Lead with Focus
Special Education Administrators and Goals for their Organization
I stepped into my role as a special education director in July 2020 and was met with a tumultuous time that still sends ripples through the education landscape. Schools were shut down in the spring of 2020 due to the COVID pandemic and we were not sure what school was going to look like in the next school year.
The whirlwind early in the school year gave me plenty of work, and playing whack-a-mole with the issues that popped up made me feel like I was doing the right work. Problems came up and problems were addressed.
This is a dangerous place for an executive to be.
The executive has to be focused on future success and sustainability in a way that no one else in the organization needs to be. Luckily I had amazing mentors and other resources that helped me realize this before it was too late.
So I knew I needed a different focus, but what should that focus be? The districts I support and the cooperative I led didn’t have clear goals or key metrics to focus on. The state has indicators that measure the success and compliance of special education organizations, but those measures were lagged by 2 years, so it was hard to feel like you could influence them.
Regardless of the lack of clear direction, I knew I needed to set goals for the organization and those goals would give me the focus I needed to ensure the work I was doing was more than just urgent, but truly was important.
Determining Goals
1. Identifying Important Outcomes
The first thing I needed to know when setting goals for the cooperative was the outcomes that mattered the most for the students we served. Manager Tools talks about managers (executives are still managers) being responsible for the results the organization needs and the retention of their people. Results and Retention. This felt like a great place to start.
Retention was easy to set goals for. Our retention in the previous 3 years had reduced from 25% to 15%, and I thought we could drive that down further. Not only was teacher turnover disruptive and expensive, but the hiring market was drying up and there was no guarantee that a departing teacher could be replaced. Keeping staff also allows training and experience to compound so other outcomes are easier to achieve. This all gave me my first goal.
By the end of the school year, we will increase certified staff retention to 90%.
2. Narrow Priorities
After identifying retention as an area of focus, I started diving into the results side of Results and Retention. As mentioned earlier, the state has over a dozen indicators that they track for special education agencies. These include compliance metrics, such as timeliness of evaluations, parent involvement, and child find responsibilities. It also includes measures of inclusiveness, student achievement in reading and math, early childhood growth, and many more areas.
From my reading of Peter Drucker, I knew that having too many priorities is just as bad as having no priorities. So I dug deeper into the data, talked with staff and administrators, and got input from parents of students we serve. It became clear that several of the items were not in my direct control.
Student achievement was based on curriculum and instructional practices that were determined differently in each of the 4 districts I served. Compliance measures were in my control, but did not feel like they moved the needle in other areas. We are an education cooperative, not a compliance agency. That couldn’t be a major focus.
One thing that I could influence was the decision-making of IEP teams, and the most important decision they make is how much time each student spends with grade-level peers and how much they are exposed to grade-level instruction. Research was clear that improvement in this area would have an impact on many of the other things we are being held accountable for. Achievement, behavior, early childhood growth.
So there was my next goal.
Within a year, we will reduce time away from peers (G setting for those familiar with that code) by 10%.
3. Communicate your Goals
I now had the two goals that represented the most important things that our special education cooperative could do. Keep our people and get a result that represents our mission.
Having goals is great, but they are nothing if they are not communicated. So once I had these goals, I worked to communicate about them to the people who could influence them.
For retention, I shared it with my assistant director, the principals of the schools, and the superintendents of the districts we serve. They could then look for opportunities to help influence that goal, while I also worked on strategies and resources.
For results, I shared the data that showed how much time kids were spending away from their peers. I also shared research on how students who are behind can still be successful in grade-level instruction with appropriate scaffolds and support. I encouraged them to look at one student at a time to find parts of the day that could be switched from excluded time to included time.
Throughout the year, I would write about and talk about these goals every chance I got. Inclusion, specifically, became a part of our culture as a special education department and slowly decisions started to change.
Conclusion
Setting these goals has helped our organization make progress in the areas that are most important for our mission. While we have yet to hit 90% retention, we have been between 11% and 14% each of the last 4 years. Numbers that have been key to our ability to keep caseloads low.
We have had more success with our inclusion goal. Each of the last two years we’ve reduced exclusion services by 150 minutes per week per student. The average student has gained an extra hour per day with their peers and with grade-level instruction. This represents a 33% decrease in two years.
This would not have been possible if I was still playing whack-a-mole. The whirlwind still exists and has to be managed, but the goals give me permission to set that aside to work on the things that matter most.