For the first time, this year’s Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) Curriculum, Research, and Instruction Conference included a dedicated strand on special education. The timing matters: Even as the federal government reconsolidates special education programming and budgets tighten across the board, districts remain responsible for the 8.2 million (and counting) students who qualify under IDEA.
Two panels showed how district leaders are responding:
- Special education leaders from Atlanta, East Baton Rouge, and Birmingham—Dr. Shateena Love, Dr. Janet Armelin Harris, and Pamela Wimbish—diagnosed the core problem as a lack of shared ownership between general education, special education, and school leadership. The fix, they argued, is structural and cultural, not just compliance. Dr. Harris tracks “who’s assigned a task, who is accountable for this task, who is supporting in that task” in real time. Dr. Love put it simply: “Shared ownership looks like clarity, it looks like calibration along with collaboration.”
- A second session paired Christina Foti (NYC Public Schools) and Dr. Nathalie Nérée (School District of Philadelphia) with Glenna Wright-Gallo, former Assistant Secretary at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Foti pushed districts to move beyond compliance: scaling inclusive practice means training the whole school, not building separate models. “How do we support all children and build the capacity of all our educators? It’s programmatic. It’s enrichment. It’s not separate.” Dr. Nérée pressed on family engagement—”How are we meeting families where they are, and supporting parents in being their child’s biggest advocate?”—and warned that districts “must dispel the illusion of inclusion.”
What to Watch
Special education is where federal retrenchment will hit districts first and hardest—and it’s the issue we’re watching most closely heading into the school year.
The districts to learn from won’t be the ones defending the status quo; they’ll be the ones building coherence, integrating special education, MTSS, and multilingual services into one system rather than running them in silos. As Nérée put it, the illusion of inclusion is no longer enough.
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