Abstract
The decades-old term “educator burnout” has grown increasingly louder as educational demands have intensified and learning landscapes have evolved. Teaching today is very different from what it was in the 1970s. Just as I would pack my suitcase differently for a warm climate than for a cold one, today’s educators require different tools than previous generations of teachers. Research has grown and expanded to meet current needs and improve teacher and student outcomes. Even now, educators continue to improve their practice with the introduction of AI tools, helping to simplify administrative duties. Yet, educators are still feeling overwhelmed.
Perhaps asking teachers to do more isn’t the solution to an age-old dilemma. Perhaps the issue is not instructional, but structural.
Special education was first created as a legal safeguard to ensure students with disabilities were not excluded from public education. Those safeguards remain critically important today. But the reality is that we are navigating a very different world than the one that existed at the original development of special education. Increasingly, schools have become community hubs, absorbing the strain of fragmented systems attempting to address mental health needs, neurodiverse learning profiles, behavioral complexity, economic instability, and family stressors. Managing the coordination of multiple systems that aren’t always aligned is a heavy burden on the shoulders of educators.
When the community of Asheville, NC experienced destructive floods in 2024 due to Hurricane Helene, restoring the community in silos was not an option. The recovery efforts were deeply communal with neighbors helping neighbors. Attempting to solve systems-level problems through isolated initiatives often fails to produce lasting change. Emerging research increasingly suggests that meaningful change requires a transformative redesign of services and of the organizational structure of schools themselves. Schools are finding success when mental health services are integrated, there is a shared ownership of all learners, systems are flexible, and collaborative planning time is allotted.
Adequate special education cannot survive in isolation or by asking special educators to do more. Redesigning schools and distributing responsibility for learner variability across the entire system are necessary to create more sustainable and manageable workloads. This means inclusion and universal design for learning become foundational rather than supplemental or compliance driven. The system is less reactive and more proactive because supports are intentionally embedded into the infrastructure.
Fortunately, many educators, schools, and organizations are already beginning this work.
The Council of Administrators of Special Education (CASE) is supporting structural change through their webinar series, “Transformational Leadership For Special Education.” This training aims to: eliminate divided service systems, build shared ownership, and redesign staffing structures.
Founded by the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL), the Coalition for Community Schools seeks to unify educational services and community organizations to strengthen student success, family well-being, and community support systems.
The Utah State Board of Education has developed statewide co-teaching strategies that emphasize shared ownership, collaborative planning, and integrated instruction. Though co-teaching exists in many states, these formalized strategies help shift the responsibility for educating students with disabilities from special educators alone to a shared responsibility with general educators.
Even CEC’s Diversity Leadership Academy (DLA), is helping to address historical inequities by supporting future special educators who bring cultural perspectives, lived experiences, and a leadership pipeline to meet evolving student needs.
Addressing “educator burnout” requires more than simply providing professional development on managing overwhelming workloads through breathing techniques or AI tools. Lasting retention and system-wide sustainability will require us to move beyond fragmented supports and towards intentionally designed systems grounded in collaboration, flexibility, and human variability.
Special Education MEd, University of Utah