Support That Eases the Back-to-School Stress

Back-to-school season can feel overwhelming—but Undivided makes it a little easier. During our free Facebook Live event on August 12, Undivided CEO Seth Besse and Navigator Onyx Moore joined us to answer questions about how to prepare for the transition to a new school year using all of Undivided’s many tools and resources, including an exclusive preview of the upcoming AI-powered IEP Assistant launching in just a few weeks!

In case you missed our live event or you want to review what we learned, here’s a full replay and a recap of the highlights. Plus, scroll to the end for a discount code you can use on Undivided membership!

Undivided’s new IEP Assistant is the first AI-powered tool designed to help you build the most effective IEP for your child. Upload your IEP, and the tool will automatically identify goals, accommodations, and other key components of your child’s IEP to help you track progress, note concerns, and flag anything you want to bring up with your IEP team. Andy AI can even make recommendations for you to take the guesswork out of your child’s IEP. At the end, you’ll get a clear, actionable summary that includes your concerns, priorities, and more—perfect for your IEP meeting.

If you haven’t already, join our newsletter list to get the latest updates when we launch IEP Assistant for everyone in the Undivided community!

Ready to try all the tools of the Undivided platform? When you create your account at undivided.io, enter your email and the code BacktoSchool for 20% off once your free 14-day trial is over. If you want even more personalized guidance preparing for the new school year, sign up for two free sessions with a Navigator, an experienced parent coach who will provide 1:1 support on Zoom calls and messaging.

We look forward to helping you prepare for the new school year!

Full Event Transcript:

Hi, everybody, and welcome to Undivided Live. I'm Seth Besse and I'm the CEO of Undivided. And I'm Onyx Moore, a Navigator at Undivided. We know some of you are enjoying what's left of summer, and others are already back to school. It's a busy time of year, so thank you so much for being here. We know that returning to school is overwhelming, hectic, exciting, all of the emotions, all at once. Whichever you're feeling now and whatever you feel over the next few weeks, know that we're here to partner with you and make sure your child gets everything they need in school and out. We partner with you to look at the whole picture for the support that your kiddos need.

Today we're going to show you a brief overview of how our platform and app work to ensure your child has the best supports possible. It will include a preview of our soon to be released IEP assistant, and as someone who's had to prepare for numerous IEPs, I can tell you this will change everything about the way you prep for an IEP. And we have a special promo today for those of you watching the event. You want to get the best for your child, and guess what. We do too, but we also know that 24 hours in a day just isn't enough to figure it all out on your own. Trainings or the occasional support just doesn't get it done. Everything else that’s this complex has a streamlined platform, a digital experience that helps guide parents through the process. That's exactly what we've built.

We've talked to so many parents going through the IEP process, and they don't know where to start, or they reread the IEP goals 100 times, still trying to figure out if it makes sense or they're completely overwhelmed trying to figure out and trying to prove if their child's made progress, or parents leave their IEPs remembering then what they wanted to bring up at that last moment. And, like Onyx said, we are about to change all of the prep for IEPs with our IEP assistant. We ensure the IEP process is easy to understand. We ensure that your team understands the parts that are key to them. We ensure all your concerns are clearly documented when meeting with your team.

We sit alongside you throughout the entire year to make sure that your goals are being met, and finally, we follow up on concerns to make sure they're being addressed. This is just the beginning, but to sum it up, we're here to partner with you.

After we show you the platform, we'd love to answer any of your questions about Undivided or how we can support you and your family, so please feel free to share any questions you have in the chat and our Community manager, Donna, will share those with me and Seth. And I'll stop talking and we can watch the video. Back to school season can feel overwhelming, Be the first to try it. Get a free trial and two free sessions with a Navigator for personalized support.

Thanks, everyone. So hopefully that video gives a preview of the Undivided platform and how to use it and how it helps parents get back to school. So I just wanted to kind of give an example of how parents get started. So go to our website, click ‘Get started,’ select the one here that applies. I’ll do my name. I'm going to verify my email here. For this, we're going to put in ‘BacktoSchool’ for the promo code, and everyone watching, that's going to get 20% off the first purchase. Going to enter our credit card information, and that's going to start a trial for us. And the first step of the trial, and what we really, really recommend is scheduling a Kickstart with one of our Navigators, and a Kickstart is two sessions with a Navigator to go through your Roadmap, build out how all that process works and get to know the account.

So I'm going to select a time here that works for me, confirm that my information is correct. I'm going to schedule the event. This is confirming Kickstart and sending me a calendar invite. I get confirmation, great, we’re scheduled. This is if I have a co-parent, a partner, a spouse, I can add them on to the account so that they can see everything that I'm seeing in the system. I'm going to skip that for now, and I'm going to be dropped in my account. and so here you can see on the left: Home, Roadmap, Messages, Binder, Resources, but I'm going to get started here by creating a child for my child's Roadmap. So I'm going to create a Roadmap for my son James, select his diagnosis and birth date here. 2016. I'm going to get my Roadmap.

What grade is he in? So he's in third grade, [public] school, IEP. We have Regional Center. We don't have Medicaid. No, we are currently not in Self-Determination. And, ‘No.’ And then I'm going to select ‘None of the above’ here. This is really just checking and making sure we're taking a look at all the potential public benefits, and that's going to drop me into my Roadmap here.

So this is going to explain how I can use the Roadmap to move forward. Then finally I can explore my Roadmap, and this is where I have all of my goals organized in one place. So please, give us a shot, and let us know your thoughts.

As we've gone through, our Navigators work with hundreds and hundreds of families, and every time we have incredible stories of the impact our platform is having and our Navigators are having with our parents. Since we have Onyx here, I asked her to share a story about one of her families that she works with to give us kind of a sample of what it's like to work with a Navigator and work with Undivided. Thank you, Seth. Yes, I'd love to tell you about Maya. She started working with us earlier this year. She's a single parent raising her ten-year-old son who has autism and ADHD, and every back to school season used to feel like walking into a storm, trying to explain accommodations, new teachers, regulating and organizing her son, who was nervous himself about going back, determining if he needed new assessments, assessing whether the team was following the IEP that she fought so hard for him to get. She was constantly asking herself, “Am I missing something important?” She had a drawer full of paperwork and a dozen flagged emails, notes scribbled on Post-its. She didn't really know where to start with her son's IEP, and then a friend of hers who’s an Undivided member told her about us.

She created her account like you just did, uploaded all of her son's IEPs, assessments, private provider reports, and notes into the digital binder, and finally realized that everything was in one place. When Maya had questions like how she could request an aide and if she could push back on reduced speech hours, she didn't have to ask online and just hope that she found the right answer. Initially she would ask Andy AI right in the Undivided platform, and she received answers in seconds. The platform would even remind her to schedule an updated OT eval before the re-eval deadline, and if she needed more help, she could message me individually, her Navigator, right in the app, and we worked through her biggest IEP questions together. We checked in before and after her IEP meeting.

This summer, she's been a beta tester for our new IEP assistant, and she can't believe how much time it’s saving her.

It reviewed her son's goals and flagged several concerns that didn't align with the services, with his present levels. They were missing prompts. It even suggested where services might be missing, like OT to help with his executive functioning. The IEP assistant flagged those concerns within minutes, and it was such a relief to feel like we didn't have to catch everything ourselves. This is exactly why we want to work with every parent we possibly can. Getting tools like this out to the community can make a massive impact.

When more and more families know their rights, know how to access these supports, that just makes the whole process easier for everyone. I always say if you haven't gotten started with Undivided yet, worst case scenario, as you go through a Kickstart and you find out you don't need our help, you don't need our support, you're doing a fantastic job. The reality, however though, is that the more common scenario is that we find countless supports, countless services, countless ways to save on therapies, support, increased services in an IEP for families, so we'd love to get started with you today.

Thinking about how Undivided works, how most families start with us is through what we call a Kickstart, and again, that's two sessions with an Undivided Navigator, and we match you with a Navigator, you get to know that Navigator, they get to know your child, what's working, what's not working, and they work with you to build out and customize that Roadmap, so what we created before is just the beginning point, and what your Navigator does is goes through that, optimizes the goals in there, helps you prioritize as a parent, makes sure that your checklist is organized and makes sense to you. Once you finish... once a parent finishes their Kickstart, they have three membership options. One is what we call ‘Platform,’ and that gives them access to all of our platform capabilities, everything the software does.

It also importantly gives them access to our weekly office hours, and our office hours are a period of time where we bring in an IEP advocate, a public benefits advocate, an insurance advocate, other experts and parents can ask their own questions. So we have parents come in and ask very personal questions. We have parents come in asking general questions. Oftentimes, we have parents just listening, right? And we do it as an open office hours because parents get so much out of hearing the questions and answers of other parents... that other parents have.

The next option for membership is what we call ‘Platform Plus,’ which gives the same access to the platform, but also gives parents the ability to message back and forth with the Navigator team, and so that means you have support, you have someone you can trust there all the time, 24 hours a day, to message with and get very, very well thought out well researched answers back. And our team is instructed very much to, unless they are 100% certain, not to answer, to say, “Let me do the research and get back to you.”

And then they have access to the rest of our Navigator team, all of our advocates and experts to make sure you're getting the best possible information and advice. And then third option for membership is our ‘Dedicated Navigator’ level membership, and that matches parents with the same Navigator, and so that Navigator gets to know you, the parent, gets to know your child, and really ends up being that partner through and through, through making sure that you get every support possible, to making sure that your IEP is where you want it to be.

And they work through that process with you for the entire duration that you're in Undivided membership, either through the messenger in the app, or through Zoom on what we call a monthly boost call. Regarding paying for membership, historically our parents have been paying directly with a credit card, and I think all of our members to date would say that that is 100% worth the cost, especially when you look at some of the numbers that we've been able to achieve for our parents, the families that work with us, and specifically the families that work with our Navigators.

On average, we find $63,000 a year in extra benefits and supports that they weren't accessing prior to working with Undivided. We have other families that pay for our services through the Self-Determination Program through the Regional Center, and then finally, we've recently become vendored with a few Regional Centers, and we're working on expanding that to others. And so what we will do... I think the team here is going to share something in the chat and the notes so that everyone can read the article on that, know how to ask for our services, but we'll also be sending a follow up email, and then specifically an email that you can forward on to your service coordinator to request Undivided membership, and as parents go, and as you request membership, it may seem like we're here just for those big moments, those transitions.

In reality, we're here every single day making sure that you as a parent have someone that has your back and any question you have, ask via chat, ask on your boost call with a Navigator, ask Andy AI, upload progress reports to the IEP assistant.

We're here every single day to make the process go more smoothly. To get your 14 day free trial so you can explore the platform, you can visit our join link today and sign up, and if you want someone to walk through things with you, you can schedule a Kickstart after you create an account and a Navigator like me can answer any questions that you have. And now let me see if we just have a few questions coming in. So one question we got is, do we have a choice to work with a Navigator or just on the app itself? You can work with the app on Platform membership, or you can work with a Navigator either through Platform Plus working with the whole pool of Navigators, or your own dedicated Navigator with a Navigator membership.

Then we have a question around vendorization for Regional Center. So how the process works with Regional Centers is since we're vendored with a few different Regional Centers, one of them, for example, is Redwood Coast at this point, other Regional Centers can request courtesy vendorization, which is a slightly streamlined process for service coordinators being able to include services like Undivided in your spending plan. So we don't know if it will take a while with service coordinators, but the first step is always requesting it, and the more families that request it, the faster that process will go for everyone. Someone asked if the Navigator would help, and so we're willing to help with any steps that you need in helping you to draft letters and figure out where to go with your next steps. If you'd like to help us with getting courtesy vendorization for your Regional Center.

Ah! When would the IEP assistant be out? So we're internally testing the IEP assistant now. We want to make sure that it's giving the best possible answers before we release it out to the wild. So we have a number of families beta testing it, and we have our internal teams testing it as well, and so we hope to get that out over the next few weeks to the broader membership.

Well, thank you all for taking the time with Onyx and I today and going through the platform itself. We really look forward to supporting everyone we possibly can. So please, if you haven't signed up yet for Undivided, if you haven't given given us a try, give us a try now, tell your friends that could use us about us, and we'll follow up with instructions on how to request Undivided through Regional Center. My fellow Navigators and I would love to meet you soon, so let's do back to school together. You got this. Bye. Bye, everyone.