Rosa Mendoza’s daughter has been on a special education plan for years. First it was for hearing loss and balance problems. She was struggling in class and getting injured in falls at her school, Glen Park Elementary.
Last year, Mendoza’s daughter, also named Rosa, got a new diagnosis of developmental delay. With it came an update to her special education plan, also known as an individualized education plan or IEP. But Mendoza couldn’t read it. She only speaks Spanish, and San Francisco Unified School District translation services for IEPs have been notoriously slow.
Like most IEPs, Rosa’s document was dense, full of educational and medical jargon, and nearly 50 pages long.
“The language of special education itself is like another language,” Mendoza told The Frisc via an interpreter. “It’s been an ongoing struggle.”
Instead of waiting perhaps for weeks, which some parents report, Mendoza — along with hundreds of other San Francisco parents — has turned to a surprising source of help: artificial intelligence.
But she’s not plugging her kid’s private records into ChatGPT. Mendoza is using an AI tool built especially for San Francisco parents, in a collaboration between a local nonprofit and East Coast researchers.
Called AiEP, it’s free to use and not related or tied to larger machine learning models like ChatGPT. According to its developers, AiEP is essentially a closed-off environment that provides personalized feedback to parents based on their child’s specific plan. With that clarity, parents can be stronger advocates for their kids while the school district struggles with special education staffing and resources.
Making IEPs make sense
By state law, every child entitled to special education also has an IEP. They’re legal documents that detail personalized accommodations, goals, curriculum, and types of classroom placement for each student. They can include specifics like minutes of therapy per week and quieter, autism-focused classroom settings.
There are more than 13,000 SFUSD students who are English language learners — about a quarter of the district’s population. Roughly 17 percent of these kids, or 2,300 students, are in special education, according to state data.
“We’ve strengthened our Special Education supports and systems, including improving data, reporting, and service delivery to better serve our students,” said district spokesperson Katrina Kincade in a statement emailed to The Frisc. “Currently, it takes approximately 10 days to have an IEP translated into a family’s native language.”
But 10 days is often too long to wait, say parents and advocates.
AiEP began as a conversation three years ago between Innovate Public Schools CEO Michelle Vilchez and a team of engineers at Northeastern University’s Burnes Center for Social Change. Funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, AiEP is one of 18 projects the school has piloted to try to create “human-centered, civic AI.”
First, if required, the software translates an IEP into Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, or Vietnamese. Then it summarizes key information, simplifies educational jargon, and makes personalized recommendations and checklists. These are especially helpful to prepare parents for meetings with school administrators.
“You’ve got to be really sharp at an IEP meeting,” said Mendoza. “You have to be ready to speak up, and you have to be ready to advocate, because the pressure is there.”
With AiEP’s intervention, families can quickly get clear information about the services their children are entitled to — for example, how many minutes of tutoring or therapy they receive each week — and push back if they’re not getting what they should.
Shan Hong, who has two children with IEPs in SF public schools, said AiEP helped her clarify questions before signing important agreements with the schools.
It also led her to an important discovery. In a meeting, school staff verbally told Hong that her son was entitled to 227 minutes of weekly language arts support. But the team mistakenly wrote down 100 minutes. Hong said she wouldn’t have noticed the difference — or been able to fix it — without AiEP.
Limited buy-in
AiEP is free, open-source, and works on a desktop or phone. About 200 local families have already started using it, according to Belén Farmer Martinez, Innovate’s vice president of Bay Area organizing. (Farmer Martinez translated The Frisc’s interview with Rosa Mendoza.)
The nonprofit reported revenue of nearly $7 million in 2023, the most recent year available. Most of it came from major donors such as the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation.
At the moment, Innovate is spreading the news about AiEP through word of mouth, targeting SF schools where its members have students enrolled. The nonprofit wants SFUSD to officially adopt the tool, saying it could help parents and overworked special education staff with large IEP caseloads. They also hope to make it available to other school districts.
If it helps our families, I’m all in. It’s the right approach, they just need a little more connection with the district.
guadalupe elementary school principal raj sharma
But the district has yet to sign on. Innovate organizer Becca Alvarenga says principals at a few elementary schools with high populations of non-English speaking families (Rosa Parks, Guadalupe, and Alvarado) have seen AiEP in action and say it’s interesting. But they’re concerned with security and first want an official agreement between AiEP and the district.
“If it helps our families, I’m all in,” Guadalupe principal Raj Sharma told The Frisc. “It’s the right approach, they just need to have a little more connection [with] the district.”
Board of Education member Alida Fisher, who has kids with IEPs in the district, met with Innovate parents on Zoom last month to learn about AiEP. “I am concerned, especially now in our national climate, about privacy and handing over families’ personally identifying information,” Fisher said.
SFUSD spokesperson Kincade said the district cannot put students’ personal information into third-party AI tools. “The district is carefully reviewing several AI tools, but at this point, no AI tools have been formally approved.” She added that the review is especially important with IEPs, which contain highly sensitive information about students and their families.
The engineers who built the program assure that it’s encrypted and extremely secure.
“The developers have no access at all to any sort of personal information,” said Northeastern University engineer Sofía Bosch Gómez.
The platform, she said, is highly compartmentalized. First all identifying information is redacted. Then the original file that parents upload is destroyed, and the redacted version is used to create the summaries and checklists for parents. No personal information is used to train their models.
“And at any point, if a parent goes into their account and says, ‘I want to delete absolutely everything in my account,’ the summary, everything is deleted,” said Bosch Gómez.
Only in SF
Hundreds of San Francisco parents, along with special education experts and advocates, participated in focus groups to help develop AiEP. Parents weighed in on which capabilities were most important to them, suggested language in the app, and made sure the AI-generated summaries were accurate, according to Innovate’s Farmer Martinez.
Thanks to the feedback, AiEP now summarizes and highlights the services students receive down to the minute. Those tallies help parents find information that they would otherwise have to pull laboriously out of the document.
Parents in the district have good reason to seek outside help. SFUSD has a history of failing to meet the requirements in IEPs, often due to gaping holes in special education staffing coupled with enormous workloads, according to reporting from the Chronicle. The issue has exposed the district to costly lawsuits.
For example, Mendoza fought for years to get her daughter Rosa a classroom paraprofessional for one-on-one attention. With her June 2024 diagnosis, Rosa was legally entitled to this extra help, and her IEP was updated to reflect it. But the district failed to provide a paraprofessional until May 2025, in the last weeks of the school year.
Educators have flagged this as a problem, and the teachers union has demanded more realistic workloads for special educators in ongoing contract negotiations. As of this week, talks are at a stalemate. “We are in the era of AI, and we’re using tools that were created before AI,” said Guadalupe principal Sharma, referring to the district’s special education information system. “It’s definitely a mismatch right now.”
The AiEP tool won’t solve system-wide problems, but it’s one more arrow in the quiver for families desperate to get their kids the education they deserve.
“This has changed me as a mother, because I no longer just observe. I also have a voice,” said Araceli Arellano, a parent leader at Innovate SF who has shared AiEP with other Mission District families. Arellano spoke during the Zoom conversation with Commissioner Fisher with the help of a translator: “I can proudly say that the tool delivers what we parents are really looking for. We want to be informed and we want to be given the tools to advocate for our children.”
And it’s no accident, Bosch Gómez said, that a project like this came together in San Francisco, a place well suited to “demonstrate that technology can serve everyone. It’s just a question of wanting to do it.”