📝 Report Card 07/09/26

When the school year ends, I have time to work on big stories that take a back seat to the busy education news cycle.

Published a couple of weeks ago, my story on a Blaine family trying to navigate the state’s behavioral health system is bigger than an education story. But it has some important connections that I wasn’t able to dig into in that story (it’s long enough as is).

Brady, the family’s son, needed support beyond what his mother could provide. He spent time in a range of state-contracted facilities for youth with behavioral health challenges. He’s now landed in a structured group facility for youth with developmental disabilities. At school, he receives significant support. But this happened years after he had exhausted the resources available to him within the school districts on Orcas Island and in Whatcom County.

Schools are required to provide education to all students, no matter their disability. But not all schools have the resources to actually serve all students on campus. Special education teams in districts work to determine what the most appropriate and least restrictive environment is for each student.

Sometimes that means sending them to local programs, like Whatcom Discovery (which serves students experiencing social, emotional and behavioral difficulties) or the Salish Sea Deaf School. But other times, that means sending them out of state, which can be a challenging decision for families and expensive for school districts.

For example, last year, Bellingham paid $822 a day (max $300,000 for the year) to send a student to a special education school in Utah. Special education funding from the state doesn’t begin to cover these costs.

But what if this responsibility didn’t fall on school districts, or was at least shared by other state agencies?

I discussed this with Eric Bruns, a professor at the University of Washington, who explained that a range of state agencies play roles in supporting these kids. Funding comes from the schools, the Department of Children, Youth and Families, the Department of Social and Health Services, the Health Care Authority, and more.

He’s spent time researching how this is done in other states. In the ones that are the best run, he said, there’s one door for families to go through if they need support for a child with severe health challenges. And school districts and other child-serving agencies come together to “blend” the funds they’re spending to support these youth.

“It would actually be all the systems collectively being responsible, so that you could blend all the resources, and everybody would feel as though they were in it together,” he told me. “And families wouldn't have multiple doors they have to go through to get care."

Some of these issues are being considered by the state. A report released in May outlined the efforts ongoing to support these youth. The report recommends the strengthening of in-state “specialized treatment capacity." Part of that will include an analysis of how much school districts are spending on these out-of-state facilities for students. The report also recommends the creation of a “clear, statewide process for coordination” between the education system and the state’s behavioral health and developmental disabilities systems.

Related: Two pivotal grants for mental health services in schools expired last week. I checked in with all the districts on how this has impacted their services, and with the Whatcom Community Foundation on a new fundraising campaign to help bridge the gap.

Two school districts in Whatcom and Skagit will have new leaders next school year, but both are familiar faces.

Meridian School District’s new interim superintendent is Kurt Harvill, who’s served in various roles in the district since 2011. He was most recently the assistant superintendent. In the fall, the school board will begin a search for the district’s new permanent leader.

In Sedro-Woolley, another assistant superintendent has moved up the ranks. Brett Greenwood will lead the district after more than a decade at the district as executive director of business and operations and then assistant superintendent.

School boards in Blaine, Bellingham, Ferndale, Mount Baker, Nooksack Valley and La Conner also extended the contracts of their existing superintendents.

An aside: More than half of the new superintendent contracts recently approved were included in agenda materials and accessible to the public. The rest are public records, and I've requested some of them for review. (Superintendent Greg Baker’s contract is embedded in this story.)

The Education Show: Alexander Russo of The Grade interviews an executive at Curriculum Associates, the parent company of popular ed-tech platform i-Ready, which has faced increasing skepticism in recent months.

Cascadia Daily News: Despite the fact that I've watched many of the World Cup games live, Elliott Almond and Finn Wendt's excellent coverage of games in Seattle and Vancouver always leaves me delighted. As a mediocre recreational soccer player, I'm working on incorporating Elliott's notes on these elite players into my own game.

The New York Times: New York City let kids design playgrounds with incredible results. Students in Brooklyn now play "the floor is lava" on ground that actually looks like lava.