Last week I attended the Urban Collaborative Spring Convening, an annual gathering for special education leaders, including directors, instructional coaches, school-based coordinators, and district administrators charged with ensuring students with disabilities get the differentiated learning experiences they deserve.

I was there to present alongside Valerie Mayad from Mesquite ISD, sharing their story of how the district approached change management when they prioritized special education in the scheduling process. A week later, I'm still reflecting on the conversations we had because, while they were rooted in special education, the conditions driving them are playing out across every corner of K-12.

By now we can all recite the challenges: enrollment is declining, budgets are shrinking, student needs are increasing. "Do more with less" has become something of a rallying cry in education, and the people saying it aren't wrong. What I think we owe ourselves, though, is a harder look at what we mean by "more." If "more" means meeting a standard built for a reality that no longer exists, we may be orienting ourselves toward the wrong target entirely.

The tension I kept observing at the conference was the struggle between knowing things have to change and still hoping that change will look like getting back to something familiar. I understand that hope. I spent years in Philadelphia working with schools on these exact challenges, and hope lived in those rooms too.

The goal for every student to get what they need to thrive has not changed. What I kept hearing at the conference was a real question about the “how” behind the goal. How do schools translate a student's IEP service minutes into an actual schedule? How do districts allocate related service providers across students and buildings? How does a school onboard a new special education teacher when the building is already stretched thin? Can we actually serve students well inside these constraints, or does doing right by kids require resources we no longer have? 

These challenges layer on top of each other, and most of them rest on assumptions about staffing, information-sharing, and decision-making that predate the conditions we're all working in now. The district and school teams doing this well are the ones willing to question those inherited structures honestly, rather than scaling them down and hoping for better results. But educators have watched cost-cutting exercises arrive dressed in the language of innovation before, and the skepticism that creates is earned.

What I found compelling about Valerie's story was how her team worked with that skepticism rather than around it. Starting with a pilot of two schools gave them a proof point. Another year of gathering baseline data for all schools gave hesitant colleagues time to get familiar with a new way of working before anyone asked them to fully commit. By the time the hard questions came, there was something real to point to.

I left that convening with more questions than answers, which feels right.

Which parts of what we're doing are genuinely serving students, and which parts have we simply stopped questioning? Where are we deploying expertise well, and where are we asking people to work around systems and tools that were never designed for what we're asking of them now? The Urban Collaborative was exactly the kind of space for that thinking, and the school and district teams doing this hard work every day are the reason Timely exists. I am honored to be on this journey with them.