Special education staffing baseline presented; board presses on agency hires and real‑time tracking

District staff presented a new, site‑based staffing tracker for special education at the Jan. 15 meeting, and trustees used the presentation to press for next steps linking staffing to student outcomes and fiscal responsibility.

Jennifer Nicholson, director of special education, and Alex Potapenko, coordinator, described a Google Sheets‑based system that centralizes position counts, assignments and FTE calculations for every school. The team showed examples from early childhood (SEED at Horace Mann), elementary sites such as Emerson, and Burroughs High School, with counts of students on IEPs and the certified and classified positions assigned to those programs.

Trustees focused their questions on two operational issues: how many positions are filled by nonpublic agency (NPA) contractors and whether the new tracking system updates daily absences. Nicholson said the district’s deep dive shows a substantial number of agency hires — the classified NPA slide reflected roughly 123 agency positions — and that the new tracker is a live staffing baseline updated at the site level, with quarterly updates planned. She said the tracker is not intended to capture daily student attendance or same‑day absences but rather who is assigned to a site and in what roles; site office managers will update the sheet at least quarterly and HR access and cross‑department workflows are next steps.

Board members asked staff to convert the baseline into actionable recommendations: staffing formulas by program, comparisons of agency spending versus hiring from within, and correlations between staffing patterns and student outcomes. Trustees also suggested the district work with HR and finance to automate access and reduce siloing so that vacancies, posted positions and agency expenditures can be monitored in near real time.

Nicholson said the report is a baseline rather than a set of final recommendations; staff will return with targeted proposals including comparative cost data, recommended staffing formulas, and a timeline for integrating HR and payroll data.