Special Education Directors Cannot Solve This Alone

There is a conversation happening in superintendent offices and school board rooms across the country that rarely makes it into conference presentations or policy briefs. It usually begins the same way. The special education budget has grown again, the director has done everything asked of her, and no one at the leadership table is quite sure what to do next.

Special education is one of the most legally complex, financially consequential, and emotionally charged domains in public education. Superintendents who rose through general education have often had limited direct exposure to the field. It is impossible to be an expert in all areas. Those who sense their own inexperience often respond the way leaders do when they feel out of their depth. They defer. They step back. They trust that the director, who carries the credentials and the case law in her head, will handle it.

The problem is that deference has a cost, and right now, that cost is becoming impossible to ignore.

The Numbers Are Not Going Away

Special education expenditures have been rising steadily in districts of every size and demographic profile. The drivers are legitimate. The population of students with identified disabilities has grown. The complexity of student needs has increased. The cost of serving students in out-of-district placements, which can run well above $100,000 per student annually, has climbed alongside the demand for those placements.

For many districts, special education now represents twenty to twenty-five percent of the total operating budget, and sometimes more. That proportion is not inherently problematic. Federal law requires that students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate public education and meeting that obligation costs money. But the trend lines in many districts suggest something beyond the natural growth of a well-run program. They suggest a system that reacts to student needs rather than building internal capacity to meet them.

There is a secondary consequence that receives far less attention. When the special education budget is the only line that keeps growing while everything else is cut, the rest of the organization notices. Teachers and school administrators learn, over time, that the most reliable path to securing help for a struggling student runs through a special education referral. The result is a quiet and unintentional pressure toward over-identification. School staff refer students who might have succeeded through general education interventions into the special education system, not because the evaluation process was corrupt, but because the incentive structure pointed everyone in that direction. The budget grows, the identification rate grows with it, and the general education program, already stretched, loses more resources to absorb the cost.

Superintendents see the numbers. What many have not done is ask the harder question underneath them.

What Deference Actually Costs

The instinct to defer to special education expertise is understandable. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is a dense and litigated piece of legislation. Procedural missteps carry real legal consequences. A superintendent who wades into an IEP dispute without understanding the underlying regulations can create problems that take years and significant legal fees to resolve.

That risk is real, and it explains why superintendents often maintain a careful distance from the operational details of special education. Fear of causing harm or of liability becomes a reason not to engage at all.

The difficulty is that disengagement carries its own set of consequences. When the superintendent stays at arm’s length from special education, silos form. The special education director manages her domain. The curriculum director manages his. The principal supervisors manage school performance. And the students who sit at the intersection of those domains, students with disabilities who spend most of their instructional day in general education classrooms, fall into the gaps between them.

This is not a management problem that a better organizational chart can fix. It is a leadership problem, and the only person positioned to address it is the superintendent.

Where the Real Work Lives

General education teachers and principals make the most consequential decisions in special education, not the staff in the special education office.

A student with a learning disability who receives thirty minutes of specialized instruction daily and spends the remaining six hours in general education is, in practice, a general education student. His success depends on whether his classroom teacher understands his IEP goals, has the instructional strategies to support him, and has access to the coaching and resources to do that work well. It depends on whether his principal has built a school culture in which the principal expects special and general educators to collaborate as a matter of course. It also depends on whether the school system leaders have carefully considered teacher capacity and workload in a way that enables them to do the job. And finally, it depends on whether district leaders designed curriculum and professional development systems with the students’ unique needs in mind, or whether those systems treat special education students as someone else’s responsibility.

When districts place the full weight of special education student outcomes on the special education department, they ask one part of the organization to carry what the entire organization must share. The outcomes that follow are predictable. Students who could succeed in their home schools end up in more restrictive placements because districts never built a general education environment that supports them. Costs rise. Outcomes stagnate. The director, who is doing her best with the tools she has, absorbs the pressure while the structural conditions that created the problem remain unchanged.

What Getting Involved Actually Requires

When I began working seriously on special education costs in my district, I ran into obstacles I had not anticipated. The data systems that tracked special education students did not connect seamlessly to those that tracked academic performance. Districts had built a professional development infrastructure for general education, and special education staff operated largely outside it. There were long-standing frustrations between the special education department and building-level administrators that nobody had addressed because nobody wanted to open that particular door.

I also had to reckon with something about myself. I had spent my career in general education. I understood curriculum, instruction, and school culture. I did not fully understand IEP development, eligibility determination, or the calculus of the least restrictive environment. Looking back, I can see clearly that I used that gap as a quiet justification for staying at a comfortable distance from the work. I should have invested the time to learn it from the inside, sitting in eligibility meetings and IEP conferences to understand what those conversations were about. I should have asked my special education director to function as a teacher, not just an implementer. I should have made my own learning visible to the organization, because a superintendent willing to be a novice in public permits others to acknowledge what they do not know.

What I have come to understand, through the experience of doing this work imperfectly, is that the problems are more tractable than they appear from a distance. They are not easy or fast. But they are approachable once the right people are working together on them, and the superintendent is the only person who can create the conditions for that to happen.

Building a Unified System

The structural work that matters most is creating deliberate systems across the silos, and the superintendent has to drive it.

That means establishing regular joint work between the special education director and the curriculum and instruction team, so that teams evaluate core instructional materials for accessibility and professional learning addresses the needs of all learners. It means including special education outcomes in the performance conversations with principal supervisors, not as a separate agenda item but as part of how the district defines school quality overall. It means requiring building-level administrators to demonstrate genuine knowledge of the students in their schools with the most complex needs and to own the question of whether their schools are serving those students well.

None of this requires the superintendent to become a special education expert. It requires the superintendent to put the expertise already within the organization to work across the organization, rather than letting it remain contained within a single department.

The directors doing this work are capable and deeply committed to their students. What they need is not more authority within their own domain. They need the rest of the leadership structure to show up alongside them.

A Different Question

The question most superintendents ask about special education is some version of, “How do we manage the costs?” That is a legitimate question, and it demands a real answer. It is also the wrong starting point.

The more useful question is whether the district is building internal capacity to ensure schools embrace students with disabilities as general education students first, whose achievement is everyone’s responsibility. Staff turnover in special education drops when teachers work within a system that has organized itself around their success. And the quiet pressure toward over-identification begins to ease when the general education environment has the resources and skills to reach struggling students before a referral becomes the only available option.

A superintendent who waits for the special education director to solve these problems will wait indefinitely. The director does not control the general education classroom. She does not set the professional development calendar. She does not determine how principal supervisors define school quality or how the curriculum office selects instructional materials. Only the superintendent controls those levers. Using them is not an intrusion into a specialized domain. It is the job.

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.