Delaware’s total public school enrollment barely changed between 2019 and 2025, falling by less than 1 percent, from about 124,000 students to about 123,000. Underneath that flat line, two very different trends were running in opposite directions. Regular education enrollment dropped by roughly 3,500 students, a decline of about 3.4 percent. Special education enrollment rose by about 2,500 students, an increase of nearly 11.4 percent. Statewide, the share of students receiving special education services climbed from 17.7 percent to just under 19.9 percent in six years. The pattern held in seventeen of Delaware’s nineteen traditional school districts, and it holds whether you compare the pandemic year to today or go back to the fall before the pandemic started, which rules out the easy explanation that this is a temporary blip.
I pulled these numbers from six years of Delaware’s own Student Enrollment and Unit Allotment Reports, the same annual filing the state uses to calculate staffing formulas for every district. Colonial School District offers the starkest version of the pattern. Its total enrollment fell by more than 1,300 students between 2019 and 2025, a drop of nearly fourteen percent. Its special education enrollment grew anyway, adding 151 more students to its caseload even as the district’s overall population collapsed, and its special education share climbed from 20 percent of students to just under 25 percent. A district losing students by the hundreds every year still needed more special education capacity than it had before.
Delaware is not unusual here. Marguerite Roza at Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab has spent years tracking a national version of this same divergence, documenting school staffing that grew faster than enrollment through a sequence of funding waves, recovery from the Great Recession, a strong economy after 2013, and the pandemic recovery dollars that let districts hire counselors, interventionists, and aides at a scale unmatched in history. Delaware’s numbers describe a narrower, more specific trend than that national hiring surge. The need for special education services kept growing while everything around it, including enrollment, funding, and staff capacity, shrank.
Why the Hiring Made Sense
I understand the instinct to keep adding people because most of what is driving demand for special education right now is real. The IEP process has grown heavier over the last decade, with more documentation, more procedural safeguards, and more legal exposure attached to every decision a case manager makes. Districts are also taking on student mental health needs at a scale that didn’t exist when I started as a superintendent, and a meaningful share of that burden lands on special education staff, since mental health and disability identification overlap constantly inside a school building. Add the increasing expectation that families receive real-time updates on a child’s progress, something a phone call used to handle informally and now functions as a formal accountability measure in many districts. None of these pressures are imaginary, and none of them are going away.
I’ve written before about how new legislative mandates arrive in a school system without a corresponding reduction in what’s already on a teacher’s plate. Special education has absorbed more of that pattern than almost any other part of a school system, because federal law requires the services regardless of what else is happening in the budget that year. Adding staff in response to that pressure is often the only lever a superintendent has in the short term.
The Problem Hiring Doesn’t Solve
Despite hiring more teachers, special educators leave the profession at a meaningfully higher rate than general education teachers, and caseload size again and again appears in the research as the reason they cite for leaving. In one study of urban special educators who left teaching, a third cited caseload or class size as too large, more than any other single factor. That research goes back decades, and it hasn’t changed because the staffing numbers moved.
A district can lower its student-to-teacher ratio and still lose its best special educator if that teacher’s remaining caseload carries the most complex, most litigious, most time-consuming cases in the building. Headcount refers to the number of people a district has. It says nothing about what any one of them is actually carrying, and the weight of that daily caseload is what teachers describe when they explain why they left.
Constantly adding new positions can’t continue as the default response indefinitely. Delaware’s regular education enrollment continues to decline. State and local funding formulas still primarily rely on total enrollment, not on the complexity of a shrinking student body’s remaining needs. A district that keeps solving special education strain by adding positions is spending against a revenue base that isn’t growing at the same rate as the strain. That math doesn’t resolve itself. It gets worse gradually, until a budget year arrives when it can’t continue.
Fix the Classroom, Not Just the Department
Treating special education strain as a problem the special education department can solve alone makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t match how a school actually works. Most of the improvement needed for students with disabilities must occur in general education classrooms, since that’s where they spend most of their school day. General education teachers are also stretched thin. Asking them to absorb more without support moves the same mistake to a different part of the building.
The way through this isn’t asking one overwhelmed group of teachers to do more so another overwhelmed group can do less. Instead, it’s about building practices in behavior support, communication systems, and classroom structure for students with intensive needs that reduce the burden on adults and improve outcomes for every student, not just those with an IEP.
A Final Thought
There are days when I think the entire system needs rebuilding from the ground up. We need a new federal mandate structure, new funding formulas, and a new accountability regime that doesn’t treat every part of a district as if it operates independently of the others. Unfortunately, I don’t think that rebuild is coming, and spending energy wishing for it doesn’t help the superintendents and directors doing this work right now. What’s left is the part of the problem within a district’s control, and Delaware’s numbers point to where that control still matters. Regular education enrollment there is still falling. Special education enrollment is still climbing. The districts that put real capacity into the general education classroom are the ones still standing when the current approach runs out of room.
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.