Don’t rush changes to AEAs
By CCI member and educator Pam Vogel
As an educator in Iowa for more than 30 years, I urge our lawmakers to vote no on any bills, including amendments, that will result in changes of the Area Education Agencies at this time.
We need to make time for a thorough study of all the educational systems in Iowa and do this carefully, with a representative group of stakeholders. Iowa should stand proud as a state that can lead in the nation and not follow other states who are making sweeping changes only for political purposes.
I know firsthand the benefits that the AEA systems provide - as a special education teacher, a curriculum director, principal, special education supervisor and superintendent in several Iowa districts.
1) These same services that schools currently receive cannot be replicated for less money.
In 2015, I moved from being a superintendent in rural Iowa to a superintendency in rural Connecticut. There, I shared seven school districts which served 1600 students and encompassed 275 square miles. I quickly learned two things about the regional service centers in Connecticut:
1) They did not have special education staff to assist schools.
2) Professional learning, curriculum materials, and other supports to schools were on a pay for use basis.
This required that we hire our own speech and language pathologists, school psychologists, contract out for occupational and physical therapists and vision and hearing specialists and pay for any specialized educational materials and equipment that some students required. To coordinate these professionals’ time and efforts with our seven rural schools necessitated that we have someone dedicated to overseeing special education. For salary and benefits, travel between the seven schools, contracted services, and specialized curriculum materials and equipment for students, the annual cost was over $3.4 million dollars from our districts’ budgets. In Iowa, these services would be provided by the district’s AEA in Iowa. A school district in Iowa with 1600 students would receive approximately $600,000 in special education flow-through money that then gives the district these special education services.
Since neither the Connecticut schools nor the regional service centers were accountable for children from birth to three, responsibility for the infants and toddlers fell to the state health and human services agencies, which meant there was not a seamless transition for infants to preschool, such as what exists now with our Early Access program in Iowa.
It was extremely difficult to find quality staff for our rural part of the state for these positions, as a number of professionals often preferred to have less travel and work in urban areas. A job vacancy had few if any applicants. When an educator called to request professional materials from the educational service center, if the center even had the materials, it was the school’s responsibility to acquire them. Not like the AEAs in Iowa who locate and deliver materials to schools every week at no additional cost.
2) The Iowa Department of Education is supposed to be our schools’ first line of educational support and innovation. If the governor is questioning the quality of our state’s education, shouldn’t the Department be her first area of attention?
For a number of years, the Iowa Department of Education has functioned in a manner that would cause us to think that giving that agency more power and supervision would not be smart. It has largely become a system of paper pushing with a lack of responsiveness to the schools, and a lack of understanding about what schools really need. I served on several state committees with the DE staff, and we found that they often did not listen to what we, as school administrators, said our schools needed. The most recent demonstration of incompetency has been the state roll-out of the ACHIEVE special education IEP training to all special education teachers and AEA staff in the state. The training was minimal and not helpful. Yet when asked if the state would modify or provide any additional training, we were told “no” and consequently everyone who began to use this program floundered for months, even years. There is still no Parent Portal which was promised to provide easy access for parents to see their child’s progress.
Both Director Snow and the Governor have little or no knowledge of special education processes in schools and in the AEA. Neither of their resumes include working as a teacher or administrator in public schools. Snow worked for Betsy DeVos who made no secret of her desire to dismantle public schools. Snow has had frequent job changes in the past four years and with a focus on school choice, charter schools, and tax credits.
Snow’s only focus in the area of special education has been for parents of children with special needs to enroll in a private home school program whereby special services would be provided by a created scholarship program. Director Snow spoke at a recent Iowa meeting and asked, “Why would we exit a student from special education?” It was shocking to those present, but when one sees her training with no credentials and we look at the state of Virginia and what they did under her reign, it is understandable—and frightening.
3) What's Past is Prologue
In 2024, following Snow’s time in the state, Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission identified major shortcomings in the state’s provision of special education services, including low-quality IEPs, a lack of knowledge among educators about how to effectively support students with disabilities and shortfalls in the Virginia Department of Education’s oversight of local divisions. Also, researchers who reviewed 90 randomly selected IEPs found about half lacked goals for academic progress or improved functioning, which are required by federal law. About 37% of parents believed the services outlined in their child’s IEP were only “somewhat” or “not at all appropriate.”
Virginia has begun to take steps to correct all of these grievous errors and with enormous money and time.
As astounding, the DE has already planned for this change in our state to occur by posting this on the DE website:
4) What We Don’t Have -- and Unintended Consequences
The Virginia Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission said only half or fewer administrators and general education teachers in their division had the knowledge or skills necessary to support students with disabilities.
Most school principals and superintendents in all states do not have strong knowledge of special education. For that reason, we must have professionals with this experience, or this will result in some students not getting services or not getting it in a timely manner, increased frustration from teachers who are trying to serve our kids, many who may leave the profession, and increased litigation from families.
Currently, the AEAs are able to ensure that the Individuals with Disabilities Education (IDEA) is followed and serves all children and we do not find our state in numerous lawsuits. In 2010, the Center for Appropriate Dispute Resolution in Special Education recognized Iowa as “Exemplary in Dispute Resolution.” As part of this profile, they recognized the PEC (now known as Family & Educator Partnership) as one of the reasons we have some of the lowest mediation, due process hearings, and state complaints in the U.S. In this current bill, it should be noted that the FEP program has been removed.
5) What We Have
Iowa is the only state in the nation that identifies and assigns special education services to students with disabilities based on nonproficiency (failure to progress and performance below expectation) rather than specific disability categories for students entitled for services under IDEA. We determine when a child is “discrepant”, and we do not wait for a disability label for the child to receive special education services. This is a very good thing for students, as we are able to help more students meet their goals at an earlier age or grade level. This also causes our numbers of students on IEPs to be higher than those of many states. With Iowa’s identification process, our goal is to work with all of these students so they can be served when we immediately see there is a need, reach their goals, and then exited out of special education. Additionally, Iowa is in the top 10 states for students in special education who graduate - 83%. Also, with our current system, there is a smooth transition that meets the need of the growing mobility of our student population across our state.
The data that the governor and director sight for our achievement gap was never designed to be used for comparisons. NAEP does not include all kids. Only 266 students out of over 7,500 of Iowa children identified for special education (only assessing 4th and 8th grade students) took the test or the matrix sampling was used so no one student takes the entire test. To make a thorough analysis before changes are made, we need the right kind of data that accurately describes Iowa students’ performance and then we should discuss real numbers.
The AEAs were never designed to support special education as a stand-alone service. Through the years, feedback from school administrators and teachers enabled the AEAs to adapt their offerings to meet the needs of districts to provide requested quality professional development, access to professional literature, as well as media and technology services, and negotiate lower prices for districts to be able to access licenses to use different technology subscription services. All teachers- special education and general education- reap these benefits.
6) What We Still Need
We need the most highly qualified experienced teachers in our schools. And we need to increase teacher pay—but not by removing their supports! Each year the workload is immense, largely due to the increased number of children and youth who come to our schools with mental or behavioral health issues that impacts their learning. Special education and general education teachers all need the support they can receive from AEA personnel who have the experience and education to help schools address the diverse needs of kids. The AEA staff meets with families, thoroughly evaluates and designs programs for students, and then provides guidance and support to teachers who implement the students’ plans. Teachers learn to teach; they are not taught to evaluate and determine eligibility or to deliver services such as speech, communications or occupational or physical therapy. This is the role of the AEA.If our goal as a state is to help teachers grow their skills and for us to increase student achievement for all students, teachers need this support.
If Iowa loses this system. we will lose many of the current professionals employed by the AEAs. Schools who are already having difficulty with budgets will be forced to reallocate their purchasing power. We will have inconsistencies in services from one part of the state or from one district to another.
The governor’s proposals are wrong for Iowa.
When mental health and all education and wrap around support services are critical for our students, it should be inconceivable to consider such a bill. The governor’s proposals are reckless and designed to follow Virginia and other states that have demonstrated system failures.
It is our expectation that our elected representatives are to represent the constituents.
I sincerely hope each and every one of us can see that if these changes happen, without careful study of what we must keep, our communities and Iowa will continue to sink lower in education quality. And there will be economic impact that ripples across our state. College educated students are leaving Iowa at higher rates than other states (National Bureau of Economic Research). And why would they stay if our educational system is sub-par?
We must do better.