About Us
We pursue an education system in which marginalized families feel empowered and prepared to advocate for their child's federally guaranteed rights.
EDquity at the Margins is a Tennessee nonprofit corporation and an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 42-2295582. Our IEP Audit, our Know Your Rights workshops, and our Advocacy Toolkit are free to every family, funded by donations and by our paid work with schools and school systems.
Our Mission
EDquity at the Margins is a 501(c)(3) public charity recognized in May 2026. We provide IEP advocacy support to marginalized families through an independent audit of their child's IEP and recurring parent workshops on their child's school experience. We also publish The EDquity IEP Advocacy Toolkit, a 22-sheet parent instrument set that stands behind the audit: every indicator the report flags as missing points to the tool a parent uses to act on it.
We opened intake in May 2026 and deliver audits for families across multiple states, with a median of three days from request to report. We led our first workshop in July 2026 at the Gallatin Public Library and lead monthly Know Your Rights webinars.
Our goal is to empower parents to advocate for their children and give them the language to do it. Our IEP Audit, our Know Your Rights workshops, and our Advocacy Toolkit are free.
Our Vision
We work toward a public education system where a family's race, income, or language does not determine the quality of special education services their child receives, where every IEP table functions as a space of genuine collaboration, and where the law means what it says for every child it covers.
From the Founder
"I want every child to have a 'ME' fighting for them."
Dr. Reba Clarke-Wedderburn
Founder & Executive Director, EDquity at the Margins
Founder
Dr. Reba Clarke-Wedderburn
Dr. Clarke-Wedderburn is an instructional coach, curriculum developer, and educator preparation specialist with 21 years of experience across K-12 teaching, instructional coaching, and higher education. She designs and facilitates graduate-level special education licensure coursework, coaches pre-service and in-service teachers through competency-based development, and builds standards-aligned curriculum grounded in equity, disability advocacy, and special education policy.
She holds a Doctor of Education in Learning Organizations and Strategic Change from Lipscomb University, a Master of Science in Instructional Leadership from Union University, and a Bachelor of Science in Exceptional Education from Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of the F.L.O.W. equity-centered coaching framework.
Her certifications include Tennessee K-6 Elementary Education, Tennessee K-12 Special Education, and Tennessee Educational Administration. She has held roles at LEAD Public Schools, TNTP, Western Governors University, and the Nashville Teacher Residency. She currently serves as Program Specialist at Diverse Learners Cooperative.
Download Full CVThe Gap We Disrupt
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) established parents as equal partners in the IEP process, a mandate grounded in decades of research showing that family participation improves educational outcomes for children with disabilities. That mandate, however, has never been evenly enforced.
School districts arrive at IEP meetings with teams of professionals, evaluators, and administrators whose command of specialized terminology and procedural rules creates a structural disadvantage for families who lack equivalent training. For families of color, economically disadvantaged families, and non-native English speakers, that disadvantage is compounded by documented patterns of racial and economic disparity in special education identification, placement, and service delivery.
EDquity at the Margins addresses that gap directly. Parents hold knowledge about their children that no evaluation instrument can replicate, and our work translates that knowledge into legally binding education programs through document analysis and sustained advocacy support.
Our Programs
Free IEP Audit
We review your child's IEP across six research-grounded domains, identify what is missing or legally inadequate, and deliver a plain-language written report with specific next steps before your next meeting. Families pay nothing.
Free Parent Workshops
Live sessions covering what the law entitles your child to, how to read the document the school hands you, what to say when services are cut, and how to put a request in writing so the district has to answer it. They run online on the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 PM Central, and we partner with libraries and community organizations to bring sessions in person.
Alongside both, our Advocacy Toolkit is a free library you can download and use on your own, covering the thirteen IDEA disability categories, eligibility, the difference between IDEA and Section 504, who sits on an IEP team, and a notecatcher for the meeting itself.
Governance and Accountability
EDquity at the Margins is a Tennessee nonprofit corporation and an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 42-2295582, headquartered in Gallatin, Tennessee. The IRS recognized our exempt status in May 2026.
We are governed by a board of seven. Two directors are seated, one election is pending, and most of the remaining seats are reserved for parents of children with disabilities. Directors do not have to live in Tennessee. Read how the board is being built and how to join.
Our IEP Audit, our Know Your Rights workshops, and our Advocacy Toolkit are free to every family, and they always will be. EDquity Scholars seats are funded by sponsors, so no family ever pays for a seat. We never accept payment from a school district in connection with an individual child's case. Schools that engage us pay for reviews of their own IEP quality across their system, and ten percent of every school engagement fee is designated to the Family Audit Fund, which keeps our free services free.