At Copperas Cove Independent School District (CCISD) in Texas, special education leaders were spending nights and weekends keeping up with paperwork. The district serves approximately 8,000 students across 11 campuses, including about 2,200 students receiving special education services. Special education leaders saw an opportunity to use AI to ease time-consuming administrative work while keeping educators firmly in control.
- Challenges
- Copperas Cove ISD's special education team managed an unsustainable workload that led to 60+ hour work weeks and constant late nights.
- Two people were responsible for manually reviewing 1,000+ Full Individual Evaluation (FIE) reports a year, with each report taking 60-90 minutes.
- The two-person team each fielded 18-20 calls a day from staff with procedural questions, causing interruptions and more time lost.
- Complex, multi-tiered Texas special education funding classifications took hours of manual documentation work per student and required exceptional detail and accuracy.
- Results
- FIE report review time dropped from 60-90 minutes to 15-20 minutes per report, with same-day turnaround for evaluators instead of a queue.
- A special education tiered funding tool cut IEP-related funding-tier documentation time from almost two hours to under 10 minutes.
- A newly built Handbook Assistant reduces daily phone interruptions and is building staff self-sufficiency.
- Educators can use time savings to better support students and improve special education processes.
Challenges
For CCISD’s special education team, ensuring high-quality, detailed evaluations came with a significant workload. Lead Diagnostician Amber Bottoms and Assessment Coordinator Jennifer Stevenson manually reviewed every single Full Individual Evaluation (FIE) submitted by district evaluators. The two educators reviewed more than 1,000 reports last year, with each review taking 60-90 minutes per report.
The workload was unsustainable on top of their regular responsibilities. “We had a lot of late nights. A lot of working 60+ hours a week to get it done,” said Stevenson. Something had to give. By the second semester, the team had to drop a second review to make sure requested corrections were completed. The result: these evaluations didn’t have the same level of quality control.
At the same time, Bottoms and Stevenson were each fielding 18-20 calls a day from diagnosticians and other special education staff. The two-person team supports 24 diagnosticians as well as staff across school sites, speech pathology, and related services. Bottoms and Stevenson wanted to be available to support staff, but the constant support requests were a drain on their already full schedules.
They decided to create a special education handbook that would be a self-serve resource for staff to find answers to their questions. It was a step in the right direction, but staff still frequently called when they couldn’t find an answer or needed guidance quickly. The district needed a system in which staff could find reliable answers without waiting for one of two people to become available.
Texas special education requirements added another layer of complexity. CCISD operates in what Stevenson described as a highly litigious area, making detailed, defensible documentation especially important. Special education leaders had to navigate the state’s tiered funding requirements, another process that demanded significant staff time.
The district needed to make its workflows more sustainable without sacrificing the professional judgment, accuracy, and oversight essential to special education.
Solution
CCISD has worked with Panorama since 2021, when they started with Panorama Surveys and Panorama Check-ins before adding Panorama Student Success and Panorama Pathways in 2025. The district then expanded to Panorama Solara in 2026 to take advantage of Panorama’s AI capabilities. The special education team identified areas where Solara could support high-burden workflows while keeping educator oversight at the center.
Rather than a top-down mandate, the district took a deliberate approach to AI adoption that was primarily staff-led. Bottoms, Stevenson, and their colleagues built the tools themselves prompt by prompt and refined them around CCISD’s own requirements.
FIE Review Tool
To tackle the time-consuming FIE review process, Stevenson started with an existing Solara tool. She created a district-specific checklist incorporating CCISD’s required documentation, templates, standard language, and expectations. The process was iterative as Stevenson worked with Panorama’s team to improve the tool. She layered in a knowledge base of CCISD’s own documentation requirements and templates. By testing the tool with real reports, she can refine prompts, instructions, and exceptions.
Handbook Assistant
To reduce the call volume of support questions, Stevenson created a Handbook Assistant in Solara. The tool uses the handbook Stevenson and Bottoms had written as the knowledge base. Staff can use the Handbook Assistant to ask questions and receive answers grounded specifically in CCISD’s own procedures.
One new staff member, for example, needed to know where to archive consent documents. Instead of calling Bottoms or Stevenson, she asked the Handbook Assistant and received the exact folder identified in the district’s procedures. With the tool, staff are now able to find and apply this information themselves.
Special Education Tiered Funding Classification Tool
CCISD partnered with Panorama to streamline special education funding classifications under Texas's new funding model. Using Solara, district staff can review students' IEPs against state funding criteria and identify the appropriate funding tiers without manually working through every requirement. The tool helps reduce administrative work while keeping district professionals responsible for verifying classifications and ensuring accuracy.
Human Oversight
Educator expertise remains a central part of the district’s AI workflows. While Solara helps identify issues, special education professionals determine what those issues mean and what action to take. When the tool flags issues or needs additional context, the team adjusts its instructions and exceptions.
Stevenson pointed to Solara’s reluctance to fill in information it cannot substantiate as an important guardrail. “If it even thinks it’s going to have to make an assumption, it tells me no, it’s not going to do that,” Stevenson said. “I do like that and appreciate that about it.”
Results
Special educators in CCISD are spending less time chasing paperwork and answering repetitive questions, and spending more time supporting students. AI has accelerated the parts of the job that consume hours, while educators remain responsible for interpreting information, making decisions, and ensuring every student receives the individualized support they need.
Instead of spending 60-90 minutes on each FIE review, Stevenson and Bottoms say that work now takes approximately 15-20 minutes. With this time savings, the team can return reviewed reports to evaluators the same day rather than making them wait in a review queue. For a team that reviewed more than 1,000 reports in the previous school year, that difference has the potential to return hundreds of hours to special education staff.
The district has seen similar efficiencies with its tiered funding workflow. In one example, staff took nearly two hours to complete an IEP-related funding process manually. Now with Solara, the same work was finished in under 10 minutes.
Stevenson and Bottoms are fielding fewer calls and interruptions now that staff have access to the self-service Handbook Assistant for routine questions. By giving direct access to district-specific guidance, CCISD is building special education staff’s independence so they aren’t as reliant on two people. “Giving them more ownership of their learning is my ultimate goal,” Bottoms said.
The special education team sees more opportunities ahead with Solara. The next stage of the FIE rollout will give evaluators access to the review workflow, so Bottoms and Stevenson can shift from reviewing every report to spot-checking work for quality. The team is reviewing an IEP checker and exploring ways to synthesize assessment and observation information to make it easier for new diagnosticians to identify appropriate follow-up assessments.
CCISD’s work with Solara so far has demonstrated that efficiency and professional judgment don’t have to be competing priorities in special education.
