SPECIAL EDUCATION

Special education and IEPs, connected to everything else

bhworks runs the full IEP lifecycle on the same platform that screens your students, tracks their services, and handles consent, so a student’s IEP is never stranded in a separate system.

One system, from screening to IEP

Dedicated IEP platforms exist, and they are mature. What bhworks adds is cohesiveness: the same system that screens students, tracks services, and handles consent also writes and monitors their IEPs. One student record, one login, one place the whole support team already works. Before an IEP ever begins, a student moves through the academic, behavioral, and health tiers of MTSS, and bhworks carries that history forward, keeping the same measures and interventions connected during the IEP itself.

What the IEP module does

• Guided, section-by-section authoring with built-in validation.
• State-aware templates that align with each state’s requirements and workflows, selected automatically from the student’s school location, along with that state’s eligibility categories, required signers, and compliance timelines.
• Evaluation to eligibility in one flow, pulling MTSS and intervention data forward, capturing family consent and prior written notice, and tracking the federal evaluation timeline.
• Present levels (PLAAFP) that pull forward from evaluation data and anchor the goals and services.
• A standards-aligned goal bank, scaffolded from a student’s present levels toward grade-level standards, plus your district’s own library.
• Progress reports that fill in from the data your team logs.
• A family portal that adapts to each family’s preferred language, supports electronic signatures, and automatically records when the IEP is shared and signed — complete with timestamps.
• Mid-year amendments that carry everything forward and record what changed, one-click annual rollover, and an archival PDF of the full record.

A workflow that knows the rules

bhworks guides the team through the special-education process and heads off the errors that cause compliance findings, adapting to each student’s data as it goes. The workflow asks for matching content in the goals and in the supports and accommodations before the IEP can be finalized, and prompts the team to consider a Behavior Intervention Plan. Set a service start date, and the end date fills in to the day before the one-year anniversary, leap-year safe. For an older student, transition-planning fields appear and the approaching transfer of rights at the age of majority is flagged. An IEP cannot be finalized while a required section or signature is missing, and the system lists exactly what is left.

When a student transfers in mid-year with an active IEP, bhworks loads the right state template from the school’s location, starts the federal comparable-services clock, and puts a dated alert on the compliance dashboard, so nothing depends on someone remembering the deadline.

Compliance you can see across the district

A compliance dashboard surfaces categorized alerts: annual review due, reevaluation due, progress report due, age of majority approaching, transfers nearing the comparable-services deadline, and finalized IEPs missing a guardian signature. Case managers see the alerts for their own caseload; program coordinators see district-wide compliance rates at a glance. Monitoring at the population level, through dashboards and reports, removes the need to open records one at a time to check that state and federal requirements are met.

FERPA-aligned by design

IEPs are student education records, so bhworks treats student privacy under FERPA, with role-based access and full audit trails on who viewed or changed a record. It also meets HIPAA and the NIST 800-53 Risk Management Framework for the clinical work it supports, and holds an Authority to Operate from the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget.