Fractional special education leadership
You brought special education in house. Now who runs it?
Ending an outsourced contract gives a school control over its own students. It also hands the school an intervention specialist, a stack of IEPs, a compliance calendar and a scholarship-funded budget — with nobody whose job it is to run any of it. Socrates Ed becomes your special education director at a fraction of a director's cost.
- 30 yrs
- Ohio special education
- M.Ed.
- Special education, Xavier
- Admin
- District-level experience
- K–12
- Preschool through transition
Without a documented process, every IEP in the building is written differently, and none of them are defensible if challenged.
Evaluations expire on a rolling calendar. One missed date can interrupt a student's services and their funding mid-year.
Your classroom teachers are the ones executing these every day. Most have never been trained to.
The day the contract ends
Hiring the specialist was the easy part.
Bringing services in house is usually the right call — better continuity for students, better alignment with your mission, better control of the budget. It also transfers a list of responsibilities that a vendor used to absorb quietly. Here is what your school now owns:
- Writing measurable, defensible IEP goals
- Tracking ETR and IEP expiration dates
- Running annual review meetings
- Documenting progress against every goal
- Training general education staff on accommodations
- Coordinating with resident districts
- Supervising and developing the specialist you hired
- Keeping scholarship-funded services aligned to the IEP
- Records retention and confidentiality practice
- Answering parents who arrive with questions and lawyers
Most schools assign all of it to an assistant principal who already has a full job. That works until the first hard case.The engagement
A special education director, two days a month.
You cannot justify a full-time director for a department of one or two. You also cannot run the department without one. The fractional model puts thirty years of Ohio special education leadership on your org chart at a cost your budget already absorbs.
STEP ONE
Readiness audit
Half day on site · report in 10 days
- Review of current IEPs and ETRs
- Compliance calendar reconstruction
- Interviews with staff delivering services
- Written findings with a prioritized punch list
- Presented to your leadership team
$1,500One-time · credited toward a build
STEP TWO
Department build
8 to 12 weeks
- Program design and staffing plan
- Job descriptions and hiring support
- IEP and ETR workflow, start to finish
- Compliance calendar and documentation system
- Progress monitoring and family reporting
- Onboarding and initial staff training
$4,500–$8,500Scoped to enrollment and caseload
STEP THREE
Fractional director
Ongoing · school year retainer
- Two scheduled days per month on site
- Supervision of your intervention staff
- IEP review before every meeting
- Attendance at complex meetings
- Quarterly compliance review
- Staff PD built into the calendar
- On-call for hard cases
$1,200–$2,000Per month · 10-month term
What it costs
Three ways to cover the role. Only one is affordable.
| Full-time director | Fractional director | Absorbed by existing staff | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual cost | $100k–$125k | $12k–$20k | $0 |
| Actual cost | Salary plus benefits and payroll load | Contracted, no benefits load, cancellable annually | An administrator's other job, done worse |
| Experience | Whoever you can hire at that salary | 30 years, district administrator level | Learning it from the internet at 9pm |
| Coverage | Full time, until they leave | Two scheduled days a month, plus on-call | Whatever is left after the day job |
| Risk carried | Low, at a cost most schools this size cannot justify | Low | Compliance gaps nobody notices until a dispute |
Full-time figures reflect typical Ohio director-level salary plus benefits and payroll load; your numbers will differ. Fractional pricing is scoped to enrollment and caseload. Schools under one governing body can be quoted as a consortium at a lower per-school rate.
Also available
Training, on its own.
Professional development
Built for the people who actually deliver accommodations every day — classroom teachers, aides, and the administrators supervising them.
Session topics
Every session is built from your own caseload, not a stock deck.
Not every school needs a director. Most need their general education teachers to understand what they are being asked to implement.