A school can follow special education law to the letter and still leave a child without much to show for it. That gap, between a school that is technically compliant and a school that actually serves the student in front of it, is where Sarah Sandelius has spent her career.
Sarah is the founder and CEO of The Ability Challenge (ABC), a nonprofit launched in 2019 that partners with schools, districts, and networks to build inclusive special education programs. Before that, she spent more than 15 years working across law, policy, and education, including roles with the New York City Department of Education's Alternative Schools District and, later, as senior counsel for litigation and policy, where she helped move roughly 1,700 schools toward more equitable practices for students with disabilities.
She sat down with SPCN founder Eric Sampson to talk about what she learned watching special education from the legal side, and why the fix is rarely about doing more paperwork. What follows are the ideas from that conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
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When "legally compliant" isn't the same as serving a child
Sarah's early work was with schools that did not look like traditional schools, including programs inside correctional facilities where a student might only be enrolled for three weeks. That forced a harder question than most compliance checklists ever ask: what does it actually mean to implement an annual IEP for a student who won't be there long enough for the annual cycle to matter?
"There was a real gap in what people thought they needed to do in order to be compliant and what they were doing to serve kids," she said. Coming from a legal background, her instinct was to keep asking why things were done a certain way rather than accept that they had always been done that way.
The pattern she kept running into was a mindset she calls box-checking. A leader completes the IEP, files it, considers the legal obligation met, and moves on. When she asks a leader to pull up a struggling student's IEP, she is sometimes met with a puzzled look, as if the document and the day-to-day teaching are two separate worlds. Her point is that they should not be. An IEP team sat around a table and decided which services a child needs, so that document is the natural place to start when something is not working. If it no longer reflects the child, the answer is to bring the team back together and revise it, not to leave it in a folder.
Turning the IEP into a working document
The most practical part of the conversation was Sarah's argument that IEPs belong in the operational running of a school, not just its legal files. When ABC helps a leader build a master schedule, the IEPs are the starting data. How many sections of each class does a high school need? How many ninth graders need ninth-grade English, and how many of those need a co-taught classroom? Those answers live in the aggregate of student IEPs, and pulling them into scheduling is what shifts staff toward seeing IEPs as documents they use all the time.
She gave a concrete example from a school she worked with right after COVID. The school, in a semi-rural area, could not hire enough paraprofessionals to cover the one-to-one support written into students' IEPs. Rather than treat that as an unsolvable staffing crisis, ABC went back to the documents and looked at what each IEP team had actually been trying to accomplish when it decided a student needed a paraprofessional. Often there is a disconnect between that original reasoning and the default assumption that a child needs one adult, one-to-one, for the entire school day.
By reviewing the reasoning behind each plan, the school could figure out where to concentrate its available staff and where to triage while it recruited. In some cases two students briefly shared a paraprofessional, or a student received support in a different configuration, paired with a plan to build that student's independence over time. Sarah was candid that this may not have been 100% legally compliant for every minute of every day. Her measured view is that the students were more likely to be thriving under a thoughtful plan built from their actual needs than under a rigid reading of the paperwork that the school had no way to staff. It is worth stating the other side plainly: the services written into an IEP are a legal entitlement, not a courtesy, and a school falling short is something a family can raise with the IEP team. The lesson she draws is consistent: start from what the documents say each child needs, then make smart decisions that use the school's real resources well.
If you want a plain-language refresher on how these plans are supposed to work, our IEP guide walks through the parts of an IEP and what belongs in each one, and our guide on how to request a special education evaluation covers the step that comes before a plan exists at all.
The finding that surprised her: teachers want time, not another tool
Before ABC had a name, Sarah ran a national survey of educators because she suspected schools were collecting mountains of special education data without a clear sense of what any of it was for. That survey grew into ABC's THRIVE framework, and one result stood out enough that she still leads with it.
The survey asked educators which of several things would most improve special education at their school. One of the top answers was more time to collaborate with peers. Later in the same survey, it asked whether they actually had those things. About 70% of respondents named dedicated collaboration time as one of the ways special education could be improved, while only around 30% said they had it.
"Here I am thinking the thing that educators most want is a structural, systemic fix," she said. Instead, the loudest need was simply time for a general education teacher and a special education teacher to plan together. That matters because inclusive teaching is supposed to bring two kinds of expertise into the same room: a content-area teacher who knows the grade-level material, and a special education teacher trained in how disability affects learning. Neither can do the other's job, and they cannot combine their expertise without time to sit down together.
ABC works on both halves of that problem. It helps leaders find the scheduling room to create collaboration time, and it trains teachers on how to actually use it, because co-planning is a skill, not something adults automatically know how to do. Sarah's teams focus on shared language, a working agenda, and a basic common understanding of how special education plays out in a classroom, so that a planning block turns into real instructional change instead of a meeting on a calendar.
What an anti-ableist classroom looks like from the doorway
Sarah describes ABC's mission as building anti-ableist schools, and she is specific about what that looks like from inside a classroom rather than in a mission statement. THRIVE has five core elements, including school culture and student-centered curriculum and instruction, and the classroom element pulls out several evidence-based approaches for teaching diverse learners.
Her simplest test is one an observer can run in about ten minutes. Walk into a room, sit down, and see whether every student, not only the ones in the front row, can tell you what they are learning and why. From there she looks for genuine access to the content. A student with a reading difficulty in a social studies class might work from a different set of reading materials, but is still engaged in the same lesson as the rest of the class. She also looks for peer-to-peer conversation instead of a teacher talking for the full period, and for the other strategies that research links to real access to grade-level instruction.
That framing is a useful lens for parents evaluating a placement. It moves the question from "does this school offer special education services" to "can my child understand and engage with the same content as their peers here." Our companion interview, what to do when the school is not serving your child, gets into what parents can do when the answer to that second question is no, and our guide on choosing a special needs school covers what to look for on a visit.
How funding quietly shapes inclusion
Because ABC's partnerships are concentrated in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area, Sarah has a close view of how a district's structure and money shape what special education looks like on the ground. D.C. is an unusual ecosystem: roughly half charter and half traditional public, with a single school district, which lets her team see a wide range of approaches inside one small system.
On funding, she pointed to D.C.'s uniform funding formula, which, as she describes it, allocates more money to a school based on the level of a student's assessed need. In her assessment, that leaves D.C. schools relatively well funded for special education compared with some other places, though she was quick to add that no one would call it enough to fully meet the mandates schools carry. She also named the honest tension in any need-based formula: if more services attract more dollars, a formula can unintentionally work against inclusion. Her takeaway is not that one model is perfect but that every funding design carries trade-offs worth naming out loud. State and district funding structures change, so treat this as her read on the landscape as of this 2026 conversation rather than a fixed rule. For how funding shifts are reaching families right now, see our reporting on what the OSERS move to HHS means for your child's IEP.
The 2045 goal, and the honesty about measuring it
ABC has set an ambitious target: getting one million more students with disabilities on track to graduate by 2045. Asked how the organization measures progress, Sarah was refreshingly direct that they have not fully solved that question yet.
Part of the difficulty is that many students with disabilities are assessed in ways that show what they cannot do rather than what they know. A child who struggles with reading, handed a test that must be read in full, may be graded on the barrier instead of the content. So rather than lean only on test scores, ABC has moved toward measuring growth: the share of students with disabilities who meet their growth goals in reading and math, and whether that share rises after ABC starts working with a school. Alongside student growth, the team tracks changes in adult behavior and the scale of its reach, on the theory that durable gains for students follow durable changes in how the adults around them work.
What parents can take from this
Sarah's throughline is that good special education is less about paperwork and more about whether the adults use the plan, share the work, and give every student real access to grade-level learning. For a parent, that suggests a few things worth watching for: an IEP that the team actually references and revises when something changes, teachers who clearly have time to plan together, and a classroom where your child can explain what they are learning and why.
If you are weighing schools or providers and want help narrowing the field to places that fit your child, SPCN's concierge match can build a shortlist based on your child's needs and your location. You can also browse related conversations and guides on the SPCN blog.
About the guest: Sarah Sandelius is the founder and CEO of The Ability Challenge, a nonprofit founded in 2019 that partners with schools and districts to build inclusive special education programs. Learn more at theabilitychallenge.org.
Watch or listen: This article is based on the SPCN podcast episode "Fixing Special Education: Compliance vs. Real Impact with Sarah Sandelius," hosted by Eric Sampson. Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
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