Big change is coming to KCK special ed. Teachers fear biggest problems will stay
More than a year has passed since Lisle Jeremiah Kauffman left his position in Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools. It wasn’t an easy choice for him to make.
But looking back on the time he spent serving deaf and hard of hearing students in the district’s special education program, Kauffman knew his only choice was to leave, he told The Star.
“I could no longer take the intentional cruelty, so I resigned,” he said in an email. “Which was heartbreaking, because I cared about my students and loved my job.”
Bullying at work and fear of falling out of compliance with federal mandates plagued him daily, he said. It wasn’t uncommon, he said, for administrators to ignore plans that describe what services students are legally entitled to.
Kauffman, a certified deaf and hard of hearing teacher, is one of numerous KCK teachers who left Wyandotte County’s special education cooperative in recent years over concerns that have been documented by staff, the state and an audit performed by the University of Kansas.
During the Spring of 2024, KU reported that several staff left the KCKPS special education program due to mistrust, poor communication and concerns of retaliation from department leadership. The 2024 audit followed a separate one in 2022 that documented similar issues.
And beyond its staffing conditions, the government has docked KCK’s special education program for its treatment of students. The program is under a federally mandated corrective action plan after data showed it had been disciplining Black students at a higher rate than other students for years.
The teachers’ calls for better conditions and increased accountability come as the way special education works in KCK is on the brink of change. The Wyandotte County Special Education Cooperative, which KCKPS has led for more than 40 years, is due to dissolve, pending state approval. That means the district could soon stop overseeing services for multiple districts within the county.
And though some say ending the cooperative model, which would reduce the number of special education students that KCKPS is responsible for, might address some issues, others don’t think it would on its own make much of a difference.
But the stakes are high, as the need for special education services are only growing. Departments across the state and country are struggling to keep up with increased demand for student evaluations rising expenses that have outpaced government aid and a national teacher shortage.
KCKPS recently said it had 40 vacancies for special education positions across grade levels, meaning the department was about 76% staffed.
District officials have said conditions are slowly improving through those corrective action plans, although the grievances those reports highlighted continue to be commonplace in KCK, according to special education teachers who spoke to The Star.
And, they said, those conditions are affecting the way they serve students in Wyandotte County.
‘Devalued, intimidated, bullied’
Kauffman, who has since moved to a position in Olathe Public Schools, carries a Ph.D., has experience teaching at the university level and has personally experienced hearing loss. Despite his experience in his field, his suggestions to KCK administration on how to serve deaf students were never taken seriously, he said. And, he said, supervisors discriminated against both him and his students regularly because of their disabilities.
“My students and I endured thoughtless ableism and discrimination,” Kauffman said, such as supervisors calling his teaching abilities into question. “I was routinely humiliated, devalued, intimidated, bullied and insulted by SPED coordinators who are so vicious and hateful that it traumatized both me and my colleagues who were also bullied.”
At one point, a supervisor told Kauffman that his disability hindered his job performance serving deaf and hard of hearing students.
“Bullying was a standard practice used to intentionally intimidate the teachers,” Kauffman said. “KU documented these behaviors in two separate audits, but the inappropriate conduct by SPED administrators was allowed to continue.”
In one instance, a former special education coordinator, who Kauffman said is no longer in the district, allegedly accused one of Kauffman’s students of pretending to be deaf, when the student really was.
He and other staff members have been yelled at by their supervisors in private and in front of others, Kauffman said. When he pointed to concerns or asked questions, his supervisors responded to him using insulting, intimidating or condescending language, he said.
Services for deaf students
The “abuses and violations” Kauffman witnessed on the job trickled down to the services that the district’s deaf and hard of hearing students were able to receive, he said.
He said some of what he witnessed included direct violations of federal law, such as ignoring students’ individualized education plans, or IEPs.
Students enrolled in special education each have planning documents — designed by a team of administrators, staff, parents and more — to lay out what services that student should receive on a daily basis and what that will look like. Those plans are legally binding under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.
“There have been many instances in which SPED administrators have unilaterally ignored IEP placement decisions made by teams even though those decisions were based on the critical needs of students,” Kauffman said. “This is a direct violation of federal law.”
When asked, KCKPS didn’t say whether the district was aware of accusations of the administration ignoring IEP decisions.
And at one point the district’s deaf students went a whole semester without quality American Sign Language interpreting skills, he said. The district only had one interpreter at the time, who Kauffman said had limited interpreting skills in educational environments, which created issues in the classroom.
KCKPS did not answer questions about how many interpreters the district now has, whether that’s a role that’s been difficult to recruit for, or whether those interpreters were in-person or virtual.
Despite what Kauffman said he witnessed, he said he knows most students in KCKPS are still getting a quality education. A team of dedicated teachers and staffers fought to make sure students were receiving quality services despite issues in the department.
“Some of us were just unlucky to get deeply incompetent and abusive supervisors, which prevented us from effectively educating our students.”
‘Isolating students into just special ed’
Another longtime teacher, who is still with the district and didn’t want to be identified because of fear of retaliation, said they saw their workplace’s culture affect the services students received. In their case, that teacher said they saw students being placed in classrooms and environments that didn’t benefit them.
Some collaborative classrooms, which are supposed to help integrate special education students into general education settings, are seeing an increase in the proportions of special education students in them, which makes it harder for the special education students to benefit from being in class with general education students, according to that teacher. The proportions seen on their campus exceed what best practice recommends, they said.
“When you’re isolating students into just special ed, the level of rigor is going to be lower, and sometimes, depending on the teacher, it’s really hard to move that rigor,” they said.
Throughout that teacher’s time in the district, they’ve seen collaborative classes grow from less than 25% special education program students, to upwards of 50%, and even 80% in some instances.
“The point of collaborative services is to have gen-ed peers, so if the entire classroom or the majority of the classroom is special ed, then we’re not meeting the point of collaboration,” they said.
KCKPS does not have enough special education teachers to be able to distribute students more effectively, they said. And, low morale among the district’s staff isn’t helping much.
The Wyandotte Comprehensive Special Education Cooperative has seen a lot of turnover, change and vacancies, the teacher said. And conditions within KCKPS have specifically contributed to local exits.
“But between the paper work, the lack of support, the feeling that you’re not doing what you need to do for kids,” they said. “And you can’t do anything. You can’t speak up, people are just exiting.”
In response to the KU audit, KCKPS launched a 2025-2028 action plan that included goals like improving communication, workplace culture, staff retention and clarifying responsibilities.
But not all of those have shaped out as intended, the teacher told The Star.
Roundtable meetings meant to improve communication between teachers and administrators haven’t resulted in any significant changes, they said. Rather, those meetings have felt more like a space to express concerns that don’t get addressed.
They also said some teachers who initially were invited to participate in roundtables during the 2024-25 school year were not invited to return this school year, something they believe disrupts any real progress.
KCKPS did not say whether or why the number of people included in those conversations has changed. It also didn’t say how many special education students it recommends having in a collaborative classroom, or why some classes may see higher proportions than what’s considered best practice.
”We continue to navigate challenges related to staffing specialized roles, balancing service delivery needs across schools, and maintaining clear and consistent communication throughout the organization,” according to a district statement.
And throughout those challenges, the district said it’s “committed to listening to staff feedback, addressing concerns thoughtfully, and continuing to refine our practices so that students receive the services they are entitled to while fostering a collaborative, supportive and compliant working environment.”
Disproportionate discipline
The issues within KCKPS have previously cost other districts in the special education cooperative.
JaKyta Lawrie, who leads the cooperative for KCKPS, told school board members last summer that the cooperative’s school districts would lose 15% in special education funding for the 2025-26 school year because of a government order to address disproportionate discipline.
KCKPS was most recently marked for suspending a disproportionate amount of Black students with disabilities for more than 10 days out of the year.
The cooperative had to dedicate $964,637 of its federal funding to make changes and correct the issue. Though the inequities were documented in KCKPS, that money came out of the pool for students in other Wyandotte County districts.
When one member district of a cooperative is penalized, so are the others, said Dean Zajic, an assistant director of Special Education and Title Services at the Kansas Department of Education. Part of his job includes communicating and coordinating with the state’s 39 special education cooperatives and inter local agreements.
That’s because when districts enter a cooperative agreement, they become jointly responsible for providing special education services to each student within that cooperative, regardless of what district they’re in.
But KCK is making progress, Zajic said. The Wyandotte Comprehensive Special Education Cooperative’s disproportionality numbers have since significantly decreased, and it’s not currently on track to get flagged again for the same issue, he added.
Shay Chastain, a Kansas special education advocate, said she’s worried how previous disproportionate punishment of Black students could affect the quality of the services those students receive.
Chastain recently represented a parent in Bonner Springs in a state complaint after cooperative leadership allegedly told that parent she’d have to cap the price of her daughter’s evaluation. The cooperative also allegedly said her daughter didn’t require an individualized education plan anymore.
“During the same period in which the District was under a federal mandate to address racial inequities, my client requested an Independent Educational Evaluation. That request was denied based on a purported ‘Board-approved’ cost-cap policy that the Superintendent later confirmed does not exist,” Chastain wrote in an email. “The record shows that an unsupported policy justification was used to deny an evaluation to a Black student while the District was already under corrective action for discriminatory outcomes.”
Chastain also thinks the treatment of her client’s child was indicative of the state approving a corrective action plan that’s not being meaningfully enforced.
KCKPS declined to comment on the case involving Chastain’s client. The district did not answer questions seeking whether district policy requires outside evaluations to be capped, or whether the district would deny evaluations that exceed that amount.
Dissolution
For more than 40 years, KCKPS has led a cooperative of Wyandotte County school districts that share special education funds, services and specialists.
All four Wyandotte County public school districts were included in the cooperative at its inception. Turner Unified School District left it in the 1980s to establish its own program. Piper Unified School District left last year.
Bonner-Edwardsville Unified School District, the final remaining member district besides KCKPS, requested to leave the cooperative late last year. Should the Kansas Board of Education approve that decision, it would bring an end to the decades-long cooperative.
That decision could come anytime within the next few months to within more than a year, Zajic said.
If approved, dissolution shouldn’t negatively affect KCKPS, Lawrie said. The district serves more than 3,000 students in its special education program and has the necessary infrastructure, staffing and programs to meet students’ needs on its own, and those services won’t change, according to the district.
And this shouldn’t mean the smaller school districts will see reduced services for students either, according to KCKPS.
“The cooperative successfully fulfilled its original purpose during a time when shared services were necessary,” Lawrie said. “Its dissolution reflects growth and increased capacity across districts rather than a reduction in services or support.”
The school districts that recently left the cooperative attributed their exits to their being more qualified to offer their own services.
Chastain, meanwhile, said she still has broader questions about whether breaking down the cooperative will affect any of the ongoing accountability plans.
“Why this matters is straightforward: the cooperative may be dissolved, but the students are not disappearing,” Chastain wrote in an email.
“If dissolution proceeds without an audit or clear enforcement of existing correcting actions, there is a risk that accountability for the Significant Disproportionality finding — including required (coordinated early intervening services) expenditures — is disrupted or effectively reset.”
