The Same Sentence, in Every State

For ten years I was a director of special education in districts north of Boston. Ipswich was the last of them.

Every strategic plan I wrote in those years rested on numbers I gathered myself. Not from a system. By hand, from systems that did not speak to each other, on a timeline the data itself outran.

I assumed that was a me problem. A small district problem. A New England problem. Something a bigger budget or a better platform or a more organized director would have solved.

This summer I found out otherwise.

Since the spring I have been on calls with school districts, intermediate service agencies (ISDs), BOCES, ESCs, and regional networks around the country. Massachusetts and Michigan. Colorado and Ohio. Illinois and Pennsylvania. Districts with a few hundred students, and regional agencies covering hundreds of buildings.

The plan was to show people PULSE. What happened instead is that I spent a summer listening to special education leaders describe their jobs.

I want to tell you what they said, because it was the same thing every time.

It comes out a little differently depending on who is saying it, but it is one sentence.

I am accountable for numbers I cannot actually reach.

A director in a small district said she builds her staffing case in a spreadsheet every spring and knows it is wrong before she presents it. A regional administrator said he can tell you how many students are served across his member districts, but not how much service they are owed. Someone else described pulling three exports, cleaning them by hand so the reports would run, and finishing with a number that had already changed while she was assembling it.

None of them were describing a broken district. They were describing the same distance, over and over: the gap between the data a leader is accountable to and the data a leader can actually reach.

I have a name for that distance, because I wrote a dissertation about it in 2020. Ten administrators, one district. What I found then was that the belief in inclusion was never the problem. The capacity to carry it was.

I did not expect to hear my own findings read back to me by strangers in six states.

Those photographs are from one planning cycle in one district. Whiteboards, chart paper, an intervention wall built out of sticky notes, staffing scenarios worked out on a legal pad.

I used to be a little embarrassed by them.

I am not anymore, because I have now watched a dozen leaders describe the same room. This is the operating system of American special education planning. Not because the people running it are unsophisticated, but because nothing else was ever built for them.

Here is the part that stopped being abstract for me this summer.

Take a director's salary at $135,000 and turn it into an hourly rate. Assume ten hours a week on data gathering, cleaning, and reconciliation, October through April. That is about three hundred hours. Seven and a half full working weeks, carried on top of the actual job, for one initiative, in one district, once a year.

I did that math about my own last planning cycle and it was uncomfortable.

But the number is not the cost. The cost is what those hours were not spent on.

Seven months in a war room are seven months not spent coaching teachers, not spent in classrooms, not spent building the intervention capacity that would have reduced the referrals in the first place. The district was starving for exactly the thing its most senior interventionist was too busy to provide.

That is the shape of it everywhere I looked this summer. The most experienced person in the building doing arithmetic.

I want to be honest about something that has nothing to do with data.

I left a directorship to build a company, which is a thing I had no business doing and did anyway. For most of the last year I have been fairly sure I was the only person who thought this problem was worth solving, and reasonably sure I was going to find out I was wrong.

What this summer told me is that I was not wrong about the problem. Whether I am right about the answer is still being decided, and it will be decided by districts and not by me. But the problem is real, it is national, and the people carrying it have been carrying it alone and assuming that was normal.

If you are one of them: it is not you. It was never you.

Before your next budget cycle, keep a rough tally for two weeks of the hours you spend assembling data rather than acting on it. Do not change anything. Just count.

Almost everyone I talked to this summer underestimated it by half, myself included. You cannot make a case for capacity you have never measured, and the first number worth measuring is your own.

If this sounds like your year, hit reply and tell me about it. One line is plenty. I read every one, and I’d love to hear about your experience.

-Eric