Bergen Commission subcommittee to draft response to AIR workload analysis, flags workforce and paperwork burdens

The Bergen Commission's subcommittee on special education workloads met online and agreed to prepare a short executive response to a draft workload-analysis report produced by AIR and shared by the state education department.

Leslie, a subcommittee co-chair, told members the group should organize feedback into three buckets—what to uplift from the report, concerns (including equity risks from too much local flexibility) and follow-up questions—to guide a companion response for the commission. "We're thinking of, of course, there are some things in here that we definitely wanna uplift," Leslie said.

The subcommittee co-chair, who led the meeting, said the group would use a shared Google Doc for asynchronous collaboration and asked members to add bullet points or draft text by Wednesday evening so co-chairs could prepare an initial draft by Monday and target a preliminary submission around July 1, pending administrative confirmation. "If other folks can join, that'll be great... we're kind of focusing on the workloads analysis report from AIR and that the SDE gave us the draft version," the co-chair said.

Brian, a CSDE official who has been facilitating the work with AIR, summarized the report's main technical finding: AIR found substantial variability in workload models across the state and recommended defining essential components or standards rather than imposing a single mandated formula. "Having 1 model, 1 required formula, if you will, was not the recommendation from AIR," Brian said, urging the subcommittee to identify what components they would lift and what local contexts should be considered.

Members stressed that recruitment and retention of special educators is fundamental to any workload or funding solution. The subcommittee co-chair said that, beyond caseload counts, administrative paperwork and follow-up tasks are a primary drag on special-education staff time: "It was more the paperwork, the busy work that comes with that," the co-chair said.

Participants discussed how the subcommittee's detailed, practice-level findings could feed the governor's Blue Ribbon Commission on education funding, which has a faster timeline and research support from Columbia University. Several speakers urged coordination so the Blue Ribbon Commission's funding focus could be informed by the subcommittee's operational recommendations.

The meeting also covered a planned PCG usability study of the CT SEDS platform. A committee member asked whether Medicaid billing workflows would be part of that work. Brian said Medicaid billing is not included in the usability study and is instead a separate vendor–district relationship. "The Medicaid billing is not something that is part of the usability study," he said.

Next steps: co-chairs will compile comments from the Google Doc, circulate a draft to subcommittee members early next week, and seek clarity from the commission chair, Rep. Mariam Khan, about the submission process and deadline. The co-chairs also signaled that the group will later turn to tier-2 interventions as the next substantive task. The meeting adjourned after roughly 30 minutes.