Schools in the United States are already fighting teacher shortage. For students with thinking and learning difficulties, it is even more difficult find teachers and other specialists who are equipped to work with them. Parallel Learning solves that problem with a teletherapy platform that partners with school districts to create individualized plans for each student.
Parallel, aimed at children in kindergarten through 12th grade, announced that it has raised a new sum of $6,125 million, led by Rethink Impact, a fund that focuses on female and non-binary founders. Financing, which raises the Serie A At a total of 20 million dollars, it will be used for expansion into new territories and products. This will involve hiring suppliers who have licenses in each new state where Parallel will operate.
Founded three years ago in New York City, the startup says that in the third quarter it increased its supplier network by 200%, with more than 95% of suppliers choosing to stay with Parallel. This means Parallel has been able to work with 4 times the number of students in nearly 80 K-12 school districts, resulting in 4 times the total revenue generated compared to the previous year.
Services offered by Parallel providers include speech-language pathology, specialized instruction, training of mental health and behavioral and executive functions training for students. Parallel providers work with a school's special education program (SPED) to develop an Individualized Education Program (IEP), a legal document in the United States that describes the personalized education plan for a student with special needs.
Parallel Founder and CEO Diana Heldfond conveys that Parallel's mission is personal to her. When she was seven, Heldfond was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia.
“I experienced firsthand several of the same services we now provide to students and can speak firsthand to the impact additional support can have,” he says. Heldfond began her career working on Wall Street and, after seeing many investments in the development services space, spent years developing a thesis on a virtual care provider. Then, when the pandemic hit and schools began to struggle to serve their students, Heldfond knew it was time to make his idea a reality.
One of the main issues Parallel addresses is the shortage of behavioral and special education providers who work with children. “Special education has the complicated problem of everything being lumped together at the district level,” Heldfond says. “Each student receives different services, which makes it a big challenge for districts, especially in rural areas. Imagine that providers spend hours driving from one school to another. “It is a huge waste of time, especially when there is already a huge shortage of these suppliers.”
Set goals
The company's clinical director is Dr. A. Jordan Wright, psychologist and author of the sixth edition of the "Manual of Psychological Assessment" and "Fundamentals of Psychological Teleassessment." Since children, especially younger ones, react differently to teletherapy, Parallel worked with clinical publishers such as Pearson and Riverside to incorporate learning materials, interactive games and activities into sessions, which are useful for children with short attention spans. shorter. The platform also includes a library of clinical testing materials for speech therapists and school psychologists, and curricula for educators and service providers.
Parallell's proprietary software also includes partnerships with curriculum publishers that use evidence-based practices. Its enhanced GoalTracker tool tracks a student's progress on their IEP and generates individual progress reports, saving your special education team time.
Once a collaborative plan is created with everyone invested in a student's well-being, including their providers, teachers, and family, Parallel begins with an initial meeting where everyone comes together to create a plan. The plan takes into account the strengths of each school district, which is an important part of Parallel's business model. The company partners with K-12 public school districts, reaching out to special education directors, superintendents and others.
We offer districts a menu of services, including evaluations, speech and language therapy, mental health services and specialized instruction,” says Heldfond. “School districts have the flexibility to choose between these core services based on their specific needs.”
One of the ways Parallel is working to prevent burnout among its suppliers is by encouraging them to form a community with each other, through things like continuing education, mentoring, and opportunities to grow within Parallel.
Prevent burnout
“We have made it a priority to integrate our suppliers into the Parallel community and ensure they achieve substantial benefits that make Parallel the right choice for them. We even have programs that help providers transition from private practice to working in schools,” Heldfond says. She adds that Parallel's lead-to-supplier ratio is 3 times lower than its competitors, allowing it to provide more support to suppliers. Parallel workers include 1099 and W2 employees, who are paid hourly and work remotely.
Parallel grows and finds more suppliers in several ways. One is word of mouth: suppliers who already work for Parallel recommend their peers. They are also talking to universities, especially graduate schools, to recruit future suppliers. It has also created a library of free resources for internal and external providers, including professional development materials, free white papers, and webinars, with the goal of attracting trained speech therapists, school psychologists, specialty trainers, and school social workers.
Parallel also announced five key hires to its leadership team. They include former GoHealth CTO Cern Veron, who will be Parallel's chief strategic growth officer; Sarah Finney, who will join as vice president of customer success after serving in a similar role at Presence Learning; former Acorn Health senior vice president of strategic growth Monica Maspons, who will serve at Parallel as vice president of strategic operations; Kushal Patel, new vice president of finance at Parallel after serving as senior director of strategic finance at Learneo; and Polygon co-founder and CTO Meryll Dindin, who joins Parallel as head of data analytics and artificial intelligence.
In an investor statement, Rethink Impact Founder and Managing Partner Jenny Abrasion said: “Parallel's innovative technology comes at a time when 42 of 50 states face a shortage of SPED teachers. Our firm spent years searching for solutions in special education and was incredibly impressed not only by the quality of what Diana and her team have built, but also by the fact that they have scaled so quickly to over 80 districts.”
