Our Story

Built from inside the system

Ripa Elevate was created by a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist with over a decade of clinical experience across schools, homes, and community settings — and a builder who kept asking: why is there no better tool than this?

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Michelle Ripa, M.S., CCC-SLP

Licensed Speech-Language Pathologist

With over a decade of clinical experience working with children and adults ages 3 to 40 — in schools, private practice, home settings, and community programs — Michelle has seen firsthand how traditional assessments fail the students they're meant to serve. They measure reading level and math facts, but not whether a student can count change, navigate a social conflict, or plan well enough to get through a school day.

Ripa Elevate was built to answer the questions IEP teams actually need answered: What can this student do independently? Where do they need support? What does growth look like over time?

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Brian Ripa

Platform Strategist & Product Builder

The frustration wasn't just with the tools. It was with the market gap. Parents of students with IEPs have almost no access to independent assessment outside of what the school provides. The school assessments are slow, opaque, and designed to meet compliance requirements, not to actually inform parents or students.

Building Ripa Elevate meant creating a product that could start with parents, people who desperately want to understand their child, and eventually build into schools from the bottom up, through parent demand.

Our Mission

Assessment should serve the student, not the system

We believe every student, especially those who learn differently, deserves to be seen for what they can do, not measured against what they can't. Assessment should be a tool for understanding, not a label or a ranking. It should tell parents something real. It should tell students something true.

Ability over deficit

We design every question to find what a student CAN do at their level, not to document failure.

Transparency for families

Parents shouldn't have to wait for an IEP meeting to understand their child's functional skills. They deserve direct access to clear information.

Growth over comparison

We never compare students to each other. We measure each student against their own previous performance, over time.

How We Got Here

The longer version

The problem started with a meeting. An IEP meeting where a parent sat across the table, holding a report that was technically accurate but completely useless: a page full of grade-equivalent scores, standard deviations, and comparison bands that told her nothing about whether her son could make change for a $20 bill, or recognize when an adult online was trying to manipulate him, or plan well enough to get his homework done before practice.

That gap, between what schools measure and what parents actually need to know, is what Ripa Elevate is built to close. Not to replace school assessments. Not to compete with SLPs or psychologists. But to give families an independent, clear, affordable way to understand what their child can do in the areas that actually matter for their daily life.

We built the question bank from scratch. Every question was written with a specific student in mind, not a hypothetical average student, but a real twelve-year-old who might need to hear the question read aloud, might need a hint, might work slowly, and still gets the right answer when given the chance. That student deserves a score that reflects their ability, not their processing speed.

The platform is designed to be used before IEP meetings, before school evaluations, as a check-in between assessments, or simply because a parent wants to understand where their child is and where they're headed. No referral required. No waiting list. No school involvement needed unless you want it.