Zone 2e, Inc.

Zone 2e exists to create artificial intelligence (AI) software and services to maximize the potential of twice-exceptional (2e) students and ensure they stop falling through the cracks in the public and private school systems. Zone 2e’s innovation enables at-scale individualization of education. The second facet of our mission is to generalize these technologies to serve all K-through-12 students in America. 

Across the country, three to five million 2e K-12 children struggle to receive an education that enables them to reach their intellectual and academic potential.[2],[3],[4],[5] Many 2e students struggle significantly because the educational system poorly understands their accelerated and asynchronous developmental and learning needs. These struggles translate to expensive financial, social, and emotional burdens for these students and their families.[6] This year, we have seen educational costs ranging from $62,000/year to $105,000/year in direct educational and advocacy expenses borne by 2e families. Because 2e students are gifted and high-ability individuals with co-occurring learning differences, their complex learning needs are often unidentified or under-identified. Learning differences and disabilities may include ADHD, executive functioning disorder, dysgraphia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). 

 

The body of evidence shows that 2e students require strength-based gifted individualized learning programs (G-IEPs) that utilize their strengths as scaffolding for learning differences. (Reis, S.M. et al. (2014),[7] Baum, S. M. et al. (2001),[8] Trail, B. A. (2022),[9] Assouline, S. G. et al. (2010)[10], Brody, L. E., Mills C. J. (1997)[11]).

 

But IEPs are a significant pain point for 2e students because many educators erroneously fail to grasp that giftedness is fully compatible with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).[12] As the centerpiece of the IDEA,the IEP legislation is often misinterpreted solely as a deficit remediation system. This flawed interpretation is problematic for 2e students whose needs span the exceptionalities of giftedness and learning differences. Their giftedness cannot be isolated from learning differences, and vice-versa. Public schools generally fail to develop appropriate strength-based G-IEPs for 2e students. When a 2e student is lucky enough to secure an IEP, their IEPs often lack comprehensive integration of multi-disciplinary data, ignore strengths, or fail to use strengths to scaffold learning differences. On the other hand, 2e students' learning differences may mask intellectual strengths and prevent identification for gifted services.

Zone 2e integrates data from various sources, including psychometric assessments, grades, cognitive, social and emotional (CSE) learning, affective and behavioral data, and various curriculums. A key component of the Zone 2e innovation is formulating a "digital twin" of each IEP student to enable individualization and testing of IEP offers. Our system goes beyond static (“snapshot in time”) reports, continuously adapting and generating personalized learning recommendations (offers) based on a novel Zones of Proximal Development (ZPD) implementation. It's an organic strength-based approach that utilizes science-based cognitive-theory and Large Language Modeling (LLM) to comprehensively enable 2e students to engage dynamically in maximizing their educational potentials.

 

There are isolated centers of 2e excellence across the country, e.g., Bridges Academy in California, Belin-Blank Center in Iowa, and Quad Prep in New York City. However, research data shows that delivering individualized education programs for 2e students relies on highly specialized and expensive human intervention, thus excluding many children. The IEP process is data intensive and generates many assessment reports. Unfortunately, IEP teams often cannot integrate the plurality of assessment, achievement, observational, and other unstructured data sets into strength-based IEPs. A big part of the problem is that public schools focus on grade-level proficiency as a primary goal function. But this approach is incompatible with the accelerated and asynchronous learning profiles of 2e students. 2e students may achieve significantly above grade level in some areas and simultaneously struggle to meet standards in others.

 

Zone 2e's technology solution solves the significant human problems faced by multiple stakeholders in the IEP process.

 

Zone 2e is a business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) social impact company. As a B2B enterprise, we aim to sell our products and services to public school districts, private schools, psychometrics vendors, neuropsychology professionals, and law firms. The B2B opportunity targets some 13,452 public school districts representing $80 to $100 billion in annual special education expenditures.[13],[14] Zone2e’s CISILP value-proposition scales the capacity of the current educational system in multiple ways.

·         For 2e students and their families, CISILP alleviates the significant and expensive burdens of managing complex cases. Therefore, Zone 2e anticipates significant revenue through services to alleviate the case management and integration burden for various stakeholders.

·         Economies of scale: Zone 2e aims to reduce the cost of individualized education by orders of magnitude while expanding the ability of the educational system to service all 2e students. As identified earlier, the cost of educating 2e students ($62,000/year to $105,000/year) is prohibitively high for most families. Therefore, the current system excludes many 2e students. Zone 2e aims to reduce costs while enabling a system that can service all 2e children. Reducing the price-point for individualized education further enables us to service all 65 million K-through-12.

·         The current model of assessing and providing individualized education relies on high levels of human specialization. Zone 2e’s technology does the heavy lifting for 2e families and many other stakeholders. The money-making opportunity is realized by reducing the need for more human specialization and liberalizing access to high quality individualization tools and interfaces.

 

Public schools may need time to adapt to personalized learning models, and shifting traditional curriculum structures and IEP practices could be challenging. However, we believe our dynamic CISILP’s potential for revolutionizing education outweighs the obstacles. Zone 2e's AI-powered technology services the needs of many educational stakeholders. We believe our disruptive technology will create new educational business models for many stakeholders to participate in and innovate 2e education.

 

The psycho-educational learning profiles of 2e students represent the corner cases in education. Therefore, Zone 2e's focus on these students means we are first solving the most complex problem. Solving the most challenging problem enables Zone 2e to generalize our solution to deliver individualized education for some 65 million K-through-12 students nationwide.

 

[IP Protection & Patent application in progress. 4 Dec. 2023]

 

Zone2e is a small business startup incorporated in California in 2021.

 

Zone2e seeks funding and grant capital to scale its R&D and bring next-generation individualized education products to market. These innovative products integrate psychometric assessments, grades, cognitive, social, and emotional (CSE) learning, affective and behavioral data from various sources by exploiting advances in Artificial general Intelligence (AI).

 

Sam George, Silent Contributor, and Aiden George founded Zone2e.

 

Sam is a technology polymath, software and semiconductor electronics hardware technology/engineering executive, and entrepreneur. He has developed generations of technology and risk solutions leveraging machine learning (ML) in multiple industry verticals. During the past ten years of special education advocacy for Aiden and other families, he has recognized that many of the profound struggles experienced in the 2e education process, which seem isolated, can be solved if the data from different sources can be integrated comprehensively.

Thus, in 2016, Sam expanded his expertise in artificial general intelligence technology and mathematics to create processes and prototype solutions that addressed various pain points in delivering special education for 2e students, e.g., the comprehensive development of twice-exceptional (2e) gifted individualized education programs (G-IEP). These solutions show great promise when generalized to all students.

 

Aiden is a twice-exceptional (2e) high school sophomore whose complex academic and Social/Emotional Learning (SEL) needs have catalyzed the founding of Zone 2e. Aiden's potential as a 2e child is defined by identified strengths in game development, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Aiden is an imaginative storyteller and an avid gamer who aspires to a career in game and 3D/Virtual Reality (VR) development. He is interested in human-machine interface design and robotics. His 2e cognitive strengths co-occur and are impacted by his learning differences.

 

[1] The term IEP is expanded to include Individual Service Plans (ISP), “learning plans” or “service plans.”
[2] National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2023). Fast Facts: Back-to-school statistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372>.
[3] Davidson Institute, “Twice Exceptional: Definition, Characteristics & Identification,” May 31, 2021, <https://www.davidsongifted.org/gifted-blog/twice-exceptional-definition-characteristics-identification/>, last accessed: 27 Dec. 2023.
[4] National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), “Students With Disabilities,” 2022, <https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/2022/cgg_508.pdf>, last accessed: 27 Dec. 2023.
[5] International Dyslexia Association, “Gifted and Dyslexic: Identifying and Instructing the Twice Exceptional Student Fact Sheet,” 2020, <https://dyslexiaida.org/gifted-and-dyslexic-identifying-and-instructing-the-twice-exceptional-student-fact-sheet/>, last accessed: 27 Dec. 2023.
[6] The Hechinger Report, “Twice exceptional, doubly disadvantaged? How schools struggle to serve gifted students with disabilities,” by Rachel Blustain, May 6, 2019, <https://hechingerreport.org/twice-exceptional-doubly-disadvantaged-how-schools-struggle-to-serve-gifted-students-with-disabilities/> (last accessed 11/20/2023).
[7] Reis, S. M., Baum, S. M., & Burke, E. (2014). An Operational Definition of Twice-Exceptional Learners: Implications and Applications. Gifted Child Quarterly, 58(3), 217–230. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0016986214534976>.
[8] Baum, S. M., Cooper, C. R., & Neu, T. W. (2001). Dual differentiation: An approach for meeting the curricular needs of gifted students with learning disabilities. Psychology In The Schools, 38(5), 477-490. <https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.1036>.
[9] Trail, B. A. (2022). Twice-exceptional gifted children: Understanding, teaching, and counseling gifted students. 2nd Edition. Routledge. New York. <https://www.routledge.com/Twice-Exceptional-Gifted-Children-Understanding-Teaching-and-Counseling/Trail/p/book/9781032198606#googlePreviewContainer>.
[10] Assouline, S. G., Foley Nicpon, M., & Whiteman, C. (2010). Cognitive and Psychosocial Characteristics of Gifted Students With Written Language Disability. Gifted Child Quarterly, 54(2), 102–115. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0016986209355974>.
[11] Brody LE, Mills CJ. Gifted children with learning disabilities: a review of the issues. J Learn Disabil. 1997 May-Jun;30(3):282-96. doi: <https://10.1177/002221949703000304>. PMID: 9146095.
[12] https://sites.ed.gov/idea/regs/b/d/300.320.
[13] <https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_214.10.asp>.
[14] <https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/special-education-definition-statistics-and-trends/2019/12>