Replace Accelify Frontline IEP Program in Austin ISD

This is so bug ridden. It causes FAR more work and is repetitive. It won't even translate an ARD to Spanish. This system is terrible and should NEVER have been introduced during a pandemic!

Accelify is not user friendly, the reports from it are not as good as SEEDS, and just printing an IEP takes multiple steps! AcceliPLAN was not designed for teachers and would leave no time for actual teaching.

I think I can speak for all of my colleagues when I say that despite giving Accelify a chance and giving it time to work out the "bugs", it is now evident that this program was NOT ready to go live to the entire district. This program should have been piloted first in order to work out the issues before it became the only tool for us to work with. With all of the aspects of the program that don't work or still aren't ready yet, it makes the case workers come off as incompetent in front of the parents when running an ARD meeting. We are all trying to do our best to support the students and ensure that their paperwork is completed correctly. All we want is a program that can support that goal.

I don't think this program was ever piloted or vetted. The training we got at the first of the year barely scratched the surface of the program. Not even special education administrators knew all the problems about this system before we, the teachers, were required to use it. There are so many actions in the program that are still not fixed and teachers are left to fend for themselves to complete an ARD. Frontline acquired Accelify recently. Frontline has other special education electronic systems like eSped that may be better suited for our district. All I know is the program takes 3 times as long to do, and I don't know any person in the district that thinks it is appropriate for our needs.

Acceliplan does not allow case managers to report service hours to groups of children. There is no time in the day to report service hours for each day per individual student, yet reporting service hours is a requirement. I am signing because I do not want the blame for special education service hours not being reported to fall on me when I was given 0 instruction, 0 time, and 0 resources to do so.

Many tasks take too many steps. The program is not easy to learn, understand, or recall steps because items are hidden behind other items. Progress Reports are very important for special ed teachers and this has not been considered.

5 years ago Featured

This program continues to be a problem and we have had little to no direction from the district. We were told "there is no direct way to complete progress reports". WHAT???

5 years ago Featured

As a related service provider, I support these students and the other team members with the concerns that with all the bugs that haven’t seemed to be resolved with 6 months of use, we have been out of compliance through no fault of our own, which presents legal questions.

This program has educators documenting the SAME THING in 5 different areas that is unnecessary. This AcceliPlan process has taken over the entire day with very little wiggle room to actually plan and teach my students. I agree with Mr. Webb. I want to look for jobs away from AISD and I LOVE the school I am at and my co-workers. I feel I'm not teaching anyone to my students because of this program.

Accelify Frontline in my humble opinion is a waste of time. It takes up valuable time documenting every little thing that students with disabilities may, or may not do, instead of working with the students in order to help them with their specific learning issues. The time wasted on recording every step, and or misstep is arduous, and time consuming. I feel this is counter productive, and the district should abandon it altogether. I very much agree with the write up that I received in my email box.

there are portions of Acceliplan that are fantastic but idealistic. In all practicality, it doesn't do what it claims and is often over burdensome to it's users. IEP development has become more complicated and time consuming, there are frequently more errors than our previous program, and the new "improved" sections do not outweigh the benefits of finding something that actually works.

Ms. Edwards has the right of it. Accelify takes more time, has more bugs, and is more frustrating from every angle from the perspective of a high school resource teacher. When the documentation application is this obtuse and difficult, it encourages noncompliance .

5 years ago Featured

I have had my workload increase by 66% —all of it being paperwork— I am looking for jobs outside of AISD— and I have told new teachers not to work here. I have actually lost colleagues due to this horrible black hole of software.

This has been the most frustrating year of my 19 years in education due to the change to the Frontline system. We were not properly trained for this system and it seems to still be in a testing stage as there are constantly things that go wrong and/or need to be changed. The program takes so much time, so many steps, to do anything; it is NOT user friendly or intuitive. As SpEd teachers/case managers, we have so many things to do - paperwork has always been something that was in the background to providing services to students - something that took time, but was manageable. Now, my whole job feels like Frontline ARD; it takes so much time and is so frustrating I have no energy for anything else. My SpEd Team on my campus have spent over 20 hours in trainings and group support sessions and the program still alludes us in terms of documenting progress and creating progress reports; it's so difficult to do and takes so much time, we are still using 'paper' progress reports. The precursor to the actual progress reporting is AcceliPLAN - to track student progress daily - and it was clearly NOT designed for teachers but for related professionals that see a set small number of students at a set time and that bill for Medicaid. The average SpEd Teacher does NOT do this; we work with hundreds of students each day at the high school level. To think that we have time to calendar out our unpredictable week and then document - for each day/class/hour - what we did and how much time we spent with this or that students is unrealistic. And, let's not forget the evaluation side of things. I still have open, unlocked re-evaulations on several students on my campus due to the evaluator at the time not knowing how to use Frontline, so she did 'paper' re-evaluations, leaving our Frontline system to show these students out of compliance; I don't know if these will ever get completed before it's time to re-evaluate again. This program should not have been introduc

I've spent hours after school and on weekends working on my IEPs in Acceliplan. I have also spent hours sending emails to support and sped admin trying to get issues/bugs in Acceliplan fixed. The system does not fit our needs and I'm constantly having to add notes in the deliberations to address Acceliplan issues. Processes that used to take one step now take 3 or 4 steps to get the same results. Something has to change or AISD will be losing more hard-working teachers from the additional stress that Acceliplan has caused.