Indiana teachers face challenges with state’s new IEP tracking system

Her sister’s best friend was born with fetal alcohol syndrome and indirectly diagnosed with Tourette’s and “ADHD to the max.”

Her mother was a special education teacher in the 90’s — a decade full of landmark moments for disabled people — like the induction of the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990.

Those actualities meant Bigaman “grew up around people with disabilities and not even thinking anything about it,” she said. “[My family and I] just incorporated them into our lives.”

After graduating from college, Bingaman followed in her mother’s footsteps by working in the School City of Mishawaka (SCM), a school district in Northern Indiana, first as a program assistant and later as a special education teacher, the job title she holds today.

With nearly two decades of experience in special education, Bingaman knows all too well the ebb and flow of her career and the various technological advancements that aim to mitigate struggles within the Individualized Education Program (IEP).

“I’ve been around long enough to see different incarnations of the IEP program,” she said.

Indiana’s most recent shift within the IEP program came in July 2025 — just ahead of the  2025-26 school year — when the state transitioned from using its legacy program, Indiana Individualized Education Plan (IIEP) — which had been the standard for roughly 12 years, according to information guides published as early as Aug. 2012 — to PowerSchool Special Programs (PS SP) as the primary online tracking system for all IEPs across the state.

PS SP’s swift and sudden launch has left special educators like Bingaman reminiscing about IIEP.

“What was nice about [IIEP’s] rollout was we had almost a year of transition time,” Bingaman said.

However, the transition period from IIEP to PS SP during the summer months was far less forgiving. Instead, Bingaman recalled it being “cut and dry.”

“July 2025 is too late of a rollout…when the new school year’s starting [in] Indiana. [State officials] did us dirty,” she said. “It’s still a learning process, because [PS SP] is so new, and I think they did a disservice by rolling this out without everything being ready.”

Her frustrations were echoed by Samantha “Sam” Ivy, a special education teacher at Muncie Central High School, who said her biggest qualm with the PS SP was its lack of stored information, a stark difference from IIEP.

“When you go to look up one of your students that’s on your caseload, there is nothing there. Their name is there…but their IEP did not transfer into this new system,” she said.

Ivy and Bingaman agree that the lack of transferred information has wasted hours of their time — time they could have been spending getting to know the very students whose IEPs they had to essentially rewrite at the start of the academic year.

“It’s like you’re putting in brand new IEPs into this new system. So, I mean, you can pull up [a student’s] old IEP file, but then you have to completely type in everything into this new system — which has been a hot mess,” Ivy said.

The drop-down boxes offered through the system are “helpful but confusing,” she said, as not every kid’s diagnosis or circumstance fits neatly into the provided answer choices.

According to a Jan. 27 newsletter from the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE), “This new platform has been designed with feedback from schools to ensure its efficiency and effectiveness.”

While tests of the platform reportedly earned high marks, Ivy said she is not entirely convinced the web program was thoroughly tested, calling the faults of the online system “mindblowing” and attesting to the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Indiana teachers are not the only ones frustrated with PS SP’s rollout. Public opinion has proven dissatisfactory even among state administrators like Jenny Smithson, Muncie Community School’s director of special education.

“Any new system will take more time until you learn it, but, I do admit, PS SP was a rough start…I don’t find it as user-friendly as the old system… I’m pretty tech savvy, and it has taken me several weeks to get comfortable using it,” Smithson said via email.

As the 2025-26 school year continues, Smithson said she is working hard to ease the difficulties posed by the new online system and “ensure that teachers have all of the resources they need to meet the requirements of each student’s IEP,” but said she worries about the parents who are not as “tech savvy” as her, a concern shared by Bingaman and Ivy.

“I have to assume that a parent has an email address that’s working, and that they’re going to get this notice, and hopefully they’re going to be able to digitally sign it by the time a meeting comes up,” Ivy said. “And, some of these kids don’t even have internet…It’s just all extra stuff.”

However, as painstaking as the new online system may have been initially, both Bingaman and Ivy underscored the statewide issue as just that — a state-level issue, not a district-level one.

The teachers, each unanimously praising the outpour of support they have received from their districts and upper-level colleagues like Smithson in recent months, said they had hoped the system’s kinks would continue to be uncoiled as they moved along.

Smithson reciprocated appreciation for the teachers in her district.

“I’m so proud of my staff at MCS for working together and supporting one another in learning PS SP this fall. Teachers are so resilient and resourceful, and MCS has some of the best,” she said.

All three women only wished for a similar sense of unity, flexibility and understanding to come from city officials working in IDOE directly.

“I wish they understood the amount of work, decision-making, care and love that teachers pour into students, but yet, we are treated as if we are asking for too much,” Bingaman said.

She also noted that educators across the country are treated vastly differently by policymakers now than they were during the pandemic, a time when teachers were unanimously dubbed “the saviors of education.” 

“It took less than five years for us to be dirt under their shoes again. If they came here and lived a week in our shoes, they would see how difficult it would be…We are educating your future caretakers here, but yet we are treated like garbage — and that’s sad,” Bingaman said.

Contact Katherine Hill via email at katherine.hill@bsu.edu.

This article is republished as part of a collaborative content-sharing agreement between Ball State Unified Media and Indiana Public Radio, established to expand access to high-quality journalism and to better inform and serve the public through trusted, in-depth reporting.