Thank you to everyone who wrote, called, and shared this page. The redesign was pulled back from the strike deadline and a more thoughtful special education plan was put forward instead.
A group of elementary education teachers and instructional assistants (IAs) — across general education and special education — within Seattle Public Schools. The information presented comes from their experiences in the classrooms, with hundreds of years of experience between them. The examples below are their account, reviewed and confirmed by staff who do this work. A parent built this site to help carry their message.
These details are not yet public. SPS very recently shared more details of a new special education vision with educators during bargaining agreement talks. The individuals at the table are bravely sharing the details so parents can see what is being decided for their children.
Our educators, across special education and general education, want you to hear why negotiations are moving toward a strike — and it is not primarily because of salaries, or what the press is reporting.
SPS added a special education redesign into contract negotiations that would affect 170 jobs: eliminate 100 instructional assistant positions and convert 70 more to “roaming” assignments. Removing these roles changes what happens in classrooms every day — how much gets taught, and whether children and staff are safe.
Throughout negotiations the district made mention of wanting “to make changes to special education.” A detailed plan was not shared.
13 days ago — August 16 the district shared one detail about ratio changes, but withheld all other details such as program mergers.
One week ago the district finally shared the most detailed version of the plan we have today — the one shared on this site.
Late on August 29 the district released details publicly — and walked away from the negotiating table. Educators have confirmed that release does not contain the details shared in negotiations, which are shared below.
The good news is that this redesign does not have to happen within negotiations. The current contract already provides a joint district–union taskforce* built for exactly this work. Ask the Superintendent and the Board to use it, and to remove this redesign from the strike deadline so school can start on time. See below on how to email them.
Our educators want you to know the impact across the entire school body. Today, roughly 1 in 6 students has an IEP*. Most of those students are not in separate classrooms — they sit in general education either part time or the full day. These students may have accompanied support or receive support outside of the classroom.
A class of twenty-four. 8,010 SPS students have an IEP — 16% of enrollment.
Most special education in SPS is delivered inside general education classrooms, not in a separate room down the hall. State data shows about 71% of SPS students with IEPs spend 80–100% of their day in a general education class. They are spread across every school and nearly every classroom in the district.
Which means the instructional assistants in these staffing ratios are not sitting in one room. A program’s three IAs are spread across fifteen or more classrooms, moving between them all day — de-escalating, running behavior plans, helping a child stay in the lesson instead of leaving it.
When an IA is not there, the work does not disappear. It lands on the general education teacher, who stops teaching the other twenty-three children to manage it. So this does not affect 8,010 students. It affects all of them — every classroom, in every school.
Staffing is written as three numbers: students, teacher, instructional assistants. 10:1:3 means every ten students generate one teacher and three instructional assistants. The proposed ratio applies K–12. Today’s ratios differ by level — Extended Resource is 10:1:3 in elementary and 13:1:3 in secondary — but the proposal sets one number for everyone. The comparison below uses the elementary starting point; secondary is shown underneath.
Read these as building-wide staffing, not classroom photographs. Resource and Extended Resource students are integrated throughout general education. The numbers below are allocated per program, not per room — today’s three instructional assistants are already spread across fifteen or more classrooms, moving between them all day. Cutting to one does not thin one room. It thins an entire building, and the work falls to general education teachers.
Focus and Distinct are different: those students spend most of their day in a self-contained classroom, though many still spend part of the day in general education depending on how their IEP is written. They need the most intensive support in the district.
Focus and Distinct students already do less inclusion than they could — because there are not enough adults to do it safely. Teachers say some of these students could spend far more time in general education if the staff existed to support them there. They cannot. Educators describe this as one of the most heartbreaking parts of the job.
At the secondary level, cutting staff pushes students the other way. Without enough adults to co-teach, students who are currently in general education classes get moved into self-contained rooms instead, because that becomes the only way to staff them. Families who have fought for years to get their child into general education classes would find them there without the IEP support that makes it work — or not there at all. That is the opposite of the direction the district says it wants to go.
The district faces a real budget shortfall. However, cutting special education support in a contract negotiation is not the way. Redesigning a complex plan like this deserves time and thought. Adding it to the contract negotiation is shortsighted, jeopardizes everyone’s safety and cuts teachers’ ability to educate.
There is real disagreement about the size of the district’s budget shortfall, and about how special education spending should be counted within it. People who follow the budget closely have reached different figures, and we are not going to referee that here.
It does not change the point. Whatever the number is, it was created by a state funding formula that does not cover the cost of services districts are legally required to provide — and by a Legislature that capped the local levies districts had been using to make up the difference.
The classroom consequence is what the educators on this page are describing, and that is not a matter of accounting interpretation. Fewer adults with the same children is fewer adults with the same children.
A funding failure created in Olympia should not be paid for by the students least able to carry it, inside a labor negotiation on a strike deadline. The full proposal was shared with educators one week ago, and still has not been shared with families.
Below examples are built from the proposal’s staffing suggestions and descriptions from educators.
10:40 a.m. He starts to escalate during independent reading.
The instructional assistant who knows his plan is available. She steps in, moves him to the hallway, runs the de-escalation steps he has practiced with her since September. He is back at his desk in nine minutes.
The other 23 keep reading. The teacher never stops teaching.
10:40 a.m. Same child. Same trigger.
The assistant who knew his plan is gone. Her program now has 20 students and one assistant instead of three. The roaming assistant is at another school. Nobody comes.
The teacher stops instruction and tries to de-escalate a child she was never trained to de-escalate, while 23 eight-year-olds watch. It doesn’t work. She calls a room clear.
23 children line up in the hallway. Twenty minutes of instruction, gone. It happens again Thursday.
Report from a 4th grade parent: this is already happening where support is thin. Two students on the autism spectrum, no assistant assigned, daily room clears — and in 5th grade the whole class needed weeks of remedial instruction to recover what they had missed.
She leaves her classroom for 30 minutes and works in a group of four with the resource teacher on structured literacy — decoding, spelling patterns, the specific instruction her IEP requires.
Her resource teacher carries a caseload of 22 students with similar academic profiles.
Small group. Same teacher every day. Instruction matched to what she needs.
Her resource teacher’s program has absorbed Extended Resource — students who previously had three instructional assistants and who largely have social-emotional and behavior support needs. The assistants did not come with them.
The same teacher now serves a wider range of need with one assistant. Group sizes rise. Time gets rationed toward crisis.
Her 30 minutes still appears on her IEP. Whether she receives it depends on what else is happening that day.
One assistant takes him — toileting happens twice a day and can take 30 minutes. The teacher and the second assistant remain with six students, most of whom need 1:1 support to engage with their work at all.
Instruction continues. Everyone is supervised.
Same three staff. One takes him. Now two adults remain with nine students instead of six — several needing 1:1 support, several with behavior emergency plans that require three adults present to keep everyone safe.
Add the two 30-minute breaks each assistant takes daily, and the room regularly drops below what the safety plans require.
Not an unlucky day. The arithmetic of every day.
This is an excerpt from a letter sent to the Superintendent and Board by a SPED-certificated teacher who spent four months last year as a long-term substitute in a grade 3–5 Distinct classroom. She has asked to remain anonymous. Lightly condensed; her words.
The classroom had seven students, all of whom were non-speaking and needed toileting support, several of whom wore diapers. Several had hit puberty and were almost as large as an adult, which was very challenging when they were escalated.
Here is a glimpse into just a few moments of the day when two adults — let alone three — is often not enough support.
Toileting took place twice a day and often lasted up to 30 minutes or longer. At our current ratio the remaining staff were helping students with academic and functional goals during this time, though even that was challenging, since most of the students needed 1:1 support to engage with their work. The only way “independent” work would occur was if it was far below the students’ learning level. IEP goals won’t be reached and students won’t progress.
Even with multiple students having 1:1 aides, staff and occasionally students were getting hurt by escalated students. For one escalated student we had to restrain him in a CPI hold so he wouldn’t hurt himself or others. Another staff member would get a pad to put under his head so he would not strike it repeatedly on the ground, and the other staff would move the remaining students — almost none of whom follow novel single-step directions, and many of whom have mobility needs — to a safe space so he could have privacy while we helped him de-escalate. That is the plan for one student. Four of the seven had behavior emergency plans requiring at least three adults to keep people safe.
One child knew how to work the child lock on the door and would attempt to elope multiple times each day. He eloped three times during my tenure despite our best efforts. He was nearly as tall as me and you could not get him back to the classroom on your own if he did not want to come. One time I found him in the boys bathroom having urinated all over himself and the floor. It took two adults to get him cleaned up and changed. Under the current proposal, when that child exits the classroom, a single adult is left with the remaining students. What if that other adult was on a mandated break, or with a different child in the bathroom? Do we let the child elope, or do we leave a classroom of nine or more high-needs students unattended? What does the district recommend legally in this scenario? What about morally?
The mobility needs of this classroom mean two adults cannot move it safely. A wheelchair user unable to propel herself for long periods. A child in a boot from a broken leg caused by striking it on the floor when escalated. A child with Down syndrome who drops to the ground and refuses to move when frightened. A child who is afraid of the others and will not walk near them in a group. Most of these students need an arm under their arm to be escorted, so with two adults only four cooperating students are accounted for. In an emergency, who should we leave behind to save the remaining students?
Also, staff get breaks. IAs go on break at least twice a day, typically 30 minutes at a time, and we already struggle with coverage during those gaps. People are ALREADY getting hurt, and there isn’t enough learning at current staffing levels for our most vulnerable students.
I am only speaking of my experience in a single classroom that already had adequate staffing. Imagine if that staffing were cut down by half.
And this does not address my concerns for the general education setting. If you combine Extended Resource and Focus into other special education classrooms and increase ratios, general education teachers will spend much more time evacuating their classrooms and less learning will take place for everyone. Isn’t academic excellence a goal?
Please take the reduction in ratios and the combining of SPED programs off of the table for the SEA contract.
Sent to Superintendent Shuldiner and all seven Board Directors, August 2026.
Email one asks the district to take this proposal out of bargaining and into the taskforce the current contract provides for. Email SPS today to help avoid the strike.
Email two asks the state to fix the funding failure underneath it.
Withdraw the restructure from contract negotiations. Refer it to the joint SEA–SPS Special Education taskforce* with published analysis and a public board vote.
Goes to all seven Board Directors, Superintendent Shuldiner, and the Board Office. Messages to Board Directors are public records.
Thank you for speaking up for Seattle’s kids. Now send this page to one other parent at your school.
The structural failure is in Olympia. Two asks, both with numbers attached.
Goes to the education and budget committee leaders who write the funding formula. Want to reach your own legislators too? Look them up here.
Thank you. Olympia is where the structural fix has to come from.
59% of all IEPs. In general education classrooms, with pull-out or push-in instruction. Dyslexia and other learning disabilities, speech and language, ADHD.
Split between general education and a supported setting. Every student has a behavior intervention plan.
Self-contained academic classrooms, taught well below grade level.
The most intensive support in the district. May include toileting and medical needs.
Staffing ratios — how many students per teacher and per assistant — are written into the contract between the district and the union. So changing them means changing the contract.
That is why the district can raise it in bargaining. Special education funding and staffing have been debated for years, and nobody claims otherwise. The district also said throughout bargaining that it wanted “changes to special education.” What is new is the plan itself. About two weeks ago the district shared a single ratio change and did not say which programs were being merged. Those at the negotiating table confirm the full proposal was only produced and shared roughly one week ago. However long the district spent developing it internally, educators had one week with it. Families have still not been given it. That is not enough time for anyone to evaluate a redesign of this scale, let alone settle it under a strike deadline. The contract also provides for a joint taskforce designed for exactly this kind of change.
The district is in serious financial trouble. Its general fund balance has fallen sharply since 2022. Estimates of the annual operating deficit vary widely depending on what is counted, so we do not cite a single figure.
The question is who absorbs it. The shortfall is created by a state funding formula that does not cover the cost of services the district is legally required to provide. Cutting 100 assistants does not close it — but it does change what happens in classrooms every day.
Partly. In 2025 the Legislature passed SB 5263, which removed the 16% enrollment funding cap and increased the per-student multiplier, sending roughly $870 million more statewide over two budgets. It passed the House 97–0.
That helps. It does not close the gap in one district, and the Safety Net “donut hole” still leaves $30,371 per high-cost student with no state or federal offset. Whether the 2025 changes actually closed the gap is something the Legislature should be asked to measure.
Yes — and last time it did not cut adults.
The contract designated “Satellite” and “Continuum” schools hosting particular services. If your neighborhood school did not host your child’s pathway, your child traveled. Those categories sunset in 2023–24.
Access was staffed at 10:1:3. Social and Emotional Services at 10:1:2. The merged program came out at 10:1:3 — the district kept the higher staffing level.
This time the staffing does not follow the students. Roughly 100 assistant positions eliminated, 70 converted to roaming.
Merging programs is a policy choice. Removing the adults is a budget choice.
In the state staffing formula, a student receiving special education services for a fifth of the day counts as only 0.8 of a student for general staffing purposes.
So a school that increases a child’s services can lose general education staffing for doing it. District finance staff confirmed this in a public board meeting on August 19, 2026.
The fractional count comes from the state. The decision to pass it straight through to individual schools, rather than holding buildings harmless, is the district’s.
One honest caveat. The district has not published its bargaining proposals. The proposed ratios here were shared with SEA membership and reported to us by SPS educators, and they are consistent across several independent accounts — but they are not a district document. We have asked SPS to publish the proposal and the analysis behind it. If the district releases figures that differ, we will correct this page.
Special education runs on acronyms. None of this vocabulary is common knowledge, and you should not have to learn it to have an opinion about your child’s school.