schools to collect and analyze data to determine student progress towards goal attainment.
• Allows staff to complete an Educational Benefits Review (EBR).
• Provides the ability to display data in graph format and to have graphs be part of the progress reports.
• Can be used to review teacher effectiveness.
• Can increase professional accountability and competence.

Student Transfer

There is still some confusion concerning IEPWriter's student transfer process. Some schools have the misconception that if they transfer a student, they will no longer have access to the student's record. Because the student transfer process makes a copy of the student data and sends it to the receiving entity, it does not affect access or change any data on the sending school's version of IEPWriter.

Schools can transfer both active and inactive students to other entities via the student transfer process. They can also choose which documents they want to transfer for each student, along with the demographic information. For instance, if you have a student who is also receiving services at your IU, you can transfer that student and their documents to the IU. This would give the IU a copy of the student's data and documents. You can continue to work with that student because it will not change their status or alter any other data on your end. If you do make changes to any of that student's documentation after the initial transfer, you will have to transfer the data to your IU again. The transfer only sends copies of the documents as they exist at the time of the transfer.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact the help desk or bring this up at the upcoming focus group meetings.

Focus Group Meetings

Emails containing registration information for the spring focus group meetings were recently sent out. These emails were sent to anyone set up as an administrator or tech contact. We look forward to seeing everyone.

CEC Conference

We will be exhibiting at the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) conference in Philadelphia on April 9 – 12. If you are attending the conference, please stop by our booth and say hello.

Related Services

We have made a change to the Related Services section of the IEP to allow an additional way of entering frequency and duration information. Previously, when entering a related service, the frequency, interval and duration (in minutes or hours) had to be entered. However, we have found that there are entities who wish to enter services indicating that a student gets a specific service for a specific duration every chosen period. For example, a student may receive physical therapy for 240 minutes per month. With this change, you can now enter that related service by choosing the interval (month) and entering the duration in minutes (240).

We have also received questions about the recent need to specify group or individual in an IEP for a student who will be billed for Medicaid. You can create your own customized related services to reflect this. Administrators can go into My District –> Dropdown Menus –> Related Services and create their own services to reflect this. For example, you can create physical therapy individual and physical therapy group as related services that will show up on your dropdown menus. Also, don't forget to map these services to the proper health-related service so they will appear in any appropriate report.

Navigation Tip

Have you ever heard of the term "bread crumbs" when it comes to a web system? IEPWriter uses this technique in our screens as a quick way to navigate within the system. The bread crumbs are always at the top left of every screen. For instance, the main IEP page for a student is displayed below. In the upper left corner there are links you can click to go back to the Student Home page, the Students page (student search page), or the Home page (main page that you see after login). These are called "bread crumbs" because no matter how deeply you go into the system, there are links which allow you to return to previous levels.

In Closing…

We hope that everyone was able to get out and enjoy Pennsylvania's beautiful winter season. We look forward to some warm and sunny weather!