‘We cannot continue down this path’: KCKPS special education can’t shake issues with staffing, trust

Bethany Heintz stood in front of the Kansas City, Kansas, school board to explain why she was leaving her job, but said she didn’t expect her story to make a difference.

“I have watched as my colleagues stood where I stand, said the things I’m about to say and resigned due to the lack of accountability and change,” the bilingual speech language pathologist said.

Heintz spoke about frustrations with the district’s special education program: problems like trouble keeping staff, subpar services for students and unhelpful leadership.

A report from the University of Kansas’ Center for Evaluation & Educational Leadership that the board discussed the same day backed her up.

The report notes that after 2021, the district started identifying a smaller percentage of students as needing special education — and the more expensive services that represents. Kansas’ average percentage of special education students continues to rise steadily.

The team of researchers also found heavy staff turnover and poor retention. That leaves more work for those who stay and makes it harder for them to give students the services they’re legally entitled to.

Staffing shortages dog schools across the country, but the district’s issues are particularly severe. It’s seen mass resignations in protest of how it runs special education.

KCKPS hasn’t repaired a breakdown in trust and communication between central office special education staff and nearly every other group researchers talked to — principals, teachers, paraprofessionals, parents and service providers like therapists and psychologists.

The problems aren’t news to the board. It got a 2022 report from KU that highlighted the same issues. Now the district has to decide how to move forward.

“Years ago, we were told the same thing, and here we are today still in the same situation,” board member Rachel Russell said. “I really, really, really want us to figure out as a board and as district leadership: What are we going to do? We cannot continue down this path.”

Us vs. them

People use words like “threatening,” “vindictive” and “retaliatory” when they describe special education coordinators and leaders in the district, the KU report says.

Coordinators say they’re tired of being seen as “the enemy.”

Researchers used data and focus groups — conversations with two to 13 people who share a similar role — for their report.

They found that people generally didn’t trust coordinators’ knowledge and were frustrated by slow responses to emails and inconsistent, confusing information.

Special education staff who work directly with students felt left out of important discussions about changes in the program, especially a restructuring of early childhood special education three years ago.

The restructuring reduced the number of paraprofessionals , who assist the lead teacher and often provide one-on-one services to children with special needs, in early childhood education.

Teachers say it led to understaffing, students not receiving services if their special education needs are identified partway through the year and teachers not having enough input into decisions about students.

Staffing problems

The 2022 report from KU notes that more than 80% of KCKPS psychologists resigned in spring 2021, unhappy with the response to concerns they expressed.

The 2024 report adds to the list of resignations. A “considerable number” of speech therapists left in 2023 with more “departing this year in protest.” Social workers have quit in the middle of the school year.

While all schools have to contend with shortages of special education staff, researchers heard that some who have left their jobs want to stay in the profession, just not at KCKPS.

During the 2022-23 school year, KCKPS had among the lowest numbers of school psychologists and paraprofessionals per capita when compared to 20 school districts around the nation of similar size and demographics.

However, researchers thought the KCKPS data didn’t include virtual psychologists and weren’t sure whether it included staff hired by outside agencies rather than working directly for the district.

While virtual staff members and those from agencies fill some gaps, they also come with problems, focus group participants told researchers.

Some aren’t trained well, especially on Kansas-specific laws, and the district has been slow to give them access to district email and data systems they need to do their work.

Some in-person staff members end up spending extra time training new paraprofessionals and assisting virtual staff with tasks that can’t be done remotely, such as collecting signatures and talking face-to-face with parents.

The report suggests the district examine whether virtual staff are serving students at least as well as in-person teachers and ensure that it’s onboarding and training all staff well.

Moving forward

The issues revealed in this spring’s report follow a pattern.

The 2022 report had noted similar problems with staff turnover, widespread belief that special education students weren’t being served well and serious trust issues between administrators and special education staff.

In the earlier report, nearly half of teachers and district administrators and nearly a third of building administrators — such as principals — thought special education students weren’t getting necessary support and services.

Participants also questioned whether special education services were meeting legal requirements and whether a special education cooperative with the Bonner Springs and Piper school districts was benefitting KCKPS.

The 2024 report said the district is making progress with state-required compliance but needs to balance that with a focus on actually helping students improve and addressing ongoing issues with retention and morale.

Though the report includes dozens of suggestions from focus groups and researchers, its four main recommendations are:

• Develop a vision and a public action plan for special education, using meaningful input from all stakeholders. That could mean bringing in neutral facilitators, expanding handbooks, having more in-person meetings and imitating examples of successful communication.
• Involve all special education staff in finding solutions to problems. The report says decentralizing decision-making authority, which is currently concentrated in the hands of special education coordinators and central office staff, could reduce bottlenecks and get students services more quickly.
• Clarify roles and responsibilities. That includes how special education coordinators can share authority with principals and addressing the different expectations for in-person vs. virtual staff and agency-hired vs. district-hired staff.
• Strengthen recruitment, retention, hiring and training.

KCKPS board members made it clear that they want more information about the situation and what can be done to improve.

The board approved a motion to receive an update about the report with a plan of action by the end of June.

“We don’t want people to think it’s just falling on deaf ears,” board member Wanda Brownlee-Paige said. “It’s been a constant struggle. So we need to have some kind of forum, sit down and try to work it out.”

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