Jessica Goodkin

I started my career 17 years ago as an elementary learning specialist in special education. The majority of my teaching career was in Title I schools, which I loved. It was challenging, but also very rewarding. I felt like what I was doing mattered. I was doing small groups and one-on-one instruction, and I could see that I was making an impact. Then I worked in a K-8 school and realized I wanted to do more. I went into general education and became an instructional coach, teaching teachers to teach better and running professional learning communities in my school. This allowed me to make even more of an impact because I wasn't just hitting small groups, I was able to impact full classrooms by working with their teachers. After that, I became assistant director for special education, focusing on how to make even more of an impact, especially with students with disabilities and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. I started with elementary schools and had 15 different schools, working with 15 different special education teams and their principals. I did that for 3 years. Then I was asked to apply to become a director of special education, overseeing 7 different assistant directors. Again, it was about affecting larger change, moving from one school, then to 15 schools, then to 15 times 7 schools throughout the district. Three years after that, I was asked to become the interim Executive Director of Special Education to oversee the entire special education department and budget. I applied in February and got the permanent position. Now I'm the Executive Director of Special Education, managing a $162 million budget. I work on significant disproportionality within the district to ensure we're being equitable to all students. I oversee all of our center programming and out-of-district placements, trying to keep kids in their neighborhood schools as much as humanly possible. I'm working on helping change mindsets to help everyone believe that they can keep kids in their neighborhood schools, and then providing them the resources to do it. It's not the job I thought I wanted. When I was director, I thought that was good. But I realized in the interim that this was actually the job I wanted. It was nice I had the interim. I asked for the whole year to be interim because I really wanted to understand the scope. Through this, I've had to cut $2.5 million from our budget due to declining enrollment. We were able to keep budget cuts away from the classroom this year, which was a big priority for me, so we cut other things. Although enrollment is declining, our IEPs and our special education student enrollment is not declining. In fact, it's increasing.