The Problem Was Never the Person in the Room
A closer look at the challenges of sustaining special education staffing
Every spring, before we’d even finished the current school year, my staffing team could already tell me almost exactly which classrooms we’d be hiring for again in the fall. Overall teacher turnover in our district ran around ten percent, and in recent years actually a bit below that. But inside that number lived a pattern we couldn’t shake. Special education classrooms were, year after year, the hardest positions to fill, and the ones we filled most often.
For a long time, the explanation everyone reached for was simple, and not entirely wrong. Special education is a hard job. That’s true, but it wasn’t the whole story. Treating it as the whole answer meant we kept solving the wrong problem every hiring season.
Looking past the easy answer
When I finally dug past “it’s just a hard job,” I found a few things I hadn’t considered. One of those discoveries connects to special education teachers’ university experience. Most new teachers coming out of university with special education preparation now come out with dual certification, general education plus a special education add-on, rather than a standalone special education degree. Advisors tell students to get the add-on because it guarantees employability. That advice is accurate. It also does two things to a district trying to maintain its special education staffing.
The first is a depth problem. Splitting a preparation program across two certifications means less specialized training in the two skills a special education classroom depends on: strong behavior management and the ability to create and deliver specially designed instruction. Broadly, those are the skills general education teachers lean on their special education colleagues to deliver. When I talked to principals about their newer special educators, they shared that it was rare for a new teacher to deliver effectively on both skills. New special education teachers are arriving with less specialized depth than before, which has required schools to rethink team-teaching pairings and the training they need to provide to new special educators.
The second is an exit ramp. Because these teachers are dual certified, the pattern we saw was someone staying in special education just long enough to earn tenure, then transferring into a general education role using the same certification that got them hired in the first place. The turnover we had wasn’t evenly spread across a career. It clustered right around the point where a teacher finally had enough experience to become genuinely strong, which meant the classrooms that most needed continuity kept losing people at exactly the wrong moment.
Where the structure goes beyond the building
The more we looked, the more this stopped being a hiring practices question and started being a systems question that extended past our own district, into how the state supports, or doesn’t support, the people in these roles.
Maryland has pushed hard on National Board Certification for teachers. This year, Maryland was recognized as the state with the highest concentration of nationally board-certified teachers in the country. This occurred in large part because Maryland offers a stipend of either $10,000 or $17,000 per year depending on where a teacher works. It is a real investment in teacher retention, and I heard multiple stories from my team about candidates not pursuing teacher specialist or coaching roles because they would lose eligibility for the stipend. But pursuing national board certification takes significant time and energy, and special education teachers, already stretched thinner than anyone else in the building, have the least of both to spare. A genuinely good statewide incentive was hardest to reach for the exact teachers we most needed to keep.
I spent real time advocating for something else alongside that, meaningful differentiation for special education teachers who stay in the classroom, additional compensation or role distinction that reflected the actual difficulty and specialization of the work. Every time I had an opportunity to speak with state-level decision-makers, I included a recommendation to create a similar incentive program to keep special educators in the classroom. Of course, keeping teachers in those classrooms is only part of the challenge. We also have to improve the workload, which is a much more difficult task, and one for another post.
The educators we didn’t chase back
There’s a detail in this story that took me longer to see than it should have. We didn’t actually have a shortage of qualified special educators working in our schools. We had dozens of them, professionally qualified and experienced, working in our general education classrooms. They had migrated out of special education roles over the years, before I ever had the chance to address the pipeline or compensation issues above.
I had a decision to make once I understood how many of them were out there. I did not try to force them back into special education classrooms.
Two things stopped me. Neighboring districts were having the same trouble hiring qualified special educators, and any push to move those teachers back into roles many of them had deliberately left was as likely to cost me the person entirely as it was to fill the vacancy. And they were doing great work in those non-special-education classrooms. A former special educator teaching in a general education classroom carries an understanding of IEPs, accommodations, and behavior support that most general education colleagues spend years building. Pulling that expertise out of those rooms to patch an org chart problem would have cost us talent in the general education classrooms we could ill afford to lose.
The part I had to stay honest about
I understood the workload of special education teachers was a major driver of their decisions to leave their positions. It would have been easy to conclude that the fix was to ask more of general education teachers by redistributing some of what special education teachers weren’t yet equipped to carry. I didn’t want that to be the answer. General education workloads are already demanding in their own right, and solving one structural gap by quietly opening another isn’t a systems fix. It’s just moving the same weight to a different room.
A Final Thought
This is a pipeline question shaped by university certification programs, a state policy question shaped by how Maryland structures its incentives, and a district question shaped by how we build compensation and support around the people who stay. I didn’t get much past the diagnosis before I left my position this past February. Sitting in the seat, I never had the uninterrupted time to integrate the staffing pattern, the workload problem, and the budget pressure into a single approach rather than the three separate ones I was managing on parallel tracks. I’ve had that time since.
Staffing teams across the country will run through the same spring exercise again next year, working out which special education classrooms won’t make it to September. The problem deserves a better answer than the one most districts currently have.
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.