CetusEd cetused.com
Built for Washington’s MTSS & special education teams

One journey, five programs, from a teacher’s first concern to graduation — Navigate every student to success.

Tiered support, special education, Section 504, multilingual services, and health each keep their own file on the same student, and your staff spend their day reconnecting what the software separated. CetusEd keeps the story in one place, from a first-grade teacher’s first concern through the transition plan that follows a senior out the door. Built by a school psychologist and former special-education director, for the teams who run these processes.

Enter the app Request pilot information

Keeps student data on district devices  ·  works alongside your SIS  ·  runs offline  ·  nothing to stand up

The problem

Every handoff costs time. Every duplicate entry costs attention.

Educators don’t burn out because they stopped caring. They burn out acting as the bridge between systems that were never introduced.

Deadlines live in someone’s memory
The system asks a teacher to remember what software should remember. When the reminder is a sticky note, the slip becomes a compliance finding, and a child waits.
One child, five files
The same facts, re-typed into a tiered-support tracker, a special-education system, a 504 binder, an EL file, and the nurse’s records. The duplication is the software’s, not the staff’s.
The seam between referral and eligibility
Most tools stop at referral or start at eligibility. The work in between is where context has to cross five systems, and where it gets dropped.
How it works

Children don’t live in silos. Neither should their records.

Five programs move through the same five stages: Refer, Assess, Decide, Plan, Monitor. Only the work inside each stage changes, and the record underneath never does. See how the stages work →

MTSS
Universal screening → Tier 2/3 intervention → progress monitoring.
Special ed
Referral → multidisciplinary evaluation → eligibility → IEP.
EL / ML
WIDA proficiency track → ELD goals & service → reclassification.
Section 504
Referral → eligibility → accommodation plan → review cycle.
Health
Nurse flag → nursing assessment → health plan, or refer to 504 / SpEd.
Kindergarten through exit

A record that keeps going when the student reaches high school.

Districts are judged on what happens after graduation, and that is exactly where most tiered-support tools stop — they were built for elementary reading data. The same record that carried a first-grade phonics probe carries credit progress, the graduation pathway, and the transition plan.

Early
Screening & intervention
Universal screening, tiered plans, and probes scored as they happen — reading, math, writing, and behavior.
Middle
Evaluation & the plan
Multidisciplinary evaluation, eligibility, the IEP or 504 plan, and progress against goals that follow the student between buildings.
Grades 9–12
Graduation readiness
Credits earned against the 24-credit framework, cumulative GPA, ELA and math graduation-pathway status, High School and Beyond Plan status, and the early-warning signals — rolled into one on-track / at-risk read for students on a plan.
Exit
Transition & what comes after
Postsecondary goals and transition assessment from age 14, the transfer-of-rights notice at 17, the Summary of Performance at exit, and the entitlement that runs to the end of the school year a student turns 22.

Anchored to Washington’s rules, not a generic template: RCW 28A.230.090 and WAC 180-51-068 for credits and the High School and Beyond Plan; WAC 392-172A-03090 and IDEA §300.320(b) for transition. The full high-school picture →

What’s in it

What comes with it.

Everything counted here is in the product today. You can open the app and count it yourself.

100+
Forms built in
Pre-referral · referral · evaluation · IEP · notices — each citing the rule it implements
50+
Assessment batteries supported
WISC-V · WJ-IV · BASC-3 · CTOPP-2 · CELF-5 — forms that document and analyze the scores your evaluator administers, with a configurable catalog for other assessments and updated norms
23
Curriculum-based probes
Reading, math and writing, scored live on a tablet — plus 22 behavior and SEL measures
14
Eligibility rows
Washington’s 13 categories (WAC 392-172A-01035), with deafness and hearing impairment shown as separate rows for child-count reporting — side by side in the Eligibility Summary
35 / 40
WA evaluation clocks
Evaluation report to the parent, and the eligibility meeting — school-day deadlines counted down across the whole roster
26
Staff roles
Psychologist · SLP · OT/PT · nurse · coordinators · teachers · paraeducators — each seeing only what their role needs
550+
Built-in answers
Mira answers on any screen — expert-written, and the same answer every time
0
Cloud AI calls
Mira runs on the device; no student data leaves the browser to answer a question
You don’t have to take a vendor’s word for the problem

Washington measured its own systems and published the result.

OSPI’s statewide IEP feasibility study (April 2025) found educators “largely unsatisfied,” relying on “dozens of manual workarounds, duplicate data entry, and time-intensive report building,” and assessed current systems as “drastically underserving the needs of their primary users.” One vendor’s IEP system serves 83% of Washington districts; Skyward is the SIS in 87.8%. The seam between the two is where staff time goes.

A statewide IEP system is coming
E2SSB 5263: pilot 2027–28, statewide launch 2029–30 — covering the IEP, not MTSS, 504, EL/ML or health
The whole-child record stays open
CetusEd is built on the shapes Washington already reports, so a handoff is a mapping problem, not a rebuild
Two-way movement is a sequence, not a switch
Inbound rostering is built; write-back is not. The full map →

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

Where the data lives

Student records stay in the district.

Records are encrypted on district-managed devices, and out of the box the software makes no outbound request carrying student information. There is no central database to breach, because there is no central database. That is how it is built, not a promise about how it is run. How it’s built →

Encrypted
AES-256-GCM before it’s written; the key is generated on the device and can’t be copied off it
Nothing to stand up
No server, no seats to provision; installs as an app and works with no network connection
District-held recovery
Your IT department holds the recovery code, and you hold your own encrypted backups
Open exports
JSON, CSV and labeled PDF at any time — leaving costs you nothing but the decision
Before you go further

What CetusEd cannot show you yet.

Current status
  • Product complete — the full platform is live; enter the app and walk a real referral.
  • First pilot districts recruiting — one school to start, one semester, fully reversible.
  • No results to show — there is no completed pilot yet, so anything on this site about benefit is design intent rather than a measured outcome.
  • Never run at scale — built against a simulated district of 20,317 students across 29 buildings; not yet used by two hundred people at once.
  • One-person company — if the founder is gone you keep your data and your working software, and get no more updates.
Where to go next
  • The platform — the five stages, the deadline engine, the probe kiosk, and the high-school picture.
  • Interoperability — what moves between systems today, what doesn’t, and what has to be true before it does.
  • Privacy & security — the architecture, the encryption, the audit trail, and the open items.
  • District & IT FAQ — written for a superintendent, a special-education director, and a network administrator, in that order.
  • The pilot — how it’s structured, what’s measured, and who owns the decision.

CetusEd is seeking its first pilot districts.

One school to start. One semester. The district owns every record and the go / no-go decision, and an independent evaluator holds the research data. Pilot districts also shape what comes next — starting with which systems it learns to talk to first.

Request pilot information

or read how the pilot is structured