I pulled these numbers from six years of Delaware’s own Student Enrollment and Unit Allotment Reports, the same annual filing the state uses to calculate staffing formulas for every district. Colonial School District offers the starkest version of the pattern. Its total enrollment fell by more than 1,300 students between 2019 and 2025, a drop of nearly fourteen percent. Its special education enrollment grew anyway, adding 151 more students to its caseload even as the district’s overall population collapsed, and its special education share climbed from 20 percent of students to just under 25 percent. A district losing students by the hundreds every year still needed more special education capacity than it had before.

Delaware is not unusual here. Marguerite Roza at Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab has spent years tracking a national version of this same divergence, documenting school staffing that grew faster than enrollment through a sequence of funding waves, recovery from the Great Recession, a strong economy after 2013, and the pandemic recovery dollars that let districts hire counselors, interventionists, and aides at a scale unmatched in history. Delaware’s numbers describe a narrower, more specific trend than that national hiring surge. The need for special education services kept growing while everything around it, including enrollment, funding, and staff capacity, shrank.

Why the Hiring Made Sense

I understand the instinct to keep adding people because most of what is driving demand for special education right now is real. The IEP process has grown heavier over the last decade, with more documentation, more procedural safeguards, and more legal exposure attached to every decision a case manager makes. Districts are also taking on student mental health needs at a scale that didn’t exist when I started as a superintendent, and a meaningful share of that burden lands on special education staff, since mental health and disability identification overlap constantly inside a school building. Add the increasing expectation that families receive real-time updates on a child’s progress, something a phone call used to handle informally and now functions as a formal accountability measure in many districts. None of these pressures are imaginary, and none of them are going away.

I’ve written before about how new legislative mandates arrive in a school system without a corresponding reduction in what’s already on a teacher’s plate. Special education has absorbed more of that pattern than almost any other part of a school system, because federal law requires the services regardless of what else is happening in the budget that year. Adding staff in response to that pressure is often the only lever a superintendent has in the short term.

The Problem Hiring Doesn’t Solve

Despite hiring more teachers, special educators leave the profession at a meaningfully higher rate than general education teachers, and caseload size again and again appears in the research as the reason they cite for leaving. In one study of urban special educators who left teaching, a third cited caseload or class size as too large, more than any other single factor. That research goes back decades, and it hasn’t changed because the staffing numbers moved.

A district can lower its student-to-teacher ratio and still lose its best special educator if that teacher’s remaining caseload carries the most complex, most litigious, most time-consuming cases in the building. Headcount refers to the number of people a district has. It says nothing about what any one of them is actually carrying, and the weight of that daily caseload is what teachers describe when they explain why they left.

Constantly adding new positions can’t continue as the default response indefinitely. Delaware’s regular education enrollment continues to decline. State and local funding formulas still primarily rely on total enrollment, not on the complexity of a shrinking student body’s remaining needs. A district that keeps solving special education strain by adding positions is spending against a revenue base that isn’t growing at the same rate as the strain. That math doesn’t resolve itself. It gets worse gradually, until a budget year arrives when it can’t continue.

Fix the Classroom, Not Just the Department

Treating special education strain as a problem the special education department can solve alone makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t match how a school actually works. Most of the improvement needed for students with disabilities must occur in general education classrooms, since that’s where they spend most of their school day. General education teachers are also stretched thin. Asking them to absorb more without support moves the same mistake to a different part of the building.

The way through this isn’t asking one overwhelmed group of teachers to do more so another overwhelmed group can do less. Instead, it’s about building practices in behavior support, communication systems, and classroom structure for students with intensive needs that reduce the burden on adults and improve outcomes for every student, not just those with an IEP.

A Final Thought

There are days when I think the entire system needs rebuilding from the ground up. We need a new federal mandate structure, new funding formulas, and a new accountability regime that doesn’t treat every part of a district as if it operates independently of the others. Unfortunately, I don’t think that rebuild is coming, and spending energy wishing for it doesn’t help the superintendents and directors doing this work right now. What’s left is the part of the problem within a district’s control, and Delaware’s numbers point to where that control still matters. Regular education enrollment there is still falling. Special education enrollment is still climbing. The districts that put real capacity into the general education classroom are the ones still standing when the current approach runs out of room.

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.

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Most early leadership mistakes aren’t dramatic. They’re small, understandable instincts that compound quietly over months until they’ve shaped how an entire organization sees a new leader. Four show up more often than any others.

Trap one: solving problems before understanding them

The instinct to fix something the moment it’s spotted feels p…

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Most early leadership mistakes aren’t dramatic. They’re small, understandable instincts that compound quietly over months until they’ve shaped how an entire organization sees a new leader. Four show up more often than any others.

Trap one: solving problems before understanding them

The instinct to fix something the moment it’s spotted feels p…

Read more

On paper, a curriculum director reports to the assistant superintendent, who reports to the superintendent. In practice, every significant curriculum decision runs through a veteran principal who has outlasted three superintendents and quietly controls whether new initiatives actually get implemented at the building level. The chart says one t…

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That pattern is not unique to my district. I pulled enrollment data from three states with very different politics, geography, and school funding models, and the same trend appears in each. In Maryland, general education enrollment fell by roughly 2,300 students between fiscal years 2021 and 2026 while special education enrollment rose by about 14,000, pushing the special education share of total enrollment from 12.53% to 14.16%. In Texas, over a longer window from fiscal 2019 to 2026, general education enrollment dropped roughly 35,000 students while special education enrollment grew by about 379,000, nearly doubling its share of the student body from 9.79% to 16.67%. Indiana, over the same 2019 to 2026 span, saw general education enrollment fall by about 27,000 students, while special education enrollment grew by 18,000, raising its share from 15.55% to 17.75%. The years do not line up perfectly across all three states, and the reporting behind each figure comes from different systems. However, the direction of every example makes the same point. Enrollment is going one way. Special education identification is going the other way.

Across hundreds of public-school systems, the standard playbook for enrollment decline has stopped working. Fewer students used to mean fewer classrooms, adjusted staffing ratios, and a state aid formula that shrank in step with the operating budget. That logic still applies to general education, but total enrollment can decline while the number of students qualifying for services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act continues to climb. Overall state and federal aid shrinks while mandated special education services expand. The general fund absorbs the gap between the two.

Why You Cannot Cut Your Way Out

In a typical district budget, special education now accounts for twenty to twenty-five percent of total operating spending. When enrollment drops five to eight percent and state aid contracts with it, the administrative instinct is to trim every department proportionally. Special education resists that instinct for two reasons unrelated to willpower or management skills.

Federal maintenance-of-effort requirements attach real consequences to any year-over-year reduction in special education spending. A district that cuts that budget risks compliance sanctions and the loss of federal funding under Part B of IDEA. And an Individualized Education Program is not a budget line a superintendent can adjust. It is an enforceable civil right. When a student’s IEP requires specialized transportation, a dedicated aide, or an out-of-district placement, the district funds these services regardless of the state revenue that year.

So, the cuts land somewhere else. General education absorbs them. Class sizes grow, interventionists disappear, and the core instruction that might have caught a struggling student before a formal evaluation weakens along with everything else. Struggling students get referred for evaluation more often once that early intervention thins out; identification rates climb, and the district that started this cycle, trying to balance a budget, ends up further from balance than when it began.

What a District Can Do

None of this requires choosing between fiscal discipline and the students the mandate exists to serve. It requires four shifts, and a district can make real progress on all four without waiting for a state formula to change.

The first is reducing unit cost without touching service quality. Moving agency-dependent roles toward a hybrid delivery model and centralizing assistive technology procurement around a lending library that tries low-tech solutions first both cut spending without cutting a service a student receives.

The second is capturing revenue the district has already earned. Integrating IEP documentation with automated Medicaid billing can push capture rates toward 90%, funding services already being delivered rather than paying for anything new.

The third is matching staffing to where students actually are. A weighted caseload model that accounts for acuity, not just headcount, slows the turnover that drives up agency dependency in the first place and evens out service minutes that otherwise vary wildly by building.

The fourth is preventing the most expensive placements before they happen. A district that builds in-district capacity for the students it would otherwise send out, and pairs that with a dispute resolution process applied consistently and early, keeps both placement costs and legal spending from compounding year over year.

I did not see all four of these clearly at first, and I know none of them are easy to execute. Unfortunately, the current trajectory most districts are on is unsustainable. I watched costs and enrollment go up while the rest of the budget shrank. Since leaving the superintendency, this has been the problem that has captured my attention most. Making special education budgets more fiscally sustainable is important from a governance perspective, but it is absolutely essential from a student achievement perspective. That is why superintendents can’t delegate this work to others.

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools (2018-2026) and Wilson County Schools (2011-2016).

Eager to build momentum, a new leader makes several public commitments in the first month, a timeline for a facilities fix, a promise to revisit a controversial policy, a pledge to meet with every staff member individually. By month three, half of these promises are quietly broken, and the damage from the broken promises outweighs the goodw…

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Eager to build momentum, a new leader makes several public commitments in the first month, a timeline for a facilities fix, a promise to revisit a controversial policy, a pledge to meet with every staff member individually. By month three, half of these promises are quietly broken, and the damage from the broken promises outweighs the goodw…

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A special education department has excellent staff, strong compliance records, and well-trained case managers. It still produces frustrated families and blown timelines. Meanwhile finance runs cleanly, HR runs cleanly, curriculum runs cleanly, and the district as a whole still feels chaotic to the people working inside it. Every part scores we…

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I’ve heard so many creators on this platform give some version of this advice, “Don’t wait until it’s perfect to start. Just start.” I may have taken that advice just a bit too literally.

After a false start with a 5-minute Live call where I was stumbling over the technology and nobody could hear my guest speaking, I had to shut it down and restart about 15 minutes later. Fortunately, my conversation with Matt Guggemos went great once we put the technical difficulties behind us. Matt is a practitioner, a researcher, and an ed tech creator. He is co-founder of https://www.itherapyllc.com. He brings great insight into the world of problem solving in the field of special education.

I’m glad I decided to just start. Hopefully, you’ll all agree.

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When the 2024 statewide reading results arrived, Harford County Public Schools led Maryland in reading growth for grades three through eight. In 2025, we finished third. In 2026, the state’s four-year trend data showed Harford leading the state in reading growth over that full period.

Dr. Wright, Maryland’s state superintendent, kept her word through it all. She never singled out the schools still teaching Units of Study. Other people at MSDE were not as disciplined. The comments surfaced again and again in the years after that first site visit. Harford was still using a curriculum the state’s reading leadership had written off.

What I’d Do Differently

Knowing what I know now, I would make different choices. The clearest lesson from the four-year reading curriculum journey is that implementation quality matters more than which curriculum a school uses. Units of Study is a genuinely hard curriculum to teach well. Planning a single week of lessons requires reading a volume of material that a scripted, boxed curriculum never asks of a teacher. I believe districts that struggled with it, and plenty did, had underestimated exactly how much support their teachers would need to deliver it as designed.

Harford had an advantage most districts didn’t. We had already spent years learning the foundations of Units of Study by implementing the writing curriculum from the same publisher before we introduced the reading curriculum. That head start gave our schools a runway most districts skipped. It was also brutal on newer teachers, who were still learning the basic rhythms of a classroom while trying to plan lessons that demanded real expertise from day one.

The classroom libraries were the other half of the trade-off. Letting students choose their own books from a rich, leveled collection drove genuine engagement, but it came at a real cost. Students given that much choice do not always push themselves toward books that stretch their reading level. Benchmark Advance solved that problem and created a new one. Passages don’t produce the same pull toward reading that an actual book does, and we heard from parents who wanted to know what had happened to the stack of books their kids used to bring home every week.

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The Variable Nobody Measured

Here is the piece of this story I still can’t let go of. Across four years of pilot data, principal feedback, and parent comments, one thread showed up repeatedly from people who had no reason to coordinate their opinions. Students liked this curriculum. They liked the books. Parents mentioned kids reading multiple books at home, for no reason other than that they wanted to.

I can’t name a state assessment that measures that. Reading growth data can tell you whether a student’s proficiency moved. It can’t tell you whether a nine-year-old chose to read on a Saturday because a book in her backpack interested her. I suspect the genuine enjoyment drives the other results over time. My hypothesis, still unverified, is that whatever it was about this curriculum that made students want to read mattered more to Harford’s four-year growth trend than anything articulated in a scope-and-sequence document.

A Final Thought

I’m not arguing that every district should adopt Units of Study, and I’m not interested in pushing the pendulum back the other way after seeing how hard it swung the last time. What I am arguing is narrower than that. Somewhere in the gap between what the science of reading research measures and what actually gets a child to pick up a book on a Saturday, there is a variable serious researchers have not pinned down. Harford’s results over the last four years suggest it’s worth more than a footnote.

That’s a research question, not a curriculum recommendation, and it deserves people with better tools than a superintendent’s hallway observations. I’d like to see it studied directly, with the same rigor that the field has applied to phonics and decoding over the last several years. Engagement and joy are hard to measure. Difficulty measuring something has never been a good reason to stop trying, and reading instruction proved that once already, back when writing was the subject nobody thought to test.

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.

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Midway through the 2022-2023 school year, I met with the elementary principals and offered a path forward. We would run a formal process to identify a second curriculum, and any school could choose to move to it as long as a majority of its teachers agreed. The team selected Benchmark Advance, a program with full approval on the What Works Clearinghouse. Units of Study did not have that endorsement, and giving schools an alternative that did was a direct answer to the loudest criticism we were hearing. About a third of our elementary schools, ten of thirty-three, chose to switch, with one more following the next year.

Maryland Leads

Early in 2022, the Maryland State Department of Education launched a competitive grant called Maryland Leads to spend down the state’s remaining ESSER funds before they expired. The program was the brainchild of then State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury, and it required districts to apply under six separate categories. We applied for every one, including the category tied to advancing the science of reading.

Most people who followed the reading wars closely treated Units of Study as the opposite of science of reading. We saw it differently. The curriculum had real gaps, and the publisher was making changes that critics never judged adequate. We had already supplemented our instruction to cover the major elements the science of reading research points to, and we knew we needed more training in the places where that supplementation was thinnest. That training was exactly what we were asking Maryland Leads to fund.

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We were one of only two districts in the state that received no funding for reading. I met with Mr. Choudhury later that year, and we discussed the grant. He indicated he had concerns about our use of the Units of Study, which had impacted the decision. In the following year, MSDE still had money in reserve from the Maryland Leads roll-out, and Mr. Choudhury offered to make the $2 million available to Harford if we would fully move away from Units of Study. While $2 million sounds like a great deal of money, fully rolling out the Benchmark Advance curriculum across our remaining schools would have cost closer to $4 million, so the decision wasn’t a slam dunk.

We had spent years introducing Units of Study and training teachers on it, and the schools using it were getting results. Reversing course on that scale, for a state grant, felt less like a decision grounded in evidence and more like a decision grounded in politics. I said no. Apart from the reading category of the grant, we still received significant funding from Maryland Leads in other categories and put every dollar to good use. Taken as a whole, Maryland Leads was one of the more beneficial state initiatives of the last decade, and Mr. Choudhury deserves real credit for building it. The reading category is the one part of it I still have not made peace with.

A New Superintendent, A Different Promise

Dr, Carey Wright became interim state superintendent in the fall of 2023 and was named to the role permanently the following spring. She had built her reputation leading the Mississippi Miracle, the state’s climb from the bottom of national reading rankings to the middle, and I have genuine respect for that work. Like Mr. Choudhury, she took a dim view of Harford’s continued use of Units of Study. Unlike Mr. Choudhury, she committed to remaining curriculum agnostic. The curriculum a school used did not matter to her, she said, as long as the elements of the science of reading were present and students were making progress.

By then, our schools had already made their choices, and the Benchmark Advance schools were in their first semester of implementation. Two senior MSDE leaders visited two of our elementary schools that fall, one using Units of Study and one using Benchmark Advance, to observe reading instruction in both. Their debrief and the written notes that followed had nothing good to say about the Units of Study classrooms and praised the Benchmark Advance classrooms without reservation. It felt like the conclusion had been written before the two of them ever walked into either building.

What the Numbers Said That Year

At the end of that school year, we ran our own internal comparison of reading outcomes between the two groups of schools. The Units of Study schools outperformed the Benchmark Advance schools in reading growth, though the margin was small enough that we treated the result cautiously. A school’s first year on a new curriculum is rarely its fairest test, and we knew we needed more than one year of data before drawing a real conclusion.

Dr. Wright never went back on her word. She remained curriculum-neutral in every conversation I had with her. Other voices inside MSDE kept finding ways to note that one Maryland district was still using that curriculum, and not surprisingly, state board members and other MSDE leaders formed opinions about our work as well. Fortunately, our reading data helped justify our commitment to an unpopular curriculum, which made their criticism ring hollow. Keep reading in the third and final part of this series to see what the student data revealed.

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.

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I arrived in Harford County, Maryland, in July of 2018. During my entry plan, I visited every school in the district, and one theme kept surfacing no matter which building I walked into. Principals wanted to talk about writing.

By 2018, every elementary school in Harford County was using the Writers Workshop curriculum from Teachers College and Dr. Lucy Calkins. The rollout had just finished a multi-year process, with early adopters starting two years earlier and the rest of the district following until every school had it. Principals showed me samples of student writing hanging in their hallways and repeated what teachers kept telling them. Students genuinely enjoyed the writing block and produced work that surprised the adults reading it.

Wyngate

That feedback struck a chord with me for a reason that went back almost a decade. In 2010, I was serving as a Community Superintendent in Montgomery County Public Schools, a role that put me over a cluster of elementary and middle schools despite my own background as a high school principal. I visited Wyngate Elementary School, then led by the legendary principal Bonnie Leister, and walked through hallways covered in student writing.

I remember thinking that many of my former high school students could not have produced writing that strong. Bonnie had never let writing instruction slide. Plenty of other schools had. The accountability era built its entire architecture around standardized tests in reading and math. Early in the standardized testing movement, most English/Language Arts assessments included writing passages. Still, over time they gradually disappeared as turning results around quickly became more important than including writing sections, which both slowed processing time and felt too subjective compared to the easier-to-correct multiple-choice questions. Prestige in school systems tends to follow what gets measured, and writing lost status simply because the tests didn’t emphasize it. Veterans like Bonnie protected the work anyway.

Naming It a Priority

After I finished my entry plan in Harford, I presented my findings and announced my priorities in the early fall. Writing was one of five learner attributes we would measure to ensure our students were prepared for life after high school, and we would focus on it throughout K-12. I wanted to sustain the momentum the district built around writing before my arrival. It was one of the many positive things I inherited when I took the helm, and I was confident it would not only benefit students but differentiate them.

Even if we didn’t have a clear way to assess what we were doing with writing, I assumed we would eventually see the benefit show up in reading scores. Maybe we did, but it’s hard to attribute the reading improvement we later experienced specifically to writing, because it wasn’t the only thing we were doing to improve reading outcomes. We designed benchmarking activities across the elementary, middle, and high school grade spans to ensure the focus persisted, but measuring writing quality at scale remained elusive for the same reasons state tests struggled to incorporate writing.

Choosing a Reading Curriculum

The following year, our curriculum team opened a formal review of elementary reading curricula. They issued an RFP, heard presentations, and weighed the field against each other before recommending a single curriculum to pilot. They landed on Units of Study, published by Teachers College and closely associated with Dr. Calkins, the same publisher and pedagogical family already running in every elementary writing block in the district. In the fall of 2019, a handful of pilot schools began teaching it.

Early Signs

In January of 2020, I began hearing that the first round of benchmark assessments in the pilot schools were coming back promising, and I was looking forward to seeing the finalized data to help decide if we would further expand from a pilot to a district-wide launch of the curriculum. The pilot principals were hopeful, and principals outside the pilot started asking when their schools could switch.

That was where things stood in the beginning of 2020. Then the pandemic reordered every priority in every district in the country, and before a documentary called Sold a Story turned a quiet academic disagreement into a national argument that would eventually land on Harford County’s doorstep. What happened to that curriculum, and to the district that had chosen it in good faith, is the subject of Part Two of this three-part series.

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.

A new leader is handed a strategic plan, a budget, and an org chart, and assumes those documents describe the organization. Six months in, they discover the real decision-making patterns, the unspoken alliances, the actual priorities, look nothing like what the paperwork suggested.

Do this

Read the formal documents, then set them aside and bu…

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A new leader is handed a strategic plan, a budget, and an org chart, and assumes those documents describe the organization. Six months in, they discover the real decision-making patterns, the unspoken alliances, the actual priorities, look nothing like what the paperwork suggested.

Do this

Read the formal documents, then set them aside and bu…

Read more

A director leaves. The exit interview mentions burnout, unclear expectations, and being set up to fail. The district hires a replacement, someone strong, someone with a good reputation. Eighteen months later, that person is gone too, and the exit interview says almost the same thing. By the third departure in the same role, most organizations …

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A leader looks straight at a structural problem, the same role turning over every year, the same two departments blaming each other every quarter, and still doesn’t see it as structural. She sees a string of disappointing individuals, or a run of bad luck, or a problem that will resolve itself once the right person finally takes the job. The d…

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Picture two central offices. In one, principals dread the annual budget call, it feels like an audit, a chance for someone downtown to catch them doing something wrong. In the other, principals call central office the moment they’re in trouble, because they know what’s waiting on the other end is help, not blame. Same reporting lines, same …

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Picture two principals under exactly the same pressure from central office. One passes that pressure straight through to her teachers, every directive arrives sounding like a threat. The other absorbs it and still walks into her building asking teachers what they need. Same district, same central office, same policies, completely different …

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had a different color ribbon from the non-superintendents, which was visible from ten feet away, and it told every company in that hall exactly who I was before I said a word.

For years I walked through that vendor area the way I suspect most superintendents do. I felt some obligation to be there. AASA depends on those vendors to fund the content I came for, and I wanted to acknowledge that. But I hadn’t come to buy anything, because my budget didn’t have room for new products, and the hall stretched on for what felt like acres of people who wanted five minutes of my time. So, I developed a skill. I could walk past hundreds of booths without making eye contact once.

That skill protected my schedule. It also meant I missed things. Somewhere in that hall, year after year, were tools that could have genuinely helped my students, and I had no reliable way to find them.

What Changed When I Joined the Executive Committee

In my last two years attending AASA, I served on the association’s executive committee. That role came with a new obligation. I started stopping at booths, letting people scan my badge, having real conversations, knowing it would mean emails later. Part of it was gratitude toward the vendors who made the conference possible. Part of it was self-interest. I might learn something useful for my district.

What I found is that stopping without a plan doesn’t work any better than walking past everyone. The hall is too big and the pitches too practiced. What worked was going in with a specific problem already in mind.

Filtering by Problem, Not by Product

During those years, special education was the singular focus of my work in Harford County, and I thought about it broadly. I didn’t fully know what I didn’t know, so I let that uncertainty guide how I moved through the hall. I still walked the whole floor. I didn’t skip booths that looked unrelated to special education on the surface. But I slowed down and asked sharper questions whenever something seemed like it might touch that work, even from companies that had no obvious connection to it. Some of the most useful conversations I had came from companies that would never have described themselves as serving students with disabilities.

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What I Found When I Slowed Down

One booth belonged to a company called Audio Enhancement. I had crossed paths with them before in another setting but only knew them superficially. They started decades ago because the founders had two hard-of-hearing children, and the company built its entire mission around making sure a teacher’s voice reached every student clearly. Over the years, they expanded into safety infrastructure, tying their classroom microphones and speakers into alert systems and panic buttons, so the same equipment that helped a student hear a lesson could also help a school respond to an emergency.

What caught my attention that day was a pilot they were running for a new feature, real-time translation. A student with limited English proficiency could wear an earpiece and hear a teacher’s words translated as the teacher spoke. As a former ESOL teacher, I understood the value immediately. Students learning English need as much exposure to the language as possible, but a student sitting in a science or social studies class also needs access to the content in front of them. A tool built for hearing clarity had turned into a tool that could help a student stay in grade-level instruction while still learning the language.

I wouldn’t have slowed down long enough to see that if I hadn’t walked in looking for it.

What the Vendor Hall Actually Is

A tool with the scale of Audio Enhancement isn’t a purchase a superintendent makes based on a single good conversation. Outfitting every classroom in a system means real cost, and real cost means the board, the school leaders, and the staff who’d use it every day all need time to see what I saw and decide for themselves whether it was worth it. That’s not just a formality. It’s the actual work of building support for a significant investment, and it takes years, not a budget cycle.

The conversation at that booth wasn’t the beginning of my relationship with the company, and it wasn’t going to be the end of it either. It was one touch point in a longer relationship, a chance to hear more of their story and learn about a feature I hadn’t seen before. I had about a year left in the district when we talked, not enough time to build the kind of support a purchase like that requires. I filed it away, and the opportunity to pick it back up never came before I left.

This story is about what the vendor hall actually is more than a story about a relationship that went unfinished. The vendor hall is not a marketplace where a superintendent shops and checks out with a shiny new tool in hand. It is a place that adds one stop in a much longer relationship between the people running schools and the people building tools to help them. That relationship has to survive well past whatever booth it started at, and past whichever superintendent happened to be standing there when it did.

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.