The charter
Why Advocate exists
Special education runs on documents. IEPs, evaluations and notices are written by people who produce them every day and read by parents who get one chance at a kitchen table after the kids are asleep. The district side of the table has attorneys on retainer and a template for every form. The parent side has love, exhaustion and a folder. Advocate exists to level the reading: it decodes what's written, names what the law requires and the page left out, finds every deadline and puts the right words in your hands, so the meeting starts even.
What Advocate is
A document decoder and a procedure coach. Paste the paperwork and get a plain-language explanation with receipts: verbatim quotes from your own document, and regulation citations from a versioned rules library where every entry carries its source and verification date. Free, for every document, for everyone.
And when a meeting is coming, a $25 flat-fee Meeting Prep Pack: the agenda, the verbatim “magic words,” the put-it-in-writing email, the goal checklist, the one-pager for the room.
What Advocate will never do
Never diagnose your child. Score patterns and behavior descriptions are decoded as written; what they mean clinically belongs to evaluators and pediatricians, and the decode hands those questions to them, worded for the appointment.
Never prescribe services. Advocate tells you what the document promises, what the law requires a document to contain, and how to ask for what's missing. It will not tell you what services your child “should” get. A tool that does is practicing something it shouldn't.
Never predict outcomes. No odds on hearings, complaints, or negotiations. Anyone who sells certainty about due process is selling.
Never give legal advice. We are not a law firm. Information about procedure, always; advice about your specific legal situation, never.
Promises the code keeps
Your document is read once and discarded. Analysis happens in memory; there is no database of documents to breach, sell, or subpoena. The only things we ever store: your email if you opt in, and payment records (held by Stripe).
Every quote is checked against your page. Every finding must cite your document. After every analysis, a guard written in code re-checks each quoted fragment and date against your document, strips anything it can't verify, and tells you it did.
Money never changes the answer. Free and paid users get the identical analysis; the paid pack adds the meeting kit and never a different truth. The payment step has no way to alter a finding.
We never take money from the institutions we critique. No district contracts, no vendor referral fees, no “partnerships” with the other side of your table.
When we send you to humans
A self-help tool has edges, and the decode names them. When your situation involves due process, a discipline removal, a placement fight or a district that ignores its own paper, it says so and points first to the free help. Every state has a federally funded Parent Training & Information center, staffed largely by parents who've done this. After that come COPAA's directory of advocates and attorneys and your state's Protection & Advocacy agency. We take no referral fees from any of them.
The fine print, plainly
Advocate is information, not legal advice; using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Rules data is seeded from primary sources and marked with verification dates; regulations change, and we re-verify — but always confirm deadlines against your own documents and your state's current rules. Read the privacy policy and terms.