#StartupsEverywhere: Coretta Martin, Co-Founder, IEP&Me
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Empowering special education students
It’s hard to manage the development of learning plans for special education students. Coretta Martin and her co-founder, Bridgette Leslie, are bringing a community-focused approach to this space to bridge the gap between students and their schools with their startup, IEP&Me. We sat down with Coretta to discuss her company, data privacy, and her journey raising capital as an underrepresented founder.
Tell us about your background. What led you to IEP&Me?
I went to Howard University for undergrad and started my career in education in Washington, D.C. I actually met my co-founder while working at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School. In the K-12 school setting I worked as a teacher, instructional coach, and director of special education. When I left D.C. and went to Boston, I served as a Chief of Staff and as Chief Academic Officer for KIPP Massachusetts..
Outside of the school setting, I’ve worked throughout the education sector in both American K-12 schools and global organizations, training teachers in developing areas like East Africa and Southeast Asia. I worked for organizations like TNTP, ANet, and Zeal Education to support
Also after Howard, I went to graduate school at the University of Southern California and Harvard. In grad school and in my various roles, I have worked with teachers, students, families, curriculum teams, and school principals. My career up to that point left me with questions about the bigger picture: How are wraparound services structured for students? What opportunities exist for before- and after-school programs? How is summer programming designed? How do these models translate on a global scale? One common theme was special education–how do we support students, families, and teachers with an understanding of special education? How can we help that community create and implement Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that empower individual students.
My co-founder and I stayed in touch over the years, and she had the idea to build a support system for special education students to support self-advocacy and student-led IEP meetings.
We came together, and we wanted to serve the students. But to assist the students, we needed to support the teachers, and to help the teachers, we needed to help the administrators. So we decided to just rethink the whole special education management system.
What is the work you all are doing at IEP&Me?
During brainstorming, instead of focusing on curriculum-specific and disability-specific tools, we decided to build a compliance system that keeps the end user in mind. IEP&Me complies with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and has state best practices for writing compliant IEPs.
We provide tools for special educators to securely store private data in a space compliant with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. We have also designed dedicated spaces for parents and school partners to collaborate on the IEP creation process. You never know who the student’s “village is” - I’ve seen situations when it’s a football coach or even the sign-in lady at the school rec center is one of the biggest advocates for the student. We want to be sure everyone has access in a data secure way.
Tell us about your capital access journey. Are there any barriers you face as a woman or woman of color that you would like to highlight?
It's challenging. We're closing out our seed round now. We raised a pre-seed and a friends and family round as well. We've gone through the raising process a few times and we’ve learned a lot.
Less that 0.4% of VC funds have historically gone to women of color so I imagine it’s only going to get harder now that some women-specific funds are going away. We’ve had success when we find the right investor fit but other times it’s bad.
My co-founder and I are both women, and we’ve heard comments about it “being okay if [we] can’t explain [our] numbers in the financial model.” As a former high school math teacher, it's one of the things I’m actually very comfortable with. I have a sense now of when I’m getting different questions or responses based on being a woman and a woman of color, and there are comments and questions that my male friends just don’t get during their pitches. Sometimes I hear the "Oh, your parents must be so proud," and I think, yeah, they've been proud my whole life; this isn’t new.
I also have a particularly unique challenge as a founder of color. My co-founder is white, and many opportunities for founders of color come with requirements, such as needing 51% of the cap table to be Black-owned, the CEO having attended an HBCU, or meeting similar criteria. Sometimes, I almost feel as if my Blackness is being erased in the process when looking for opportunities that are specific to underrepresented founders.
We’ve heard from other EdTech startups that compliance costs can pile up due to policies differing from school district to school district. What has been your experience at IEP&Me?
At IEP&Me, we want to get the supportive community of each student involved while staying focused on what’s strictly necessary for our clients so we can respect their privacy and security. The different policies increase our costs because we have to do a lot of work to ensure the appropriate data integration with other companies and platforms. That isn’t ideal for us because the cost of those integrations requires us to work with a higher pricing point for our end users, and then depending on the district, some of those costs also vary.
Whether you want to keep some or all students on your platform and increase the data, it increases the cost. The best practice would be having all students in our system with special education and 504 plans. Specifically in special education, schools desire to keep that data stored for previous students for up to 10 years or more as well. We want to ensure that schools don't bear the weight of the integration issues and data integration costs. However, having per-pupil pricing models with some of these technical integrations can be very challenging.
What are your goals for IEP&Me moving forward?
We look forward to scaling and creating more tools for our end users - students, teachers, administrators, and families. Now that we have a fully viable product, we’re working on getting as many people as we can to experience it!
So, we are working to partner with more schools that are open to going beyond the special educators and providing students and families with digital access to their IEPs while promoting family advocacy and student self-advocacy in the process.
We want to take special education and make it a collaborative process again because schools and families have been pitted against each other in recent years. IEP&Me is a tool that can bring that positive collaboration back together. I genuinely want to make a positive impact within our communities so all students can learn.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email advocacy@engine.is.
