Documenting Services Provided to a Growing Special Education Population

Approximately 17% of students in Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District (CFB) receive special education services. Sara Roland is Assistant Superintendent of Special Services in the district, in a suburb of Dallas, Texas. She says that number has increased dramatically in recent years.

In the past, the district lacked a centralized, uniform way of keeping track of services provided. Each campus had their own way to keep records, which prevented the Special Services department from using data to set goals or make decisions. Determining which services to submit for Medicaid was similarly challenging.

Frontline Medicaid & Service Management

Sara began at CFB in the summer of 2023. She used Frontline to track services in her previous district and was excited to see that CFB also uses it, not only for service tracking but also for Medicaid billing. She immediately began working to take full advantage of the system and ensure the district uses it as widely and effectively as possible.

Universal Documentation

Sara’s vision is to use Frontline to document all services the district provides to students — regardless of whether they are Medicaid-eligible. Once the district begins universal documentation later this year, she anticipates using data to make decisions. While the district does bill Medicaid for reimbursement of eligible services, the bigger benefit for Sara will be to have one place to capture all data on services provided so they can serve students better. “One of my big pushes is to decrease the use of the term ‘Medicaid.’ I try to explain this as a documentation system, and a bonus to the system is should a student receive Medicaid, then they can bill for Medicaid and we get a reimbursement. But we are going to document for all students.”

The Special Services department has trained all paraprofessionals across the district to document services in Frontline. They also added a clerk devoted to the School Health and Related Services (SHARS) process, which is the Texas program that covers Medicaid reimbursement. The clerk ensures that Medicaid consents are signed, stored, and documented in Frontline, and helps the district keep service providers accountable by making sure documentation is completed in a timely fashion.

Documenting services for all students in Frontline will then make Medicaid billing simpler with validations and billing management that takes the guesswork out of which claims are billable.

IEP Compliance and Legal Protection

With every report card, the district sends personalized progress reports for each student with an IEP, showing the progress the student has made toward their individual goals. “The data is then used to determine how close they are to mastering the goal, what changes we need to make in the goal, and so it helps drive the decisions for the next year’s goals.”

Frontline also serves as a digital paper trail to prove that services have been delivered — enabling teachers to demonstrate to parents that services were indeed provided. “If we can hold teachers accountable for documenting their services in the system, then it provides protection against litigious parents,” Sara says. The documentation in Frontline is there to support what is communicated to parents in progress reports. “This is a place to store it. I just think the system is great for that.”