How SETX Cooperative uses AAC + Storytime AI to publish every student's story

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A cooperative built on equal access

The Southeast Texas Cooperative for Special Services (SETX Cooperative) serves four member districts — Devers, Hull-Daisetta, Liberty, and Tarkington ISDs — across a continuum of special education that includes inclusion, resource, content mastery, life skills, vision, homebound, and adaptive transportation. The cooperative’s reach spans ages 3 through 22.

Kendra Caswell leads assistive technology across all four districts. Her mission is explicit: ensure every student has access to the same rich learning experiences as their peers — not simplified substitutes.

The visible gap on the hallway wall

Creative writing is a core literacy and language activity in K-5 classrooms across the cooperative. In other classrooms, students’ finished illustrated books end up on the hallway walls — public displays of effort, identity, and pride.

Ms. Caswell’s students — many with autism and language-based communication needs — rarely made it onto those walls. The barrier was not a lack of imagination or language. It was that the steps between having a story idea and holding a finished illustrated book required adult mediation at a scale no special-education schedule allows: developing characters, building settings, layering in descriptive detail, and producing an illustration on every page.

The absence of their books on those walls was visible — and visibility shapes how students see themselves as readers and writers.

The workflow: AAC in, illustrated book out

Ms. Caswell’s session structure is simple, and the student does the cognitive work.

1. Pick a theme. She chooses a familiar shared text — “Going on a Bear Hunt,” for example — to anchor the session.
2. The student selects. Working 1:1 or in a small group, the student uses their AAC device — TouchChat or NovaChat — to independently select icons for characters, descriptors, locations, and story details. Every idea in the book comes directly from the student.
3. Drop into Story Builder. Ms. Caswell enters the student’s choices into Storytime AI’s Story Builder. While the book generates, she reads another student’s previous story aloud — building anticipation and sneaking in extra modeled reading practice.
4. Under a minute later — a book. The student’s words come back as a fully illustrated, narrated read-along book.
5. The student edits. Text and illustration choices are editable. Students put their final touch on the book, practicing vocabulary and exercising agency over their own work.

The fit with AAC matters. AAC users are accustomed to icon-driven selection as a mode of expression. Story Builder accepts those selections as the creative inputs they are — not as a workaround.

Results: pride in the hallway, confidence on the page

The session metrics from Ms. Caswell’s practice are documented in the outcomes block above. The student stories behind them:

The boy in the hallway. A young student was so proud of his finished book that he stopped people on his walk to the library to show it off — then asked the librarian to project it for the whole class. He took it home that night to share with his parents.

Five stories in a row. A student afraid of doing it “wrong” finished her first book — and then made four more. The session ended because the period did, not because she ran out of ideas. Perfectionism, dismantled by the speed of seeing her own ideas become a finished book.

Reading and writing have become joyful, inclusive activities. The cooperative ships finished, illustrated student books to the hallway walls and into students’ homes at the rate the creative process actually moves — which, for these students, turns out to be very fast.

Why this matters beyond one classroom

Three durable signals from this workflow generalize well beyond SETX:

• AAC selection is a literacy on-ramp. When the creative-output tool accepts icon-driven selections as primary input, students whose primary expressive mode is AAC can author finished work at the same pace as their peers.
• Speed dismantles perfectionism. Reluctant writers’ barriers are often about the gap between imagining a story and holding one. Cut the gap to under a minute and the gap stops mattering.
• Visibility shapes identity. When special-education students’ work appears alongside their peers’ on the hallway wall, the message about who counts as a “real” writer changes — for the students, their peers, and the adults watching.

How to scope something similar for your district

If you serve students with complex communication needs, the SETX workflow is reproducible in any 1:1 or small-group setting where AAC use is already established. The Storytime AI side is identical to the workflow any teacher would use — what changes is the input modality (student AAC selections → teacher transcription into Story Builder).

Talk to us about a special-education pilot → or start a free classroom to see Story Builder in your own classroom.