Frequently asked questions about MTSS and IEP compliance.

Parthion only uses data your district already collects — attendance, grades, discipline records, benchmark assessment scores, intervention records, and IEP/504 information where applicable. No new categories of data are introduced.

All data is stored under your district's existing data-sharing agreement and is never shared with third parties for purposes unrelated to delivering the service. Parthion operates in full compliance with FERPA and the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (SOPIPA), the federal and state laws designed specifically to protect student privacy.

The criteria come from established federal research and evidence-based frameworks, not from Parthion. Early warning thresholds are drawn from the U.S. Department of Education's Early Warning Systems research and decades of dropout-prevention studies. Intervention thresholds follow decision rules from the National Center on Intensive Intervention, and the intervention library is sourced from the What Works Clearinghouse.

Parthion applies these research-backed standards as a starting point. Your district's Intervention and Referral Services (I&RS) committee retains full authority to adjust local thresholds to reflect the needs of your community.

A flag in Parthion is simply a visual indicator on a dashboard, not a classification, a determination, or a label. Think of it as the equivalent of a teacher noticing a pattern across multiple data points.

No action is ever taken automatically. Before any referral, intervention change, or family communication occurs, a credentialed educator reviews the flag and exercises professional judgment. Parthion surfaces information, and every decision belongs to your district's staff.

Yes! And, that's by design, not as a workaround. Every recommendation includes an option to override and document the decision. Those overrides are logged so the I&RS team can review where the system's suggestions and educator judgment diverged over time.

This isn't a punitive record. It's a tool for professional learning and a meaningful check on the system itself.

Parents retain all rights under FERPA, including the right to inspect their child's education records and to challenge their accuracy. Because Parthion does not introduce any new data (it organizes information your district is already required to maintain) there is no additional data collection to opt out of.

That said, your district will publish a clear notice explaining how Parthion is used, along with a procedure for families who wish to limit how their child's data is presented to staff within the platform. Your rights as a parent are unchanged.

Yes. Parthion does not make eligibility or placement determinations; those decisions remain exclusively with your district's Child Study Team and IEP team. As a result, every procedural safeguard under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) remains fully intact, including the right to mediation, due process hearings, and formal complaint investigations.

Families may also request to review the specific data inputs that informed any I&RS decision. Nothing about how your district handles disputes or appeals has changed.

Parthion welcomes independent third-party review, and districts may require it as part of their procurement process. The platform is built to comply with FERPA, SOPIPA, and applicable state student data privacy statutes, and is currently being submitted for 1EdTech Data Privacy Certification.

On the question of equity specifically, disproportionality monitoring is a built-in feature, not an afterthought. Parthion actively tracks whether intervention recommendations are equitable across racial, ethnic, English language learner, and disability subgroups, and surfaces any disparities for district review. If something looks uneven, your team will see it.

All data is encrypted in transit and at rest using current industry standards. Access to the platform is role-based (meaning staff only see what they are authorized to see) and every access event is audit-logged.

In the event of a breach or unauthorized access, your district's data-sharing agreement specifies notification timelines consistent with applicable state law. Your district will be notified promptly and in accordance with its legal obligations.

It's also worth noting that by consolidating fragmented tools into a single, secured platform, Parthion can actually reduce your district's overall cybersecurity exposure: fewer disconnected systems means fewer points of vulnerability.

Oversight sits with the administrator already responsible for I&RS, MTSS, and special education, typically the Director of Curriculum and Instruction or the Director of Special Services. This is not a new role or new responsibility. It is an extension of existing district leadership.

Parthion provides training and certification for designated district administrators, and welcomes (and supports!) a formal governance structure documented in board policy.

A strong Present Levels of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance (PLAAFP) statement is specific, data-driven, and directly tied to the student's measurable annual goals. Good PLAAFP examples describe a student's current performance in concrete terms — for instance, citing benchmark scores, attendance patterns, or observed functional skills — rather than vague descriptors like 'struggles with reading.'

Parthion surfaces the data points districts already collect to help IEP teams write more precise, defensible PLAAFP statements. For in-depth guidance and annotated examples, look out for our upcoming practitioner post on the Resources page.

Disproportionality — the over- or under-identification of students from specific racial, ethnic, English language learner, or disability subgroups for special education services — is a federal compliance requirement under IDEA and a serious equity issue for districts.

Parthion's early warning system includes built-in disproportionality monitoring that continuously tracks whether intervention and referral patterns are equitable across student subgroups. When the data surfaces a disparity, district leaders see it in real time — before it becomes a compliance finding — and can take corrective action early.

Yes. Parthion's intervention tracking workflows are designed to connect IEP goal data with the broader MTSS picture, so progress monitoring is not siloed from the rest of a student's support plan.

Teams can log intervention delivery, track goal attainment over time, and surface progress data directly within the platform — reducing the manual work of pulling reports from disconnected systems and ensuring that IEP teams always have current data when it matters most.