Through a Reinventing Education partnership launched in 1995, IBM and the San Francisco Unified School District worked together to provide the best, most effective school program to all students, especially those with special needs.
The partnership is using Riverdeep Learning Village to ensure that each child receives the most effective services — whether they exist within the school or in the community — as soon as a teacher finds that a child requires targeted intervention or could potentially need special education. Teachers, parents, school administrators, and community members use the technology to discuss a student's case in a confidential, online setting. These discussions enhance face-to-face meetings and promote better involvement of all those concerned so that a child's needs are addressed more comprehensively, easily and quickly. The system also helps manage case workflow by reminding users about scheduled meetings and making sure that special education regulations and time requirements are met in each case.
As secure, online discussions take place, users access an online database that contains community and school resources, from which they can then identify and access comprehensive information on the services or classroom-based strategies that best address a child's specific academic, behavioral or health problems. As users identify additional resources that have proven to be effective in helping meet the needs of students, they can input them into the resources database, ensuring its meaningful evolution.
Because the system also includes historical information on each child, users are able to ensure that the services they identify make sense in the full context of the child. The system also is designed to prevent a child's progression toward placement in special education until the school demonstrates that it has attempted appropriate interventions for the child.
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