Happy New Year! And Thoughts on Three Trends Impacting Our Work

Happy New Year, Heartland AEA staff! I hope 2019 is off to a great start for all of you. 

Three Trends Impacting Our Work 
I want to take a few minutes to share some of the trends currently playing a role in the work of Heartland AEA and our state AEA system, and I’m guessing these will come as no surprise to many of you. 

Special Education Legal Activity 
The first trend is simply the amount of litigation and scrutiny that are impacting our practice in identifying and serving children with disabilities. Most of you are familiar with the AW case and its impact on the ChildFind process, but we are also seeing increasing legal activity in the areas of seclusion/restraint and in communication privacy as it relates to students with disabilities. Overall, due process matters resulting in mediation or other more formal proceedings are growing in frequency. Please know it’s not my purpose here to comment on the need for or appropriateness of these developments. Rather, I will point out that special education law is an area that continues to rapidly change and most of the resulting changes will continue to impact our practices going forward. This isn’t anything new, but the frequency and significance of the changes we are being asked to make are definitely impactful. 

Student Mental Health 
The next big trend impacting not just the AEAs, but school districts, and really the entire state, is the condition of Iowa’s overall mental health system. I attended a legislative forum in Des Moines this past Saturday, and the first question from the audience was about mental health supports for children. Without exception, it’s the first thing I hear about when I call on superintendents, whether they be urban, suburban or rural. This is a bipartisan issue, and it’s impacting the AEAs like everyone else. For many years Iowa’s AEAs have provided outstanding supports to schools and teachers in the area of challenging behavior. But we are now recognizing that many children have significant mental health challenges that aren’t being externalized at school. 

This, combined with the severity of the behaviors that are being observed and the young age of the students exhibiting these behaviors, is resulting in a recognition that we need to support social/emotional learning and mental health (SEBMH) in addition to challenging behavior. All AEAs are now working to address the full range of SEBMH supports in an MTSS context, and this is requiring us to make changes in not only how we support students with SEBMH needs, but how we allocate our resources to do so. This year, our first legislative request as an AEA system is for an additional $5.5 million to support SEBMH in schools. Again, this trend will lead to significant changes in practice going forward. 

Workforce Development 
The third major trend that is impacting AEAs is the political focus on workforce development. Even though Iowa has the highest graduation rate in the nation, too many kids aren’t successfully entering the workforce. The education community in general, and the AEAs in particular, are being asked to be a part of the solution to this problem. This isn’t really a new focus area: 

• The AEA Compact included College & Career Readiness (CCR) in its priorities in 2012. 
• AEA PREP has been developed as a statewide support to schools. 
• Iowa’s AEAs support a personalized learning network across the state. 
• Iowa’s AEAs have been asked by legislators to support the redesign of Career & Technical Education (CTE) in our schools. 
• AEA Learning Online has been commissioned to support authentic learning and work-based projects through its online platform. 
• Iowa’s AEAs have worked with the Iowa Department of Education to make National Student Clearinghouse data available to all school districts so they can look at post-secondary outcomes of graduates as they engage in their school improvement efforts. 

All of these initiatives have impacted our service design and available resources. Perhaps the biggest challenge for AEAs in the CCR arena is our potential to help students with disabilities reach the workforce through innovative transition services. Many sub-groups are overrepresented in the number of Iowans not entering the workforce, but no sub-group is more discrepant than students who have IEPs. Future Ready Iowa has recognized this and aspires to capture this demographic into the workforce. AEAs are being looked at to assist in this. For this reason, our other specific legislative funding request this year is for $1 million to support CCR in Iowa. 

These three areas are far from our only challenges. I could talk about new support requirements for identified schools under ESSA or requests for better administrator support from school districts or any other number of requests for additional services we regularly receive from districts. I chose these three trend areas because they are impacting all AEAs and because they come from developments largely outside the system. These are challenges we have anticipated to a large extent and are well on our way to meeting, but they aren’t of our making, and that’s really the “why” of our need to evolve and to continually change or refine practice. We don’t always get to control the factors that impact our work, and therefore, we don’t always get to decide whether or not we are going to change our practice. Sometimes, we don’t even get to decide how we are going to respond to new demands. There is one thing all of us gets to choose, though, and that is how we will respond to these changes and to change in general. 

Stay tuned next week as I share more of my thoughts on change and how dealing with change has a direct effect on culture and thus climate. 

Happy New Year! 
Jon