How Panorama Solara Helped Spring ISD Meet Texas's Tiered Funding Deadline

Texas's shift to a services intensity model for special education funding created an urgent classification challenge: every district must now categorize each student's IEP across five domains by August. For Spring Independent School District, serving nearly 5,000 special education students, meeting that deadline while avoiding centralizing work on a single person required a different approach.

Challenges

• Texas's new services intensity funding model required Spring ISD to classify 5,000 special education students across five domains. 
• Before implementing Solara, manually reviewing and scoring an IEP for the TEA Tiered Funding Model took an average of 45 to 60 minutes per IEP, depending on the complexity of the student’s IEP.
• Centralizing the work on a single expert would create a bottleneck and prevent the team from learning the funding model together.
  

Solution

• Panorama Solara

Results

• With Solara, the funding results are generated in less than two minutes. Staff then spend a few additional minutes reviewing the information for accuracy and following up as needed, particularly for more complex IEPs.
• Even with that review, the process now typically takes less than five minutes, although it may occasionally take longer if additional follow up is needed based on the complexity of the IEP.
• This has resulted in significant time savings for our team while still allowing staff to use their professional judgment to review each recommendation.
  
• All 13 coordinators and two directors developed hands-on expertise in both the tool and the tiered funding model
• Spring met the August deadline while building sustainable, distributed capacity to scale Phase 2 work (IEP goals, PLAAFPs, evaluations).

Challenges

The Policy Shift

Texas House Bill 2 and Senate Bill 568 fundamentally changed how special education is funded across the state. Rather than funding based on where students receive services, Texas now uses a services intensity model: funding follows the actual intensity and frequency of services each student needs.

That shift means every Texas district must now classify each student with an IEP across five domains that measure service needs and intensity. The classification determines the student's service tier, which drives staffing, resource allocation, and funding.

The Manual Burden

For most districts, this classification process is done manually. A special education professional reviews the IEP, scores the student in four factors across five domains, identifying a final tier and determination of service groups. For the Spring ISD team, manually reviewing and scoring an IEP for the TEA Tiered Funding Model took an average of 45 to 60 minutes per IEP, depending on the complexity of the student’s IEP.

For a district like Spring ISD, serving nearly 5,000 special education students, manual tiering meant hundreds of hours of staff time during summer.

Solution

From One Expert to Distributed Expertise

Spring had finalized their implementation of Panorama Solara in late May, so they had the opportunity to use Solara's tiered funding tool—which takes an IEP, scores the student across five domains, and outputs classifications for PEIMS reporting—to streamline the classification work. Additionally, Solara flagged areas of ambiguity that could affect the final tier or service group, routing those cases back to educators for judgment and decision-making. This ensured the tool streamlined routine classifications while keeping final output in educators' hands.

Spring's Director of Special Education, Dr. Trenn Russell, made a strategic decision: distribute the tiered funding classification across all 13 special education coordinators and two directors, with each coordinator responsible for their own student cohort.

The reasoning: if only one person learned Solara's tiered funding tool and owned the classification process, that person became a single point of failure. But if all 13 coordinators and two directors worked through the process, they collectively understood not just how to use the tool, but the logic behind tiered funding decisions.

Testing in Realistic Conditions

As Elizabeth Ross, Related Services Coordinator at Spring ISD, explained: "Our director went ahead and assigned all of our coordinators to this work. There's thirteen of us, and she divided the students among us, so we each [are responsible for] a certain number of students."

And rather than jumping into all 5,000 students at once, Spring used the first week as a learning cycle, with one coordinator running the tiered funding tool to establish a baseline. Ross notes “We had a team member do one last week and took her about the whole day, maybe eight hours of continuously working to complete twenty."

But that eight-hour result wasn't treated as a failure; rather, it was data. The team immediately analyzed what they were seeing, meeting to provide feedback on the process and making adjustments to prompts and output.

Refinement Through Structured Collaboration

The breakthrough came from how the team organized their collaboration. Spring created a dedicated Google chat exclusively for the tiered funding tool. Ross explained, "We have a chat that is only for the funding tool. So anytime there's an issue or someone notices something wrong, we only report there." The chat became a real-time learning loop. Every discovery, refined prompt, and pattern that improved accuracy was shared. The whole team learned from every coordinator's experience.

This iterative approach (test, identify gaps, refine, repeat) is how thoughtful AI implementation actually works, with continuous learning and improvement. "With so many people, like there's thirteen of us, we're brainstorming constantly," Ross said, noting that the feedback was continuous: "I'm catching up on some right now and just constantly feedback so we can make updates."

Panorama's implementation team stayed actively involved throughout, helping Spring optimize prompts and validate outputs against PEIMS reporting standards. As Ross notes: "Panorama has been amazing. Anytime I reach out to them, it's been a huge help."

Scaling with Confidence

In week two, the coordinator re-ran the tiered funding process with the refined prompts and adjusted outputs. The results shifted dramatically. 

With Solara, the funding results are generated in less than two minutes. Staff then spend a few additional minutes reviewing the information for accuracy and following up as needed, particularly for more complex IEPs. Even with that review, the process now typically takes less than five minutes, although it may occasionally take longer if additional follow up is needed based on the complexity of the IEP.

This has resulted in significant time savings for the team, while still allowing staff to use their professional judgment to review each recommendation.