The agreement, without the fog.

Firm Footing is an educational resource for parents and caregivers navigating special education. We publish guides, checklists, and explanations, and we offer AI tools that help you read documents and prepare questions.

Nothing on this site is legal advice, medical advice, psychological advice, or an educational evaluation. We are not attorneys, advocates of record, clinicians, or your child's school team. Reading a page here doesn't create an attorney-client, clinician-patient, or advocate-client relationship. Nothing here diagnoses your child, and nothing here can tell you whether your child is eligible for services — only a qualified evaluation and your IEP team can do that.

For decisions with legal or medical consequences, talk to a licensed attorney, a special education advocate, or your child's doctor. If you're in crisis, contact local emergency services.

Sprout and Decode My IEP are powered by large language models. They are genuinely useful and they are genuinely fallible. They can misread a document, miss something important, summarize a section imprecisely, or state something confidently that is wrong. Treat every output as a starting point for your own reading and your own questions — never as the final word on your child's services.

Laws and procedures vary by state and district, and they change. Always verify specifics with your district's documentation or your state's education agency.

You need to be 18 or older to create an account. Keep access to your email secure — anyone with your inbox can sign in with a magic link. One account per person; don't share credentials. We can suspend accounts used to abuse the service, scrape content, attack the infrastructure, or harass others.

Your documents stay yours. You keep all rights to anything you upload. You grant us a narrow, temporary permission to process the file solely to generate your analysis, and that permission ends the moment the analysis is returned — we don't store the file, the text, or the results.

Only upload documents you have the right to share. Please remove or avoid uploading information about other people's children.

When you submit a story, you're giving us permission to publish it on Firm Footing — as written or lightly edited for length, clarity, and privacy — under the display name you provide. You confirm the story is yours to tell, that you've left out anything that would identify another family or a staff member, and that it doesn't defame anyone.

Every story is reviewed before it appears, and we may decline to publish anything for any reason. You can ask us to take your story down at any time and we will. You keep ownership of your words.

• Free includes the full guide and resource library, unlimited meeting date tracking, 10 Sprout messages per day, and one Decode My IEP analysis.
• Firm Footing Plus is $7 per month or $71 per year and adds unlimited Sprout messages, unlimited document analyses, the exclusive Progress Monitoring Log and Complete IEP Binder, and priority support.

Plus renews automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel. Payments are processed by Stripe, and prices are in US dollars plus any applicable tax. If we change pricing, we'll tell you before it affects your renewal.

Cancel any time from your account page — it opens the Stripe portal. Cancelling stops the next charge and you keep Plus until the end of the period you've already paid for. We don't automatically prorate partial periods, but if something went wrong or you were charged by mistake, write to us and we'll make it right.

The guides, checklists, worksheets, and site design are ours. You're welcome to download and print them for your own family's use, and to share links freely. Please don't republish, resell, or scrape the content for another product without asking.

Where we recommend outside resources — including "The Epic IEP" by Karen Mayer Cunningham — those are independent recommendations. Firm Footing is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Karen Mayer Cunningham, Simon & Schuster, or Special Education Academy. We don't control third-party sites and aren't responsible for their content.

The service is provided "as is." We work hard to keep it accurate and online, but we can't guarantee it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or right for your situation. To the fullest extent the law allows, Firm Footing isn't liable for indirect or consequential damages, and our total liability is limited to what you've paid us in the previous twelve months.

We may update these terms; we'll change the date above and tell you by email when the change is significant. Continuing to use the site means accepting the update. Questions: reach us through the site.