In May 2018, I had just finished submitting my edTPA in the classroom where I was student teaching, feeling confident and excited to begin my career. Graduation was around the corner, I was interviewing, building portfolios, and picturing my first classroom — but none of the positions I applied for opened for me. Then, just days before the start of the school year, I was unexpectedly offered a Special Education position.

I accepted immediately, thinking it would be a stepping stone — a way to get my foot in the door until a general education role became available.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that this “detour” wasn’t temporary at all — it was a calling. That decision altered the course of my career and my sense of purpose forever.

That first year was everything I expected it to be — challenging, full of learning curves, and stretching me in all the ways new teachers anticipate. But nothing prepared me for what came next.

A teacher on our team passed away from a stress-induced heart attack in her classroom. She was a deeply committed educator, just two years from retirement, and the pressure she carried for her students ultimately cost her life. It wasn’t a lack of passion or skill — it was the cumulative weight of constant documentation, endless compliance checks, service coordination, crisis response, and accountability layered on top of teaching. It was not a failure of commitment or competence — it was the consequence of a system that demands more than any one person can sustain.

As a staff, we attended her service together, wearing matching shirts and ribbons made from hockey laces in her honor. I remember exactly where I sat, who was beside me, and the look on her family’s faces. In that moment, I found myself thinking, “It’s not worth it“.

It was the first time I realized that the system wasn’t just inconvenient, it was unsustainable.

Her passing permanently shifted how I viewed the profession. I began to understand that burnout in special education is not rooted in a lack of dedication, but in a lack of capacity — teachers are asked to pour from an empty well and somehow keep giving.

In 2020, I moved to Florida and piloted a support model called Homebase, designed for students with ASD or social communication needs. Over the next few years the model gained traction, and by 2025 it had been fully integrated across 18 middle schools in the district. My department later expanded the framework to support all ESE students, and our data showed measurable gains — ESE students were outperforming the district average in growth.

We were moving in the right direction, but something was still missing.
The greatest barrier wasn’t instruction — it was data.

Teachers were still spending countless hours documenting services, progress, and accommodations outside of the school day. Homebase gave us everything we needed for compliance and student planning, but at the cost of late nights, weekends, and emotional exhaustion. It proved what was possible, but also revealed why teachers remained overwhelmed: the workload was not rooted in skill gaps, but in systems that required manual effort for every step.

Without automation, the burden of data management would always outpace teacher capacity.

It became clear that the challenges weren’t isolated to the classroom, they were structural. Teachers were committed, students were benefiting, but the workload tied to documenting progress was still overwhelming. The system needed to evolve if it was going to be scalable, humane, and sustainable.

That was the turning point.