Questions? Email usPlayground IEP explained for parents and families
Your child's teacher may use a new tool called Playground IEP. This page answers the questions you may have.
A short welcome from Sean Klamm, founder of Playground IEP
First, what is Playground IEP?
Think of it as a very organized assistant that gives teachers more time for their students. The teacher is still the teacher.
Playground IEP is a secure workspace that special education teachers use to support their paperwork tasks: writing IEPs, tracking your child's progress toward goals, keeping up with deadlines, and other support managing their caseload.
Part of that workspace uses AI to draft and suggest. It never decides anything. Your child's teacher reviews, revises, and approves every word before it goes into a plan.
What this means for your child
Less time on forms means more time with students. Here is what that looks like in practice.
A more individualized IEP
Individualized is the first word in the name, but overloaded teachers often copy last year's plan forward. Playground makes starting from your child's actual data the easy path.
Plans you can actually read
Evaluations, reports, and IEPs are full of legal and clinical language. Teachers can rewrite sections in plain words so you know exactly what they say.
More teacher time for students
Paperwork that took an evening now takes an hour. That time goes back to your child and the classroom.
Fewer errors, better follow-through
No more someone else's name pasted into your child's IEP. Deadlines and progress checks are tracked so nothing slips.
How does it help your child's teacher?
Your child's special education teacher does far more than teach. Every student on their caseload comes with hours of required paperwork, all of it important, and all of it time that is not spent with your child.
Playground IEP exists to clear those distractions out of the way. The most valuable thing a teacher does is build a relationship with your child. Everything we build is meant to give them more room to do exactly that.
IEP development
Writing, revising, and coordinating a legally binding plan for each student, with meetings, drafts, and signatures for every one.
Progress monitoring
Collecting data on every goal, for every student, week after week, and turning it into something the team can act on.
Report writing
Progress reports, meeting notes, evaluations, and compliance paperwork, each on its own deadline.
With Playground IEP, these paperwork tasks take significantly less of a teacher's day, so more of their time and energy goes to their students.
How we use AI
We built Playground IEP because AI is genuinely useful for the paperwork side of special education: drafting, organizing, summarizing. Used well, it gives teachers hours back and gives families clearer, easier-to-read documents.
But we also saw a problem: the AI tools most available to teachers are general-purpose ones like ChatGPT, which were never designed for student records. They carry no privacy agreement with schools, and some learn from whatever is typed into them.
So we built the opposite: a protected, purpose-built place your district has vetted, with rules about your child's data written into the contract.
The guardrails we built
The teacher stays in charge
The AI drafts. A human decides. Nothing reaches your child's plan without the teacher reading and approving it.
Your child's data never trains AI
It is never used to train models, never sold, and never used for advertising. Those are contract terms, not promises.
No demographic data goes to the AI
Race, ethnicity, and gender are never sent to the AI, so they cannot shape what it suggests.
Built for FERPA from day one
FERPA is the federal law that protects your child's school records. We built for it from the start: encryption, strict access controls, and a signed data privacy agreement with your district.
What the AI does (and doesn't do)
It does
- ✓Organize the information the teacher already has
- ✓Draft language for the teacher to review and edit
- ✓Suggest goal ideas based on your child's data
- ✓Rewrite sections in parent-friendly language
- ✓Summarize progress data so trends are easy to see
It never
- ✕Make decisions about your child
- ✕Determine eligibility, placement, or services (that is the IEP team's job)
- ✕Interact with your child directly
- ✕Train on your child's data
- ✕See or use demographic information
Still have questions?
We're happy to answer them. Reach out anytime.
A real person replies within one business day.