Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report - S16

she coordinates special education services for
students with low-incidence disabilities for six
school districts.
Over 33 years in that job, her curiosity and
passion have led to changes locally and statewide
in how educational interpreters are certified, how
children with autism are educated, and, most
recently, how children with traumatic brain injury
are taught.
And she’s done so while answering to the six
separate school boards, special education directors,
and superintendents that pay into the Shenandoah
Valley Regional Program for Special Education, the
quasi-governmental program that she directs.
Over the years, her responsibilities have grown
from 48 students across the six rural districts and a
budget of $1.5 million to 350 students and $10 million in funding support. Her only staff is a secretary.
Among the work Sorrell is most lauded for is in
the autism arena. More than a decade ago, she
saw that parents across Virginia were suing school
districts because the schools weren’t meeting the
needs of their children with autism. Many districts
struggled or failed altogether to provide the right
kind of therapy and education to such students,
namely in the form of applied behavior analysis.
AbA is a specific approach to working with children
and adults with autism that is designed to change
behavior.
“I didn’t think that was wrong,” Sorrell says of the
parents’ legal action. “The school divisions did not
have the knowledge or capability with respect to
behavior analysis to work with these children. The
more I read, the more I knew we needed to move in
that direction.”

Doing It ‘Proactively’
Without any in-house expertise, Sorrell partnered with Commonwealth Autism Services, a
Richmond, Va.-based organization that provides
training for school districts by embedding its
staff in districts, where they model techniques for
teachers and therapists.
“Other people have been involved in lawsuits
and litigation about this kind of therapy and come
in after the fact” to provide it, says Jessica Philips,
the organization’s vice president and chief operating officer. “Judy did it proactively,” she says,
noting that Virginia only began requiring health
insurers to cover AbA therapy in 2012.
“She really, really wants the program that she
runs to be top-notch quality. She believes that parents should be able to get services in their public
school. If those kids are academically and socially
more on track, they are more likely contributing
members of society,” Philips says. “At the gut of it
all for her was, ‘What’s good for kids?’ ”
Sorrell’s work was mentioned in a state legislative committee’s report assessing autism services
in Virginia as an example of a successful collaboration.
The six districts began in 2004 with one embedded behavioral analyst. Now there are 10, including some who were teachers in the districts and
have since become certified in the approach—
which Sorrell found money in her budget to pay
for.
“Building local capacity, that’s just really critical
for me,” Sorrell says. “I think it’s been a lifesaver
for our local school divisions.”
That building of local capacity sometimes includes herself.
Earlier this school year, Sorrell studied to become a brain-injury specialist. Traumatic brain
injury can affect cognitive function, motor skills,
the senses, and emotions.
“You have to have a way to meet the needs of
those kids,” says Sorrell, who remembers hearings
about the precursor to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act held at Madison College,
now James Madison University in Harrisonburg,
Va., when she was a student there in the 1970s.
“We don’t make 100 percent [of parents] happy,”
she says, “but we have the responsibility to make
sure we’re providing an appropriate program.” n

S16 |

DISTRICT-UNION PARTNERSHIP

Cynthia M. Stevenson
SUPERINTENDENT
Jefferson County Public Schools, Colo.

Kerrie Dallman
FORMER PRESIDENT
Jefferson County Education Association
BY STEPHEN SAWCHUK

s anyone who has ever sat at either side
of a bargaining table can attest, the labormanagement relationship is already challenging
enough in flush times. And it’s an order of
magnitude tougher when budgets are tight and
talk turns to paring things back. But as one
Colorado district shows, it is not impossible for
district and union leaders to work together to
make tough decisions.
When the state’s Jefferson County school district faced a budget crunch in 2011, officials of
the district and its teachers’ union purposefully
decided to take a chance and collaborate, rather
than engage in the common alternative: posturing,
internal squabbling, an impasse, and, ultimately,
layoffs.
Superintendent Cynthia M. Stevenson and Kerrie
Dallman, then the president of the Jefferson County
Education Association, hosted an “employee summit” at which representatives from the district, the
union, and other employee groups outlined budget
fundamentals, agreed on areas to cut, and then
carried the details into their respective bargained
contracts.
The accord kept employees on the rolls, minimized class-size increases, and preserved electives.
And it has been generally (though not uniformly)
praised in the 85,000-student district, located west
of Denver.
The new approach to budgeting in Jefferson
County, the state’s largest district, is notable partly
because the administration and the union, while not
sworn enemies, had had their fair share of uneasy
moments. Contract talks had stalemated before,
both over wages and over policy issues, such as the

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process for dismissing probationary teachers.
But the budget situation, Stevenson says,
demanded a different way of interacting.
“We are just like every other place in the country:
changing,” she says. “And in a changing environment, in times of declining resources and increased
expectations, you have to operate differently.”

Put to the Test
Stevenson, who has been the superintendent for
11 years, understands change in the district better
than most. She grew up in Jefferson County and
attended school there.
Dallman only recently left the local union to assume the presidency of the state’s National Education Association chapter; her biography on the
state affiliate’s website lists her collaborative work
on the summit among her top accomplishments.
The idea for the summit grew out of a 2011 national conference on labor-management cooperation sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. That convening, in Denver, brought together
some 150 teams, each consisting of a district’s superintendent, school board president, and teachers’
union leader, to try to identify new ways of working
together.
For a good number of the attendees, the notion
of collaboration never went further than a group
photo with the U.S. secretary of education. But for
Jefferson County’s leaders, the ideal would be put
immediately to the test.
Midway through the conference, team members received word that the state portion of K-12 aid would
be cut by nearly 10 percent. Jefferson County’s rev-

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Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report

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