Multi-tiered support works.
The paperwork around it doesn’t.

Schools collect more data than ever — then scatter it across spreadsheets, PDFs, and three platforms. By referral time, the story’s in pieces and the clock’s running.

The state already measured today’s systems. Its phrase: “drastically underserving.”

OSPI’s statewide IEP feasibility study (April 2025) reviewed the systems Washington districts use right now. Its findings are the problem statement CetusEd was built for.

Source: OSPI, Statewide IEP Feasibility Study, April 24, 2025 · ospi.k12.wa.us · findings quoted verbatim.

One process, one record —
every learner, every program.

One documented path from a first concern to the right plan — MTSS, special education, EL/ML, Section 504, and health on a single student record that teachers, specialists, administrators, and families all work from.

Washington-aligned by default (WAC 392-172A · ESHB 2557 timelines)  ·  browser-first & offline-capable  ·  data stays on the device, optional cloud backup.

Most tools cover half the journey. CetusEd covers all of it.

Some tools screen and intervene; others run referral-to-IEP. The hand-off between them breaks — that’s the gap CetusEd closes. Even the screening vendors describe the two systems as separate products that co-exist in a district.

Branching Minds / Panorama / eduCLIMBER stop on the left; PowerSchool / Frontline / PCG / SEIS start on the right. Scope from public docs (2026); not an endorsement or affiliation.

Five programs, one student. Five programs, one record.

Five programs — MTSS, special education, EL/ML, Section 504, and health — run the same five programs on one shared record. Only the work inside each cell changes, never the record.

Next, we open each stage in turn — Refer → Assess → Decide → Plan → Monitor — on that one record.

Five programs, five shared stages — and how they connect.

Every program runs the same five stages, left to right — the table shows what each one does at each stage. Below it, the five kinds of movement between programs: the refer, the hold, the carry, the refer-out, and the yearly loop.

Different students — the same throughline.

Three common profiles — each shows what the platform does at one turn in the work.

A complete IEP — all ten chapters, not a stack of loose forms.

Eligibility isn’t the finish line; it starts the plan for the child’s whole year. The same evidence flows into a step-by-step IEP that cites the rules for you.

The Probe Kiosk — probes and observations, scored as they happen.

A tablet screen for the weekly checks teachers actually run — academic skill probes scored live, behavior/social-emotional recorded by interval or event, and a Diagnostic mode that tags the type of every error, not just the count.

Work with whole groups — and keep families in the loop.

Two everyday jobs that don’t fit one student at a time: running an intervention for a group, and sending letters home. The platform generates each letter from the record and flags the family’s language so translation is never overlooked; the school sends it.

Who it’s for: MTSS specialists managing cohorts, EL/ML coordinators running ELD blocks, and anyone — teacher, specialist, or coordinator — who sends something home.

Raw scores become a decision the team can defend.

Under the meeting run four analytic stages: each bounds every score by its error, cross-checks the signal, weighs the category, and holds a language difference apart from a disability.

The meeting stops being “whose printout do we trust?” and becomes “what does the evidence say?” — every number traceable to its source.

Equity isn’t a report you run; it is built into the work.

Disproportionality surfaces on the dashboard and runs inside the eligibility path, so a language difference or missed-instruction case can’t quietly become a disability label.

Anchored in IDEA §300.309 exclusionary factors, incl. limited English proficiency · WAC §392-172A.

Active IEPs, open referrals, and running clocks come in — live.

You won’t start a pilot on a blank slate. Students arrive with plans in force and deadlines already ticking — the migration brings them in with their dates, not reset to zero.

The anchors that matter in your state.

Beyond the federal IDEA floor, the platform is wired to Washington’s specific rules and clocks — the ones an OSPI monitor actually checks.

Full IDEA, WAC, RCW, and FERPA citations ship inside the product, on the forms where teams need them.

The record doesn’t stop at middle school.

Most tiered-support tools were built around elementary reading data and thin out after grade 8, which is a problem when postsecondary outcomes are what a district is judged on. The same record carries credit progress, the graduation pathway, and transition planning, and the high-school sections appear only for high-school students.

The platform fits the person — your role decides what you can touch.

Everyone on staff sees the five programs. What is restricted is narrower — the Decide engine, the special-education evaluation, and IEP authoring each open only for the roles that own them.

KEY  ✓ full · View read-only · — none · +Eval / +IEP authors that document.  “Evaluation specialist” = psychologist, SLP, OT/PT; EL/ML, 504, and nurse are specialist peers, each authoring their own plan.

Special-education evaluation opens inside Assess and the IEP inside Plan — by a chip, gated to the specialists who own them (everyone else sees them read-only). The decision engine lives in Decide for coordinators and administrators; the referral packet sits in Refer.

Leaders don’t all watch the same things. The dashboard adjusts.

Three dials — focus, scope, and role. Pick a focus and every card, count, and alert re-casts to that domain:

Every lens is live and computed — including EL/ML, Academic, 504, and health. Deeper signals (504 reviews-due, EL reclassification-ready, LTEL stalls, IHP reauth-due, staffing gaps) surface as routed tasks in the action center.

Rostering, refresh, and the honest sharing model.

Bring students in the way your district already rosters — then keep the roster current without ever overwriting the clinical work your staff entered.

A determination is only as sound as the measurement behind it.

CetusEd doesn’t invent its own testing math (psychometrics). It implements frameworks the field has validated over thirty years, with the guardrails that keep an eligibility decision defensible at due process.

Three guardrails keep the call valid — agreement across raters (Achenbach & McConaughy), language-vs-disability (Cummins · WIDA · Cormier · Kohnert), and comparison to local peers (Shinn · Burns), so rater contradictions surface before the meeting and no determination ever rests on a single score.

From a concern to a signed IEP — your part, and what runs automatically.

Each step is one motion, not a handoff. You bring the judgment and the input; the routing, paperwork, and deadline-tracking happen on their own. Nothing to forward, file, or wait on. When a task runs late, it escalates automatically to a coordinator, then an administrator.

You make the decisions, and three things run in the background on their own: it watches every legal clock (20 / 35 / 40 school days · the 3-year reeval) · it won’t let an incomplete IEP finalize · it keeps one record, entered once.

What your team gets from the start.

The capabilities your pilot runs on from day one, and the ones district leaders care about most.

Built from inside the work — and the district stays in control.

CetusEd was built by a Washington school psychologist and former special-education director, around the real workflows of MTSS, special education, Section 504, EL, and health. He still works in a Washington school district. That is stated up front because it is where the product’s judgment comes from, and because a district evaluating any vendor should know who is behind it.

If the district considering this is the founder’s employer, that is a conflict its own process governs: the disclosure goes to counsel and HR first, and the founder takes no part in any selection decision (ch. 42.23 RCW). For every other district it is simply provenance. The part to weigh either way: CetusEd is a very small company with a finished product and no completed pilot yet, so anything here about benefit is design intent rather than a measured result. It has never been run at scale — only against a simulated district of 20,317 students across 29 buildings. The pilot exists to produce the first evidence.

Local-first. Student data stays in the district.

During the pilot, student records live on district-managed devices, encrypted at rest, never on an outside server. The sector’s largest breach (December 2024) came from one vendor’s central database; CetusEd keeps no central database of students at all. Below: what’s solid, how recovery works, and what gates the cloud.

Aligned to FERPA and Washington student-data-protection requirements. A dated data-flow and security-hardening checklist is available for IT and security review.

Accessibility: what we commit to, and what isn’t done yet.

A special-education tool that isn’t accessible is a contradiction. The honest posture: the target, the gap, and the deliverable before you sign.

Consistent with the security posture: we hand you a dated checklist, not a slogan — including the parts still in progress.

Success is set before we start — and the path to start is short.

Baseline is captured from the current process before the pilot begins and owned by a district designee — a real before-and-after, with a go / no-go agreed in advance.

First step: a working session, a one-page pilot brief, and the DPA for review — then one volunteer principal opts in. Each step uses a process the district already has.

The questions a careful buyer asks — and the honest answers.

We’d rather meet the objections head-on. The six that come up most — including where we’re still building.

Several “gaps” are us being honest about boundaries — no fake translation, no auto-eligibility, 504 analytics phased. The rest are integration & go-to-market items, not rebuilds.

What changes for the person doing the work, and why you won’t get stuck.

The Monday-morning reality of raising one concern, not the org chart. Designed so a busy staffer never hits a dead end.

And it is hard to break by accident: Mira helps on every screen, a short guide sits on each step, and work auto-saves. The workflow is designed to teach itself, without a manual.