Special Populations

Our Work

Multilingual learners, students with disabilities, students in foster care, and many other young people face significant and unique barriers along their education pathways. Students often experience several challenges in quick succession — or all at once. Too often, they receive fragmented supports that, no matter how well intentioned, still fail to meet their needs.

Bellwether’s work helps systems, state agencies, and nonprofits focus on students’ needs and design solutions with quality, access, and coherence at the forefront. We conduct program evaluations to improve the effectiveness of service delivery for the highest-need students, develop memoranda of understanding to improve education data sharing for students served by multiple agencies, and produce rigorous research and field-facing analyses to highlight key areas for progress, among other services. In the process, our work shifts the national conversation toward a coherent, integrated, and student-centered understanding of system-level reform.

We make progress toward our goals through two types of work: 1) supporting focused efforts to directly improve the education experiences and outcomes for students with unique needs, and 2) offering embedded help to our partners to ensure that their work meets the needs of every student they serve.

Research and Publications: Our team engages in rigorous research tailored for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to develop publications that fill in knowledge gaps and provide the field with sophisticated analysis.

Convenings and Facilitation: We bring together leaders at the forefront of improving outcomes for those young people with unique and complex needs so they can collaborate and learn from one another. We also support local leaders as they come together to problem-solve for their communities.

Policy Advising: We work in close partnership with public agencies to revise and refine their policies to better support many different special student populations in both traditional school settings and nontraditional, residential, or institutional settings.

Organizational Support: Our team provides expert advising and capacity for agencies and organizations that serve specific student populations, either as their mission focus or as one component of their work.

Our Impact

Nebraska Department of Education: Bellwether was selected to partner with the Nebraska Department of Education to convene and facilitate a working group of state leaders tasked with improving education data sharing for students under the jurisdiction of the juvenile courts. We collaborated with the working group to write a final report based on engagement with more than 175 Nebraska stakeholders and national experts, including youth interviews conducted in several of the state’s facility-based schools. The recommendations from the final report were memorialized in a multi-agency agreement and submitted to the Nebraska Legislature. Those recommendations were passed unanimously by the Legislature and adopted into state law within six months. 

Utah State Board of Education: Over the course of a three-year evaluation, Bellwether supported the Utah State Board of Education’s Youth-in-Care program by gathering and analyzing data to understand the implementation of a statewide mentoring program. As a part of this program, mentors are provided for all young people involved with the state’s child-serving agencies, as well as those students identified by their districts for preventative support. Our analysis found positive relationships between mentoring and youth outcomes for students served through the program.

District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE): During COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures, Bellwether worked with OSSE to develop a web hub for families of children with disabilities so the office could continue to meet their needs. This website provided accessible answers to common questions and directed families to resources for additional support for their children.

ImmSchools: Bellwether worked in partnership with ImmSchools, a nonprofit organization, to develop an analysis for school and district leaders summarizing federal immigration law and the corresponding legal protections for students and schools. This accessible resource equipped local leaders to respond knowledgeably in the event of an immigration enforcement action on campus or otherwise affecting students.

La Joya Independent School District: Bellwether supported this Texas public school district through an audit of its special education services to examine strengths and opportunities of the program. The audit also identified go-forward recommendations to strengthen identification of and service delivery to students needing special education services, optimize staffing models to ensure effective deployment of personnel, and improve financial allocation to maximize impact for students with disabilities.

Our Team

Hailly T.N. Korman
Senior Associate Partner

Shirley Appleman
Senior Adviser

Paul Beach
Associate Partner

Amy Chen Kulesa
Senior Associate Partner

Kelly Robson Foster
Senior Associate Partner

Daniela Torre Gibney
Senior Associate Partner