Parallel Provider Open House

Hello, welcome. That was a very abrupt transition. Hello, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us at this Parallel Provider Open House. My name is Dr. Jordan Wright. I am our Chief Clinical Officer here at Parallel, and you're going to get to know me a little bit better later. I'm going to leave it at that. The little housekeeping thing I want to say is you're going to see this QR code, and we've put this QR code on just about every slide. So at any point, if you wanna point your phone at it and, and go, you can certainly do that. We're gonna try and make this not too salesy. We really just wanna use this time for you to get to know us and who we are and, and what we stand for. So please sit back and relax. If you are interested, we are hiring and you can use this QR code to find out more information, to send us your resume. Do not stress about your resume. If it's not perfect, that's totally fine. Um, we don't want to make this too hard for anybody, so, um, please feel free to reach out to us at any point, and we will give you contact and this QR code as we go. So without further ado, I am actually— I have the pleasure to introduce to you our founder and CEO, Diana. And she's going to give a little welcome, tell you a little bit about why she started Parallel and who she is and why The work we do is so important to her. So I'm going to invite you, Diana, to come on up.

Amazing. Thank you, Jordan, and welcome to everyone. We're so excited to have you all here. And as Jordan mentioned, the purpose of, you know, today, we really want to invite you all into our family here at Parallel. Want you to have a better idea of what Parallel is, how it came to be. I'll start with that, and then a little bit more about how we work and what's unique about Parallel. You all have a number of different companies that you can go work for, and we really want to show you and put our best foot forward of why we think you should come join us here at Parallel. So with that, I want to start by just sharing the founding story behind Parallel with some very embarrassing baby pictures, which I can assure you Jordan is going to get some embarrassing baby pictures as well. But Parallel really came from my own experience actually growing up with ADHD and dyslexia, which you can see here. I was really lucky in that I was diagnosed at a young age, so I reaped the benefits of early detection and early intervention for my conditions. Was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was only 7 years old, which was extremely beneficial to my long-term trajectory. Didn't end up being diagnosed with ADHD until later in life when I was in high school, but nonetheless was able to really reap the benefits of such great support from my family. From my teachers, from other resources in the school, and just had a really uniquely good experience, which I recognize is not the norm for most students across America. And so when it came to really wanting to start Parallel, it came from this motivation of really wanting to bring my reality to more students across the country who frankly have a very different story to tell in most cases, are years behind in core academic subjects, They're struggling to get support and advocates on their side, and potentially struggling with mental health conditions as a result, right? The recipe goes on and on. So Parallel was really founded on this idea of bringing access and equity to really high-quality services. We want to be able to provide highly individualized support to all the students that need it. So that means Not just getting in and, and helping kids understand how they learn and think, but then being able to actually support them so that they can really hone in on their strengths and find coping mechanisms to work around their, their weaknesses. And so with that, I will introduce you to our mission here at Parallel, which is that we are building the foundation for different learners and thinkers to thrive. You'll hear us talk about this all of the time. This is really our driving mission across everything that we do here at Parallel. It really comes down to, at the end of the day, the kiddos that we work with, setting them up for success. And just to touch on why it's so important, I think everyone who is on this call probably knows the importance of helping kids, especially from an early age. But just to put the numbers And some statistics in front of folks. Roughly 15% of kids that are in K-12 school system are said to have a learning or thinking difference. And these stats always, you know, really just frame the intensity of the picture of the fact that students with a learning difference or other health indication are 3 times more likely to drop out of school, 2 times more likely to receive school discipline. that 50% of the justice juvenile, juvenile justice system is said to have a learning difference or OHI is crazy to me. And that 46% of students with a learning disability or a health indication will potentially experience unemployment during their, their career. And these are huge consequences, not just for individual students, but for society as a whole. And I say that because the work that we are doing here at Parallel It really does have such an impact both on the individual student that you're helping and you're working with at the end of the day, as well as on the greater, you know, social fabric of our country. And so it's something that I feel really great waking up and working towards every day. And really none of it would be possible without each and every one of our wonderful providers who are really the ones that are doing the heavy lifting, working with the students directly. And so just a little bit more on Parallel from a business perspective before I turn it over back over to Jordan. Parallel has grown a lot since I started the company. So Parallel was started about 3 and a half, 4 years ago now. We started just in the little yellow dot up here in New York and have since ballooned outwards. And you can see all of the colored states are states that we now operate in and are hiring providers in and working with students in. And so we now work across a number of service lines, everything from school psychology to speech and language therapy to specialized teaching. We're able to work with students across now 20+ states, which is very exciting to say, with the goal of eventually one day being able to serve all 50 states. And to give a little bit more context into the numbers behind Parallel, again, we've grown a lot very quickly. And so 12 states historically served, a bunch of new states, as I touched on, opening now. We're in the process of prospecting in 8 new states, starting to really build relationships with districts and understand their needs in now 8 new states, with the goal of going into those states in the new school year and being able to support those districts. We've already done a few pilots this past spring in some of those states, which has been really exciting to see the traction. We're in 80+ school districts at this point and serving more than 5,000 students. We haven't seen a 95% increase in our provider network year over year. And then this ROM data, and there's a lot of the ROM data, but we stuck just one in without peppering everyone with too much data. But I think it's something that's really, really exciting, and I'll let Jordan geek out on it also. But we have been collecting data points on how our students feel about their providers, how providers feel about students' improvement since very early on in session delivery. And so we have now a robust pool of data, and we've worked with so many different providers and different students now. It's amazing to see on average that we have a 9.3 student feeling rate. That's incredibly, incredibly high and really, really good. And something that's really a testament to, again, all of the hard work that every provider who works with us does day in and day out. There is really no way to get high results like that without fantastic people on either side of the screen. So it's a big thank you and shout out to all of our current providers. And I hope I can welcome many more of you on the call to our community. And with that, I am going to talk— I'm going to push— it's been a long day. I'm sorry. I'm going to pass it to Jordan, who's going to talk a little bit more about turning our mission into action.

Thank you, Diana. Yeah, and I'm going to pre-apologize because I geek about— I geek out about a lot of stuff. So you're just gonna have to bear with me. If you're not a geek, I apologize. If you are, welcome. I very much welcome you. So as Diana promised, because she got humiliated, I also get to be humiliated. This is me growing up, me being a little goofball, as you can see. And my journey was very different than Diana's. I Actually didn't struggle all that much during school with the academic work, but I was really compensating for something. I actually made it through high school without reading a book, and when I got to college, I suspected I might have a learning disability. I thought maybe I had a problem reading, and I went and got evaluated, and actually it was just ADHD. Not just, it was ADHD. I could read fine. I just couldn't sustain it. I couldn't manage to make my way through, force myself to manage my own attention span to sit down and read a book. Actually, when I looked back, when I got diagnosed, when I learned about my neurodivergence, I looked back and saw all the different ways that it actually did affect me growing up. There were many small and larger ways. It wasn't about school failure for me. But there were a lot of things that I could point to and say, ah, that's why that happened to me. That's why I struggled in that relationship, or that teacher hated me for whatever reason. It was learning about my neurodivergence in college way too late. And it has changed the trajectory of my life. It's changed the trajectory of my career. And about 10 years ago, I started doing research into virtual service provision and tele-assessment specifically, looking at what is possible because I, like Diana, cared a lot about access. I knew there were a lot of kids who were— just didn't have access to the psychoeducational evaluations that they needed to get the supports that they deserved to thrive in school. So I started doing research to find out how could we leverage technology? What can we do is it equal? Is it equivalent to in-person? And did a lot of work in that area that nobody really cared about until 2020. And something happened, I can't remember what, but the world changed in 2020 and it became very sexy, that research. So I am super proud to have partnered with Diana to push this mission forward, to improve access to services, to evaluations, and to deepen the work that we're doing with students. And now I'll— Stop making you look at my childhood pictures. More importantly than me as a child is our fantastic clinical team. I just want to introduce them briefly. Many of them are on this call and will be doing breakout sessions later, and you're going to be able to ask them questions. So look here, get to know them, look at their smiling faces because they are not only ridiculously competent and excellent and excelling at what they do, but they are also some of the nicest people I've ever ever met, and I am very privileged to be able to work with them. Um, Taylor Vealey, uh, who is our Vice President of K-12 Clinical Services, um, our mighty school psych team, Teresa and Stacy, um, and, uh, Shawna Beyer, our SLP Program Director, and Dr. Tiffany Williams and Roxanna, who are our SLP team as well. The 3 of them head up a gigantic SLP team and work tirelessly with our providers to make sure that they have all the tools they need to help the kiddos in the best way possible. I want to stay— I just want to stay on this slide forever because I love my team. All right. So who we are now. These are the services that we are currently providing: comprehensive psychoeducational assessment, Specialized instruction, special education instruction, behavioral and mental health counseling— that is through both school psychologists and social workers— and speech-language pathology, and that includes both ongoing services and speech evaluations. This is what we're doing. We're doing a lot of Tier 3 work in schools, and this is primarily where we are hiring at the moment, and you can ask any questions you want about that. But more importantly, I get the privilege of talking about why I think Parallel is different. What I think— there are 2 things I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to talk about our excellence and our innovation. So let me start with Parallel's clinical difference with regard to excellence. We want to make sure that our providers have every possible tool they need to be excellent. We want to trim the fat and make sure you as providers are not doing a whole bunch of busywork or a whole bunch of prep work that you don't necessarily need to be doing, so that you can focus on building those relationships with the kiddos that you're working with. We want our students to be the primary focus of the work. So one of the ways we do this is through a, a ridiculously robust clinical quality assurance and support Program. I get criticized a little bit or poked fun at because I call this our clinical machine, which I know sounds very utilitarian. But we have built what I call a machine around every single provider. And you can see here the school team up at the top, the kiddos, the teams, and the provider is right in the middle. We have so many ways to support our providers. All the way from our clinical leads, who are your primary point people, who are awesome in every way, shape, or form, who hold weekly office hours, who help you with escalations, who do on-demand case conferences. If you're having a problem figuring out what exactly to do with a particular student, they are there as clinical supports. They're also there to help you organize. Your time and make sure that you are in compliance. We're we're making sure that you are meeting the minutes and all that kind of stuff, and we've got another set of eyes to help you do that and help you manage that, as well as to do the best work you can do. We have a provider education team that does onboarding and skills training, and we have continuing professional development. We offer. CE programs for free for our providers, trying to do what we can to make you the best providers that you can be. And then we have ops teams. We've got our operations teams who offer a ton of support. I say that they, they try and make the relationship with schools as frictionless as possible. We are building technology and tools to make everything as easy as possible for schools. and providers, but also we've got this team of amazing professionals who are there to help troubleshoot, obviously tech support, but, but even more than that, managing the relationship with schools and school partners, stepping in if you need them to help negotiate or fix anything that needs fixing. We know that schools and school districts can sometimes be a little prickly in, in their interactions with us as providers. So We have this clinical machine built around each provider to make sure you can concentrate and focus on exactly what you need to focus on. And I'm not going to belabor this, but you can see just how much we invest in every single provider. We do obviously the prior to hiring stuff, but at hiring we do a lot of training. We do a readiness review to make sure that you fully understand the technology that we're working with. Our platform is not like Zoom. It's not like maybe one that you have used before. So there are tools that we've built in and we've tried to make it as user-friendly as possible, but we want to make sure that you are comfortable using it. And then you can see all of the other supports that we give our providers down here in the bottom half of this graphic to make sure you can do the best work you can with our students. So in a different— in addition to clinical support, we offer a lot of curriculum and tooling in our platform. I'm going to show you an example of some curriculum in a second, but we are constantly trying to improve our platform. We are constantly working. We get a lot of input from our providers. We have some eager providers who love partnering with us and giving us feedback and making suggestions about different games we can build in, or manipulatives we can build into the platform to make it easier to engage your students. And we are constantly adding tools to the platform to make your job easier, so that you can really grasp the attention of the kiddos, which is sometimes harder in the tele-world. But we also provide curriculum so that we can make sure that we are offering you evidence-based materials. Here's an example for our behavioral mental health. I'm just going to use this as an example. I'm not going to go through every single service and the science of reading for instruction and all that kind of stuff. But here you can see we have licensed specific manualized treatment programs. Manualized does not mean you can't individualize it. We definitely individualize and tailor it to each kid. But we have the tools in a curriculum. If a kid, for example, if you look at the bottom left-hand side, has anxiety, is struggling with anxiety and needs skills to manage their anxiety better, we have a program called MATCH-ADTC, which is an extremely robust evidence-based program for working with kids. With depression, with ADHD, executive functioning difficulties, interpersonal social skills. We've got curriculum to help you structure and organize the work that you're doing with each kid based on what they need. Obviously, their IEP plans are going to dictate certain things that you need to focus on, and we've got the materials and the tools to help you focus on that. And we've got them readily available and easy to pull up so that you don't have to go digging and searching For a lot of your own materials. So finally, when it comes to clinical excellence, I'm going to talk about our professional learning community. We are—I'm a big believer that I'm always learning. I'm a—I'm a professor at a university. I train people all the time. I—I obviously give a lot of feedback, but I gain a lot every single day. I learn a lot every single day, and so we try our hardest to develop and build community amongst our providers, our. clinical team, our consultants, me, um, our leads, everybody. We want to make sure that we are resources for each other because all of us are amazing professionals. Y'all more than me. Um, all of you are amazing professionals, and we want to leverage that. Um, I get super excited when I, when I hear that we're having team meetings and some of our providers are presenting on really cool stuff, really specific niche things that they know that I absolutely don't know, and they present on it to their colleagues and their other providers and all of us. And I get super excited that we can continue to learn and grow as a community of providers. All of these 3 buckets help us push toward excellence in the work that we're doing with our students. Now I'm going to touch on innovation. This is extremely important. I know we're being recorded, and I know I shouldn't say this publicly, but our education system is broken. Our education system, all of those stats that Diana cited earlier, is evidence of a broken system. And so we need to think about innovative ways to think differently about how we provide services to those kids who need them. When the education system is failing them, when the education system is not serving them or not matching the way that their brains work, we need to find innovative ways to think about how to meet societal needs, meet the needs of these kids. So I'm just going to go through really quickly some innovations. Some are like low-hanging fruit type innovations that were easy for us and we've been doing a long time. Some we're still working on and moving towards. So integrated assessments. This is for our, especially our SLPs and our school psychs out there who are doing evaluations. We have partnered with obvious— the obvious industry leaders, Pearson, Riverside, Insights, who own the biggest tests that we tend to use in comprehensive evaluations. And we have leveraged what they have to build it into our platform. So you no longer need one administration manual, a record form, a stimulus book, everything. We have built it into one screen. So that you can see what you need to say. They can see the stimulus book on their side. You can also see part of the stimulus book, and they can point, and you can see where they're pointing. It's all built in in a really seamless, easy way to administer these tests, and these are built in also in a way that is aligned with the research, the research that I do. We have a report writer. The report writer is the thing. This was probably Especially earlier on, this was one of my biggest passions. To make your life and job easier, we have a way to input all of the test data in a way that you don't have to transfer it manually. We just upload the Woodcock-Johnson or WISC report or whatever the computer report is, the GIFTA, whatever it is. We have a way that it just inputs in and starts the report for you. It's not going to do all of the thinking that we need your professional brains to do, but it's going to get you halfway there at least. It's gonna help push you forward and do all of the sort of manual stuff that you don't need your professional brain to do. And it's got a template and it's got a structure. And I get excited about it and I nerd out a little too much because assessment is actually my area of focus professionally. We have integrated IEP goals into our system. This is really, really cool to me. So when you are in a session with a student or with a few students, if it's a group session, right there in the session, you can see the IEP goal that you are working against, that you're working toward. And you can rate them in the session. You can say, oh, they managed to do this without prompts, or they managed to articulate this particular letter in the correct way 80% of the time, or this many tries. And you can actually calculate it and do it all within the session, and it tracks for you. You get a little graph that is tied to their chart, and you can look at it in every session right there. during the session so that you can see how you're progressing. We have tried to streamline documentation. We're continually working on streamlining documentation so that you can do it as quickly and easily as possible. We are in the midst of figuring out the best ways and the most ethical ways to leverage AI and other things to make your life easier because Let's face it, you did not become a licensed professional to write notes or do charting all that much, right? So we want to make this as easy as possible. We measure student outcomes. So in addition to the outcomes against IEP goals, Diana mentioned our ROMs. This is routine outcome monitoring, and at the end of every single session, our students are asked for questions, and they have a little slider from frowny face to smiley face. 2 of them are about how they are doing and progressing toward their goals in their own mind. And 2 of them are about how they felt, how they felt about the session and how they felt about their provider that day. And that's where we are well above 9. And Diana was right to point out that our providers are awesome. These are extremely high numbers out of a 10. Getting a 9.3 on average is fantastic. We have mentor programs. I'm not going to talk too much about this, but we— probably one of my favorite, favorite, favorite programs is called the BTSS program. It's the Bridge to School Success program, and it's for SLPs who are primarily trained or their experience is primarily in medical settings, and it's to help them transition into the school setting. And so they get structured learning and lessons and information as well as mentorship. They get paired with somebody to ask a bunch of questions to. It's a fantastic program and it's seen such success. And we've seen some amazing providers enter our schools who didn't have all that much school experience prior to coming. And they have been very, very successful in schools. And this is one of a few different types of mentor programs. I just like to brag on that one I think it's so cool. And lastly, oops, is professional development. Yeah, I talked, I touched on this. We do like to make sure that our providers are growing and learning, and that's why we offer webinars and CE programs and make sure that we are supporting you in the best ways possible. to grow as professionals, not just numbers and not just you do the work for us. We are invested in you growing and being the best professionals you can be. That's why we have the clinical machine. It's why we have all these tools. It's why we have our mentor programs and professional development opportunities. We want you to grow and succeed. And because that frankly makes us look good too. Right? It changes the world. It changes each individual kid's trajectory, hopefully in a way like Diana's, and it then changes the landscape of education.