Forbes: How Expert IEP Uses AI To ‘Demystify The IEP Process’ For Families Everywhere
Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to sit down with Antoinette Banks. A cognitive scientist, Banks is a single mother to an autistic Black teenager and proprietor of Expert IEP. Expert IEP is an education-focused platform which leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to improve families’ individualized education program that is its namesake. In an apropos bit of assistance, Google Search’s AI-powered tool cogently describes IEPs as “a legal document that outlines the special education services and support a student with a disability will receive in public school.” Banks’ daughter has an IEP. I had one throughout my academic career, spanning kindergarten through to my high school graduation. In essence, an IEP is put together by a team of teachers, specialists, and yes, parents, that serves as the roadmap along which a special education student’s educational journey will travel. As a binding legal document, an IEP’s contents must be agreed upon and signed by everyone who has a hand in crafting it.
There is no one more integral to that than a child’s parent(s).
“Honestly, I would not be anything without first having my own daughter who has autism and ADHD that started me on this path and this journey to become a cognitive scientist and now an edtech owner,” Banks said of her role in building Expert IEP. “It’s a privilege to talk to families because I understand what it’s like to try to advocate for your kid’s needs in the realm of special education through the IEP process.”
When her daughter first received her autism and ADHD diagnoses, the written report actually included mental retardation. However taboo that phrase is nowadays, it alarmed Banks back then because she had zero clue as to what those words really meant. The doctor’s report said her daughter had “O% of adult autonomy.” Literally no chance of having a life essentially. The descriptor jarred Banks, with her telling me it was especially cutting to hear about a 5-year-old child who ostensibly “had her whole life ahead of her.” Banks decided to build a prototype of Expert IEP while her daughter was in elementary school; the stipulation was that any doctor or other diagnostician who wanted time with her for the IEP process, they needed to “come on to my database and see what other people had mentioned prior [about her daughter] so we could have more of a holistic understanding of who she was as a child and as a student.” It turned out, Banks said, that when all people are on the same page, they tend to formulate “a more holistic process of understanding a student” instead of reducing a student to their particular siloed spaces. This context is crucial, as Banks told me that, within a few years, her daughter began to blossom. Now she’s a technologist who’s looking at colleges and partakes in martial arts training—all of it standing in stark contrast to the initial assessment that she wouldn’t amount to anything.