The Mission
The Gap We Fill
Why this work exists
Karey Starr has spent 23+ years teaching special education in Rochester City School District and 12 years working as an EMT. Two careers, one recurring realization: the emergency plan and the students in her classroom were built on different assumptions.
On the ambulance side, she learned how incidents are actually managed — roles, command structure, and the discipline of planning for the person in front of you rather than an average person. On the classroom side, she kept meeting students that the standard plan simply did not account for.
What most emergency plans quietly assume
- Every child can hear and process a verbal instruction over an intercom.
- Every child can move independently, quickly, and without equipment.
- Every child can communicate what is wrong, and where they are.
- Every child can tolerate a drill — the noise, the crowding, the change in routine.
- Every family can reunify through one standard line, one standard form, one standard process.
For a lot of the students Karey teaches, none of that is true. A nonverbal student cannot answer a roll call. A student who uses a wheelchair or a walker cannot clear a stairwell on the same timeline. A student with sensory needs may not make it through the alarm, let alone the evacuation. And a family whose child communicates through an AAC device needs more than a standard reunification line.
The gap became the mission
Starr TeachForward exists because that gap is fixable, and because it is usually only visible to someone who has stood on both sides of it. Safety Without Barriers™ is the framework Karey built to close it: emergency, evacuation, sheltering, and reunification planning designed around real student needs — mobility, communication, sensory regulation, medical supports — and written into the IEP before the emergency happens, not improvised during it.
The same practitioner lens carries into the other two pillars. Special education practice and compliance support comes from someone still doing the paperwork. Responsible AI training comes from someone who uses these tools inside a real teaching week and knows exactly where they fail students with disabilities. That is the whole premise: build for the students everyone else overlooks, and the plan gets better for everybody.