Wake Schools is overhauling how it serves students with disabilities. Here's what they're doing

The Wake County Public School System is making major changes to how it serves students with disabilities — changes school board members say are long overdue.

The district plans to increase staff training, create more assigned roles for staff, more data analysis and more support for schools when cases become challenging.

Families could see changes to which school employees are taking on certain responsibilities for their children, and staff may have new people to report to.

The changes — which the district is calling a reorganization — come three years after the district first received a report from an education consulting firm informing them of major issues with staff training, poorly defined staff roles and problematic communication with parents. It had not begun an overhaul until this year.

The reorganization has already begun, and more changes will take place over next school year.

The school district, which serves about 20,000 students with disabilities, has faced challenges with adequately staffing special education positions — having about 70 vacant special education teaching positions and about 80 vacant special education instructional assistant positions through the last school year, data show. On top of that, the district has faced some higher-profile legal complaints over special education — including one that led to a 2023 settlement over restraining and secluding a child and the assault conviction of a former teacher whom parents had raised concerns about months before the school system reported the teacher to police.

Some cases have resulted in the district paying tuition for families to send their children to private schools instead.

Parents have also told WRAL News of prolonged individualized education plan meetings, challenges communicating with staff, untrained staff, excessive discipline and not getting evaluations completed in a timely manner, among other things.

Last fall, district officials said they were exploring changes in an effort to reduce complaints, including formal state or federal complaints and those filed in court. They said the district needed to do better. During the 2023-24 school year, the district frequently didn’t meet timeline requirements for providing services to students after they're referred to special education. They only did so within the required 90 days 58% of the time.

That’s not good, said Lisa Allred, the district's new assistant superintendent for special education services. Allred joined the district last school year in the position that has had a rotating cast of leaders for several years. Allred and other district leaders are analyzing data to find out how the district is falling short.

The district has formed a group that is meeting with staff at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction for input on the data and how to improve performance, according to Allred, who discussed the initiative at a Wake school board retreat last month.

Board Member Toshiba Rice said interest is high on the topic in her monthly parent group. She said she can now encourage parents and tell them, “Hey this is where we are, this is how we’re going to help.”

Other board members are pushing for more changes. Regular education teachers need to be more involved in individualized education planning and data analysis for students with disabilities, said Board Member Tyler Swanson, who is a former Enloe High special education teacher. Regular education teachers will end up in charge of providing services much of the time, Swanson said.

Allred said district officials will work with regular education teachers during a later part of the reorganization.

Swanson also recommended a case manager in every school to help reduce teacher workloads, especially among less-experienced teachers. "That's why there is so much turnover in special education," Swanson said during the retreat.

Allred said the case-manager model is a good one, but it’s not something the district can afford to do right now.

Making plans amid federal changes

The district's reorganization is happening as the Trump administration plans to make changes to who oversees special education at the federal level. After cutting more than 1,400 jobs from the federal education department, the Trump administration plans to place special education oversight under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Federal education department employees currently handle oversight largely by handling civil rights complaints when people feel their schools or states are failing to provide the federally required special education services.

In North Carolina, bills to remove a cap on the number of students with disabilities the state will provide funding for have for years stalled in the state General Assembly.

Wake's changes, presented in July, are more to the structure of special education services. They include giving staff more defined roles and responsibilities and making sure employees have training to both help students but also to write individualized education plans for them.

Officials plan to update job descriptions later this summer to reflect the new responsibilities that people will have, "making sure everyone knows nonnegotiables," Allred said.

She plans to meet with principals in September to train them on better leading meetings on individualized education plans — meetings in which a student's disability accommodations and progress toward established goals are reviewed and potential changes are discussed and decided. Every child in special education must have one of these each year, but families can — and often do — request additional meetings when issues arise that may necessitate adjustments.

The district also wants to reduce overrepresentation of Black students in the category of "emotional disturbance” for a behavioral health issue, Allred said. Those students are also disproportionately suspended from school.

Statewide, 1,883 Black students were in the "emotional disturbance" category during the 2024-25 school year — more than any other race, and at a rate twice as high as white students.

Students with disabilities are given in-school suspensions at a higher rate statewide than any other subgroup, including any racial or ethnic group, income level or English learner status. They are also given long-term suspensions at higher rates than average and given short-term suspensions 84% more frequently than the average student.

In Wake County, the story is similar. Students with disabilities are given short-term or long-term suspension more than three times as often as the average student, and they are given in-school suspensions more than twice as often as the average student. Parents have told WRAL for years that their children are often sent home to them in the middle of the day, without a formal suspension, something disability rights advocates say shouldn't happen. It follows a pattern playing out nationally.

Changes recommended in 2022

In 2021, the school system contracted with District Management Group, a Boston-based education consulting firm, to make recommendations for improving special education services.

DMGroup in July 2022 found many of the issues the new reorganization seeks to solve, including a lack of defined roles and responsibilities, inconsistent knowledge levels among staff members, and resolution attempts complicated by communication issues.

“In focus groups and interviews with parents, school staff, and district leaders, these key stakeholders reported that a lack of clearly defined roles and responsibilities creates significant challenges in resolving issues,” the group found in its 2022 report. “This lack of clarity is driven by unclear points of contact, de facto experts, IEP meetings, and unclear ownership.”

Many school staff lack the necessary knowledge or training on special education policies and procedures, but they can still end up becoming “de facto” experts at their schools simply by having more information than other employees, DMGroup found. Then IEP meetings often don’t have the necessary personnel or defined staff roles, often resulting in the meetings “meandering” and lasting “for hours.” Relationships between schools and parents often degrade, as communication falls apart.

In creating its report, DMGroup conducted interviews and held focus groups with parents, teachers, district staff and leaders, and other community advisers.

At the time, most formal “inquiries” reported to the district involved bus transportation issues, mostly submitted by school staff. But DMGroup found through focus groups and interviews that the main concerns at school revolved around the special education services themselves. Parents said they were unhappy with them, concerned about the setting in which they are provided and whether they are quality.

DMGroup described a system that left parents and school staff feeling frustrated.

“One of the greatest pain points that parents expressed is the lack of engagement and collaboration between themselves and their school and district partners,” the firm found. “School staff do not feel they have the tools, knowledge, or authority to resolve issues at the school level.”

The group recommended Wake ensure more parent engagement, provide more and clear information online, provide more staff training and support, and formalize the process for assessing and observing students.

DMGroup found that solving issues is “highly complex” in the school district because the process is “informal and largely ad hoc at the school level. What happens at each phase of issue resolution differs based on the school, the issue, the situation, and the knowledge and expertise of those involved.”

The consulting firm described a complicated workflow for resolving problems in the district, mimicking a spider web, and recommended a simpler five-step process: Identify the problem, investigate it, hold a meeting, make a decision, monitor and follow-up on the resolution.

The district should also regularly evaluate the problems that arise to find patterns and take steps to prevent those problems in the future, the firm recommended.