The Wake County Public School System will set aside 15% of its special education grant funding and contract with more outside analysts in an effort to decrease its disproportionate identification of Black boys as "emotionally disturbed" and disproportionate long-term suspensions of Black boys with disabilities.
"Emotional disturbance" is a federal category of special education identification that refers to children with mental health issues that are holding them back from reaching their academic potential.
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The district is also providing professional development to principals and other educators to make sure children are assessed for special education and, if they qualify, set up with services within 90 days, a standard the district is meeting just over half of the time. Staff are getting more training on this process, including school leadership, and they are being asked to track their processes to better find out which tasks are taking too long.
The U.S. Department of Education identified how the district was falling short in special education compliance in a report issued this summer. The report was based on data from the 2023-24 school year, meaning any changes undertaken now will not affect the next report issued in 2026, which will be based on the 2024-25 school year.
The changes coming are in response to the federal findings but are also part of a broader plan to overhaul the district's special education services and reduce challenges, including lawsuits and shortcomings that have been identified for years.
That includes training on how to better craft Individualized Education Programs, which each student in special education has.
More changes coming
Later this school year, the district will also reassign some central office special education staff to new schools and duties. The district is trying to expand the number of coordinating teachers who can work directly with schools to serve students with disabilities and better plan for their services.
"All we're doing is putting out fires and reacting, and we're trying to be more proactive than that," said Lisa Allred, the district's assistant superintendent of special education services. Allred took over the department last school year and is overseeing the plan.
The district also plans to communicate the changes with families and more regularly engage with them, possibly starting in the spring, Allred said.
Board Member Tyler Swanson, a former Wake special education teacher, said the school system needs to make sure more than just the special education staff are playing a role in determining and providing services to students with disabilities. Special education teachers are strained for time and resources, Swanson said, and more people need to be held accountable than just them.
"We have to shift the narrative of the special education teacher not doing their job, and it is the school building as a whole," he said.
Superintendent Robert Taylor said that it will be part of principal training. He said that too often administrators sign off on things without knowing much about them.
"That's a problem," he said.
Plan for federal compliance
Earlier this year, the federal Office of Special Education Programs found that the district identified more Black children under the "emotional disturbance" category for special education than expected, along with 45 other North Carolina school systems and charter schools.
It also long-term suspended Black students with disabilities at far higher rates than other students, along with 66 other North Carolina school systems and charter schools. That means they were suspended for more than 10 days.
As a part of the annual evaluation, the federal government can compel states to seek training or reserve some federal special education funding for certain services.
As part of a compliance provisionally approved by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the Wake school district plans to set aside 15% of its special education grant funding for addressing the shortcomings identified in the report.
The district will also contract with more behavior analysts and technicians to help the district examine student data and determine what's causing certain behaviors among students. That's intended to help schools better plan to work with students and have the right interventions in place to prevent issues escalating, Allred said.
But those issues of disproportionality -- prompting the set aside and contracting -- weren't the only major shortcomings Allred found in the federal report for the district.
The district also only met the requirement of evaluating students for special education within 90 days only 58% of the time.
That's been a low percentage for a while, Allred said.
"You can see we're not doing well here," she told the school board. "We're really not closing this gap."
Federal oversight
The federal division that conducted the report -- the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) -- was nearly gutted earlier this month by the Trump administration, which urged the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies to consider laying off employees during the federal government shutdown. The education department moved to lay off 466 employees, including nearly everyone in the OSEP office. A judge temporarily halted that plan last week.
Wake school board members on Tuesday asked district officials what the potential impacts would be on the school system if those staff were laid off.
Taylor said he believed the bigger impact would be hindered oversight and administration of federal education programs, versus a cut in student-level services.
He said a funding cut would impact students directly, but he didn't expect that. He added that he also hadn't anticipated the layoffs.
Allred said the school district has already seen changes to federal special education oversight before the layoffs.
The federal education department has also reduced the number of civil rights complaints it takes on. Those can be filed by parents on many discrimination issues, including issues of denied services for students with disabilities.
"We're seeing less OCR cases," Allred said. Some are "just out there hanging for long periods of time."