For Education Service Centers.
The new intensity-of-services model asks providers to rate twenty factors for every student in special education, with a rubric that is new to everyone, on TEA's schedule — August 14 for the voluntary submission, October 8 for at least half, December 3 for the rest. Your specialists can train the region on the framework; they can't sit with every provider at the moment of a rating. Accord puts the rubric, the student's IEP, and proposed ratings in the same window, so the guidance is there when the judgment call happens.
The task.
Every special-education student has to be classified into the new intensity-of-services model: a tier built from twenty factor ratings, plus up to two service-group qualifications, with the student's IEP as the anchor for every rating. Each rating is a judgment call, made with a rubric that didn't exist last year, by providers making it for the first time.
TEA's guidance expects every reviewer of the same IEP to reach the same determination. No mechanism checks that, and no district has time to run calibration sessions on top of the ratings themselves. Left alone, every campus develops its own reading of the rubric, and nobody finds out until the data is already in PEIMS.
Right now each provider makes these calls alone — no shared reference at the moment of the rating, no way for a campus or the region to see how the work is going until it's submitted. The districts with the least room to absorb that are the same ones that lean on their ESC the most, and the questions land with you.
The workflow.
Accord puts the rubric, the student's IEP, and proposed factor ratings in the same window, for every rating, in every district. Campus and district staff review the ratings as they come in, so a misread of the rubric gets caught early instead of in the submission. The guidance your specialists deliver in a summer workshop is the same guidance a provider is looking at in October, when she hesitates on a factor.
The ask.
Your districts need this for deadlines already on the calendar. We work with ESCs to bring Accord to member districts — demos, regional rollout, support built around how your region operates.
Your smallest districts have the least room in their budgets for anything beyond what the state provides, and they lean on you most. We're making the case that Texas should fund a state-level solution that supports this work this year, rather than waiting for district IEP vendors to catch up in 2027–28. ESCs who want this for their districts are the strongest voice in that conversation.