Board Meeting February 3rd, 2026 | Special Ed & Communicating with the Public

    Today's board meeting had a presentation from the Director of Special Education.  The work they do is incredibly challenging.  Behind the numbers she presented are people, and when I see ratios of 5 staff members to a student...

...think about that...

    ...5 staff members to a student...

        ...it should remind us how much these students need us, and how hard our team works to educate them.  

    Students that need us reminded me of a wonderful book I read years ago called Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon which brought me to tears multiple times.  I highly recommend this book to get a peak into the lives of families like any of our neighbors whose children are vastly different than themselves.  It is a heart wrenching book. It forces me to remember that behind the scenes, our special education students have people dedicated to their care in ways that can augment your belief in the human spirit.  

    


    For us, the public school district, it should be our honor and privilege to educate our most vulnerable.  And I believe our community, as stakeholders of our public school system, can get behind the necessity to fund special education sufficiently.  

    For this meeting, I grabbed data from DPI to attempt to get my arms around some trends and compare to neighboring districts.

    I'm curious why every school district I've filtered for has a similar trend of declining enrollments, and an increase in percentage of special education students.  The departure of non-disabled students will drive up the percentage of public special education students.

    As a note, I agreed with Board Member Swardenski's comment that the presentation was fine, but more illustration of what daily life is like educating our special needs students would be nice.  As an effort to communicate to the public, I think we could help people understand what a 5:1 staff to student ratio means for someone for a day in the life.  My guess is that people would be surprised to learn about what our public school system provides to some special education students.  

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