A web application designed for Case Managers (Special Education Teachers) and Para-Educators (Teachers’ Assistants) in a school district to set and record a student’s progress towards their IEP (Individual Educational Plan) goals.

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Resources: As a volunteer-led project, Compass sees short terms of service for volunteers with high rates of turnover and change. Compass has some connections to end-users for ad-hoc feedback/user testing.

Status: Project Compass has been underway for four years with no deadline or timeline for completion.

Last Updated: Tuesday, July 1, 2025

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Contributors

Problem Alignment

Historically, Case Managers and Para-Educators record and track the students’ progress using pen and paper. A Case Manager tracks and prints the students’ spreadsheet to hand over to the Para-Educator and provides verbal instructions. The Para would then use these instructions and lists to have set activities with the students, reporting back on the students’ progress when they had time. This is how a Case Manager tracks and collects student goals, as this type of data collection can be easily lost and challenging for the two parties to communicate and adapt to situations like absences and progress hiccups.

The Compass app aims to make the Case Manager’s activity data collection setup easier and straightforward, but most importantly, it seeks to make activity data collection for Paras fast and simple.

High-Level Approach

We’re building a lightweight, open-source web application that provides the ability for Case Managers to create, assign, and track IEP goals in collaboration with the Para-Educators.

The core approach focuses on:

1. Build and release the foundational and smallest viable product.
2. This application is designed to run reliably on low-cost infrastructure since under-resourced schools will adopt it.
3. We will actively recruit SFUSD Case Managers and Para-Educators to validate the product in cycles to align with their workflows and constraints.

Goals & Metric Success

1. Validate that the application supports the core tasks of IEP data collection. This gives insight into which workflows are frictionless versus where drop-off occurs.
   1. Average # of student goals and benchmarks logged per Case Manager per week
   2. Average # of data entries made by Para-Educators per week
   3. Time-to-task completion
2. The application is consistently utilized by Case Managers and Para-Educators. We want an understanding of how to lay the groundwork for a broader rollout.
   1. Active Case Managers and Para-Educators weekly
   2. Retention rate after 4 weeks of use
3. Demonstrate improved IEP team coordination and data quality. This ties with helping Case Managers make better decisions on behalf of students through data.
   1. % of goals with complete benchmark data every 3 months
   2. Case Manager and Para-Educator qualitative and quantitative satisfaction score
      1. Net Promoter Score
      2. How much easier was tracking a student’s progress?

Solution Alignment

Key Features

1. Case Managers can create, edit, and archive student profiles