The IEP Cafe

At A Glance

Location: 

Newton, Massachusetts

Primary Issue Area:

  • Living Economies

Active since:

2024

Our Purpose

Our official mission is: "To provide parents of exceptional students with free access to insights on school supports, special programming, accomodations, and advocacy."Our founding story goes as followed. I am a mother of a child on the autism spectrum, I found myself in the midst of a relocation, struggling to find clear, reliable information about how local schools support students with disabilities. That experience revealed a critical gap — and sparked the idea for a product that provids insights into schools from the perspective of the disability community itself.  We tend to use underground networks and email chains to navigate relocations.  I wanted to formalize this system for the community. We currently have  free UX desigers to finish the low fidelity prototype I created, copy for the webpage, and the next step is to get insurance, seed funding, and a developer to publish the page.  Our mission is to support parents and caregivers across all disability categories by answering the real questions families ask when choosing a school. Per our user studies, parents indicated that they would use our product for advocating for their child at an IEP meeting and not just for relocations.  This resource is intended to be free for users. We will be servicing the state of Connecticute -state wide (perhaps CA, NY, and NJ will be included). We opened on December 2024, so only a couple months ago.