Using Special Education

Aspen’s Special Education view is a comprehensive solution for creating and maintaining Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and managing the special education process. Its tools help you work faster and more efficiently.

This guide is for all special education users who use Aspen to:

• Enroll students in the special education program.
• Use workflow checklists as a guide through the special education cycle.
• Write IEPs.
• Update IEPs including editing, amending, renewing, and re-evaluating.
• Provide special education services to students.

Every state has its own processes and regulations for managing and implementing special education services to its students. Aspen is a complete data management tool that is flexible enough to help you:

• Use a checklist to track steps as they are completed in the process.
• Stay in compliance with your state's regulations.
• Capture data on screen templates that look like your state-defined forms.
• Print forms that look exactly like the state forms.
• Query and display data across students' IEPs and forms.
• Easily view all students who need specific accommodations or services.

In the Special Education view, there frequently is more than one way to complete a task, but Follett highly recommends completing most tasks through the workflow a method of coordinating multi-step processes involving one or more users, or checklist, that automatically begins when you enroll a student in Special Education. Depending on your system setup, there may be several workflows in the special education cycle. Each workflow guides you through the steps to complete a process.

For example, there may be a workflow for each of these processes:

• Initially referring a student to and enrolling the student in the special education program.
• Revising and amending an active IEP Individualized Education Program.
• Re-evaluating an IEP on a predefined schedule, usually every three years.
• Renewing an IEP on a predefined schedule, usually after the first and second year after a referral or re-evaluation.
• Transferring a student on an active IEP from another district into the system.

To access the special education workflows, go to the IEP tab. Select the IEP you want to review, and click the Workflows side-tab.