Category: Special Education

AI to the Rescue

Schools face a financial cliff. Last March the U. S. Department of Education cancelled all extensions of Elementary and Secondary Education Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. The new policy requires states to reapply; in the meantime, they don’t receive the funds. “The clawback of previously approved funding extensions is resulting in students losing access to evidence-based programs that are addressing learning loss.”  (www.afterschollalliance.org) These financial cuts hit especially hard given the increased special needs of students since the pandemic: mental health support, tutoring to catch up, addressing behavior and attendance issues, falling enrollment, etc.

The vast majority of school funding goes to salaries for personnel, on average 81%. (www.the74million.org) That reality has two significant consequences: funding cuts almost invariably require cuts in personnel, and any measures that maximize the use of personnel can help offset such cuts.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help “prioritize and enable broader academic, staffing, and budget goals. And most importantly, strategic scheduling can help ensure that all students get access to the courses they want and need to be on track to graduate, remain inspired to attend and excel in school, and be empowered to pursue a postsecondary pathway.” (www.the74million.org2) Misty Rieber, the chief academic officer of Lubbock Independent School District, which serves approximately 25,000 students in West Texas, says “there are few questions more paramount than how your staff and students spend their time every day, what positions you’ll hire for, how many teachers you will hire, and how students will be able to interact with them. Equitable resource allocation across schools, proper access to core courses and electives, and dedicated support to sub-groups begins with the development of a school schedule. And perhaps the most overlooked aspect of scheduling is the ability to develop innovative staffing and budgeting solutions.” (Ibid.)

Too often, schools “roll over” the previous year’s schedule even though it may no longer be appropriate for the upcoming year. Building a master schedule is an intensive, demanding, complex process. AI can transform this process. Lubbock, Texas, schools used AI to analyze thousands of possible scheduling scenarios, a task too broad for individuals, thereby allowing them to avoid defaulting to a prior schedule and instead to align the schedule with school and district priorities while meeting the student needs more efficiently. (www.the74million.org3)

After piloting using AI for master scheduling in select schools, Austin, Texas, now uses it for all 33 middle and high school master schedules. Trying to decide how to balance the needs of a student body that includes special education students, students on 504 plans, and emergent bilingual students added additional challenges that AI manages. (www.edweek.org)

AI can optimize resources and provide strategic alignment and adaptability to unexpected changes because it can process a level of complexity that considers countless variables: teacher preferences, student elective choices, room specifications, state rules, teacher certifications, class size issues, enrollment numbers both for specific classes and schoolwide, etc. A process like this is nearly impossible manually.

The Stanford Scale Initiative Accelerator for Learning published a 2025 research brief about this entitled The Key Resource of Time: Master Schedules and Effective Allocation of Students and Educators. They describe AI-driven scheduling tools as powerful solutions that “not only reduce the manual workload for administrators but also introduce a data-driven, strategic approach to scheduling, ensuring that student needs, teacher availability, and institutional priorities are balanced more effectively than ever before… By leveraging machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, AI scheduling platforms can analyze historical enrollment patterns, optimize course placement, and anticipate scheduling conflicts before they arise.” The brief lists concrete benefits:

  • Identifying staffing inefficiencies and potential budget savings. 
  • Creating better instructional delivery for special student populations, especially inclusion settings, to ensure that instructional specialists can focus on their content areas.
  • Enabling academic interventions by grouping students and assigning them to targeted instructional supports such as MTSS [Multi-Tiered System of Supports, a proactive and preventative framework that integrates data and instruction to maximize student success from a strengths-based perspective] and learning acceleration strategies.
  • Supporting strategic priorities by building in professional learning communities or common planning time (e.g. professional development blocks for first-year teachers and common planning periods with their mentor teachers).

It’s time for more districts to take advantage of the very positive outcomes that AI offers, at least in the area of building master schedules. Avoiding human error and dealing with layers of complexity that are challenging to solve manually should compel districts to invest in this process. Ultimately, they will save time and money, allowing them to avoid unnecessary cuts.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

My heart lies with Project Head Start. As a senior in high school, already committed to teaching, I was lucky enough to volunteer in one of the first Head Start programs in New York. I saw firsthand fine teaching and coaching. I met children who grew up without books and reading in their homes, who became a rapt audience. I valued the relationship-building the paid teachers facilitated and felt hopeful for the future of the kids enrolled. That hopefulness was confirmed when I researched the impact of the program for one of my education classes in college.

Knowing that research might now be updated, I just did another search. Overall, the program remains effective: children have significantly better social-emotional, language, and cognitive development and are better prepared for kindergarten.  (Love et al., 2002) These children are less likely to end up in foster care (sciencedirect.com), more likely to have better health outcomes (Lee et al., 2013; Ludwig and Miller, 2007), more likely to graduate high school (Bauer and Schanzenbach, 2016) and go to at least one year of college and less likely to be unemployed (Deming, 2009). The children of Head Start graduates are significantly more likely to finish high school and enroll in college and they are significantly less likely to become teen parents or to be involved in the criminal justice system. (Barr and Gibbs, 2017)

A systematic meta-study shows that “studies have found persistent favorable effects of Head Start on academic achievement scores at older ages; on educational attainment, including high school graduation and college enrollment; on other lifecourse outcomes such as criminal behavior, teen pregnancy, and aspects of health, albeit with some differences in the magnitude of the impacts across subgroups defined by gender or race-ethnicity.” (www.rand.org)

I find the plans of the current administration to defund this valuable program not only appalling but also bewildering. Head Start, which serves more than half a million of the country’s neediest children, is run by public and private schools but dependent on the federal government for its funding. Current programs have received $1 billion less already, “slow-walking” money approved by Congress.  That’s almost a third of their funding, and its absence caused some programs to close. (apnews.com) RFK Jr. claims he wants to preserve funding for this fiscal year (chicagotribune.com), but last month the news leaked that the Trump administration would propose eliminating Project Head Start in 2026. (usatoday.com) Indeed, in early April the federal government closed five regional Head Start offices, including the Chicago regional office. (chicagotribune.com) The ACLU has filed a lawsuit asking the federal court to stop the administration from stripping funding for Head Start and closing program offices. (chicagotribune.com 2)

While the ultimate outcome is unclear, programs suffer from the uncertainty. I believe in Project Head Start because it serves children who need support. I am convinced that Project Head Start’s investment in our neediest children offers a good return on investment. For those who don’t value its work as a moral issue, the economics should convince them. Cutting this program might save money initially but will cost far more in the long run. The human cost is incalculable. I am heartbroken that the current administration continues to weaponize funding instead of making wise decisions about what’s worth doing. Too many of our children and—ultimately—their ability to be self-sufficient adults with agency are at stake.

The Impact of ACES for Education

Ten days ago I had the privilege of attending a conference about resilience and ACES [Adverse Childhood Experiences]. A pivotal part of my training as a CASA/GAL [Court Appointed Special Advocate/Guardian Ad Litem], learning about ACES had already clarified why some of my charges struggle. They have endured traumas that most of us can only imagine when we see them on television or in the movies, but the research proves that trauma actually causes toxic stress, prolonged or excessive activation of the stress response system. “Toxic stress interferes with developing healthy neural, immune, and hormonal systems and can alter our DNA expression. Over time, multiple ACEs—especially without adequate adult support—can affect the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems and have lasting effects on attention, behavior, decision-making, and response to stress throughout a lifetime” (preventchildabuse.org).

The 10 ACEs originally included:

  • Physical abuse
  • Emotional abuse
  • Sexual abuse
  • Physical neglect
  • Emotional neglect
  • Alcohol or drug abuse by a parent
  • Mentally ill parent
  • Divorce
  • Incarceration of parent
  • Childhood Domestic Violence

The consequences of higher ACES scores can be devastating:

  • People with an ACE score of 4 are twice as likely to be smokers and seven times more likely to be alcoholic.
  • Having an ACE score of 4 increases the risk of emphysema or chronic bronchitis by nearly 400 percent, and attempted suicide by 1200 percent.
  • People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more autoimmune diseases.
  • People with an ACE score of 6 or higher are at risk of their lifespan being shortened by 20 years (safe-sound.org).

Additional research expanded the list of ACES to include “experiencing poverty, discrimination, bullying, community violence, migration-related stressors, and foster care involvement” (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

All is not lost, however. We can counteract the impact of ACES through the buffering, consistent presence of a caring adult. We can counteract them through trauma-informed care and education. We need to shift the focus from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” and respond accordingly.

Although I’ve been studying ACES, the recent presentation on resilience and ACES sparked a thought I should have had long ago. Perhaps because the research began near the end of my public-school teaching career, I knew nothing about it as an educator.

Now I believe that every educator should know about ACES, their implications, and how to respond to student behavior and needs more effectively. It can be done. If you want to see brilliant trauma-informed education, watch the film, Paper Tigers. It “asks the following questions: What does it mean to be a trauma-informed school? And how do you educate teens whose childhood experiences have left them with a brain and body ill-suited to learn?” (kpjrfilms.co).  At Lincoln Alternative High School in the rural community of Walla Walla, Washington,  teachers and a brilliant principal provide students with that critical stable, caring adult to help them change their lives. Their work demonstrates the principles of a trauma-informed organization:

  • “Safety
    • Throughout the organization, patients and staff feel physically and psychologically safe
  • Trustworthiness + Transparency
    • Decisions are made with transparency, and with the goal of building and maintaining trust
  • Peer Support
    • Individuals with shared experiences are integrated into the organization and viewed as integral to service delivery
  • Collaboration
    • Power differences — between staff and clients and among organizational staff — are leveled to support shared decision-making
  • Empowerment
    • Patient and staff strengths are recognized, built on, and validated — this includes a belief in resilience and the ability to heal from trauma
  • Humility + Responsiveness
    • Biases and stereotypes (e.g., based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, geography) and historical trauma are recognized and addressed” (traumainformedcare.chcs.org)

It might be easy to assume that ACES are a problem of certain communities, but the truth is that they are prevalent everywhere.  The original ACE study was conducted at Kaiser Permanente in California from 1995 to 1997. “What’s particularly startling is that the 17,000 ACE Study participants were mostly white, middle- and upper-middle class, college-educated, and all had jobs and great health care (they were all members of Kaiser Permanente)” (acestoohigh.com).

The presentation hit me like a ton of bricks… why weren’t educators everywhere learning about ACES and adjusting their pedagogical approach accordingly. I vowed to reach out to local school districts to connect them with professional resources. Students today are struggling more than they were pre-pandemic, and they need a trauma-informed approach. I wish I’d known about this when I was still in the classroom. I vow to bring this information to classrooms near me now. Won’t you?

The Kids Are Not All Right

The stats are in and confirm what we already knew: academic achievement is in trouble.  This crisis parallels the mental health crisis students face.

We already knew that student mental health struggles dramatically increased during the pandemic; I’ve written about this often enough. Suicidal ideation and completed suicide rates have both risen. New data from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 34, and the rate for people aged 15 to 24 rose 8 percent. Last July nationwide hotline for mental health emergencies experienced  a 45 percent increase in calls, texts and chats in its first month after changing to a simpler phone number [washingtonpost.com]. The stats from the Center for Disease Control offer little hope:

  • From February to March 2021, the number of hospital emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts jumped by 51 percent for girls and 4% for boys compare to that period in 2019.
  • Provisional data for 2021 showed an increase in the national rate from 2020 to 2021, especially for people ages 15 to 24.
  • Nearly 45 percent of high school students were so persistently sad or hopeless in 2021 they were unable to engage in regular activities.
  • Almost 1 in 5 high school students seriously considered suicide.
  • 9 percent of teenagers surveyed by the CDC tried to take their lives during the previous 12 months.
  • The percentage of gay, lesbian, bisexual, other and questioning students reporting a suicide attempt is even higher.
  • Nearly 30 percent of students said an adult in their home had lost a job, and 24 percent said they went hungry for a lack of food.
  • More than 230,000 U.S. students under 18 are believed to be mourning the ultimate loss: the death of a parent or primary caregiver in a pandemic-related loss, according to research by the CDC, Imperial College London, Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Cape Town.
  • The loss for Black and Hispanic children was nearly twice the rate of White children.
  • Schools don’t have enough mental health professionals. Professional organizations recommend one school psychologist per 500 students, but the national average is one school psychologist per 1,160 students, with some states approaching one per 5,000, well below the recommended rate of one for every 500 students. Similarly, the recommended ratio of one school counselor per 250 students is not widespread. [washingtonpost.com]

Now layer that with the disappointing test results for academic achievement. The National Educational Assessment of Progress scores released in April show stark declines, especially in math. “Math scores for eighth grade fell by eight points, from 282 in 2019 to 274 this year, on a 500-point scale, and in fourth grade, by five points — the steepest declines recorded in more than a half century of testing.” These declines come on the heels of a pre-pandemic decline in both math and reading for 13-year-olds [washingtonpost.com]. Many 2019 scores were bad, and current scores are even worse. And the declines play favorites: low-income students and students of color fared far worse [nytimes.com]. Older students – with less time left in their public education to make up learning losses – are recovering more slowly than younger children [washingtonpost.com]. Support for virtual learning during the pandemic varied dramatically among communities, and students who were in virtual learning longer fared worse as well [Ibid.]. I live in Illinois, where schools were closed for a long time. That choice may have supported how much better Illinois did with Covid than many states, but our state’s children now pay the price.

Expressions of concern and hand-wringing over troubling scores will not move us off the dime. I support the call for a historic investment in education published by leading educators in an opinion piece for the Washington Post entitled “To help students shoot for the moon, we must think bigger and bolder” [washingtonpost.com]. Their metaphor of a moonshot is apt; we must support a major effort to address these losses that is both immediate and effective. Under President Kennedy, NASA realized they would need a much bigger rocket to reach the moon than we’d ever built, and major investment allowed the development of the Saturn V that took us to the moon. Research offers several solutions to our current crisis in education:

  • Providing students with three hours of tutoring, with three or fewer students per teacher — each week can produce a year’s worth of additional growth.
  • Summer school provides an academic quarter of growth.
  • One additional period of algebra instruction can teach a semester’s worth of algebra [Ibid.].

 I would add a number of other strategies:

  • Offer classroom teachers more support and professional development.
  • Offer parents/guardians specific work that they might help their students accomplish.
  • Increase the teacher pipeline so we don’t have classrooms being combined and supervised by non-teachers, a serious problem now. We need teachers to feel valued and supported, not exhausted.
  • Increase mental health services on site for both students and faculty/staff.
  • Increase the mental health pipeline.
  • Find a way to limit political attacks on school board members so that they can focus on the urgent issues we all face.

None of this will be inexpensive. As a nation, though, we need a 21st century work force of critical thinkers, collaborative workers, and quality producers. We need a comprehensive approach to mental health issues, behavior, and academics. That won’t happen unless we seize this opportunity for another “moonshot.”

Becoming a “Lighthouse”

This week I had the privilege of attending a Special Education Eligibility Hearing for a student for whom I’m a Guardian ad Litem. I drove a fair distance to an unfamiliar school; there I was welcomed and made to feel included.
 
Eleven of us gathered around a conference table to explore how best to support this student. An innocent victim of a tragic accident, this student has very specific needs for services to support vision and hearing. I have attended hearings like these as a teacher, but my perspective at this hearing felt so different. As a teacher, I might have worried about how to manage the required accommodations, but as a guardian I worked to be sure those accommodations would be made available.
 
My first teaching job in 1970 preceded any kind of special education for students like this. Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, wasn’t signed into law until late 1975.The EHA guaranteed a free, appropriate public education to each child with a disability in every state and locality across the country.  It has been renamed and amended since then, but the purpose remains: to guarantee an appropriate education for every student, at no cost to parents, in the least restrictive environment, with an “Individualized Education Program” that identifies each student’s individual needs and how they will be met.
 
Our group included the DCFS Caseworker, the foster mother, and eight staff members, including teachers, the school psychologist, the vision support specialist, the speech therapist, the social worker, and the chair of Special Education. As I listened to these committed, compassionate adults develop an action plan, I thought about what would have happened to this student in the early days of my teaching, before 94-142. My student would have faced untold struggles and been unlikely to achieve a fulfilled and independent adult life, yet this is a resilient youth whose struggles were caused by others and who deserves assistance to achieve success in school and build a full life.
 
When I was still teaching, I enjoyed collaborating with our Special Education Department. I worked with special ed English classes on creative writing, I helped them produce a newsletter as well as a performance where they read their work to family members, and I co-taught an American Literature inclusion class for juniors with six to eight special education joining other students to be team-taught by the special ed department chair and me. I thought I was a supportive enough advocate, but this week’s hearing strengthened my resolve. Providing special resources and accommodations like extra time on tests or different kinds of printed materials certainly is a burden on already overloaded schools and teachers. But it’s necessary and right, and I remain in awe of a team like this that is not only making it happen, but that also works on how to make it acceptable for a student like mine who desperately wants not to be seen as different.
 
That would have been epiphany enough for this week – smile – but yesterday reinforced it when I got to hear Steve Pemberton speak. Pemberton wrote A Chance in the World, his personal memoir of being raised in a series of abusive foster homes and what helped him find his way to a fulfilling adult life. His follow-up book, The Lighthouse Effect: How Ordinary People Can Have an Extraordinary Impact in the World, shows how ordinary people can become “human lighthouses” for those in situations like those of his childhood. Yesterday Pemberton spoke about the three lighthouses who changed the trajectory of his life; then he encouraged us to continue to be lighthouses for others. His talk, delivered with humor and without a trace of self-pity, inspired me to recommit to my guardian work. It made me want to share his perspective with the people who sat around that table, each and every one of whom is a lighthouse. Last night I had a wonderful call with the foster mother of my student, and I explained to her why she is a lighthouse. When I finish the book, I’ll pass it on to her – she’s earned it! And I will continue to push myself to be a lighthouse for the youths in my cases. Every child deserves a fair chance, and we all can make a difference.

Best Buddies at Graduation

Last week we had the pleasure and privilege of attending our middle granddaughter’s graduation from a Chicago public magnet high school. The ceremony was held at the Arie Crown Theater at McCormick Place in Chicago because the school auditorium was too small for the class of over 450 and all of their supporters. The event was lovely if long, and we especially enjoyed seeing a certain young woman prance across the stage with grace and confidence to receive her diploma. The class stats were mind-boggling: every student was headed to a four-year college, and they’d logged countless volunteer hours in the community, won numerous academic and athletic championships, and earned $56 million in scholarships! Memorable and impressive, to be sure. That’s part of the package of a top-notch magnet school.

The part we didn’t anticipate happened when the Special Education students walked across the stage to pick up their diplomas and certificates. Part of the mission of Whitney M. Young Magnet School is “To give students with disabilities the same high school opportunities as their non-disabled peers.” In addition to a sizable faculty and staff, the school has a Best Buddies program that pairs regular and special ed students. Some of these students could not make it across the stage without physical support; a couple had trouble following the directions. But each and every one of them received the same response from the audience of parents, friends, and peers: loud cheering and applause with great gusto. This is a truly inclusive community where high-achieving students whose academic success is often a given appreciate and celebrate the success of those who have overcome obstacles to be able to march across that stage. Their genuinely joyful response was uplifting.

When I commented on it, I was assured that those who have attended multiple Whitney Young graduation ceremonies experience that every year. Being part of that kind of school culture, with genuine inclusion, prepares students to work and live with others regardless of their circumstances. It gives me hope for the future.