The Capacity Gap: When Teachers Become the Workaround

Least restrictive environment was designed to protect students with disabilities from unnecessary exclusion, but over time, schools have reduced their capacity to provide for students with disabilities in the general education settings. Without building the staffing, expertise, time, coordination, and alternative supports needed, it is difficult to make inclusion work well.

When that capacity is missing, the gap doesn’t disappear. Someone absorbs it.

Too often, that someone is the teacher.

In this episode of The Unintended School, Dr. Cathy White uses LRE as a case study for a much larger systems problem: what happens when schools respond to structural capacity gaps by asking individual educators to work harder, differentiate more, build stronger relationships, write better behavior plans, and somehow make an under-resourced system function.

Inclusion matters. Providing all students with access to a Free Appropriate Public Education matters. The question is whether we’re asking good teaching to compensate for capacity gaps in the system.

You’ll also be introduced to the Capacity Gap Audit, a free tool for identifying pressure points, naming the capacity that’s missing, determining who is currently absorbing the gap, and finding the smallest system move that could begin to reduce it. 

👉Download it here: tools.drcathywhite.com/capacity

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About The Unintended School
The Unintended School explores what happens when reasonable choices, good intentions, and everyday habits create consequences we never meant to build into the system.

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Beyond Relationships: Building Capacity Through Better School Systems
Dr. Cathy White
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Transcript

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One of many moments that I was not prepared for as a special education director was the time that I was standing with the principal and we were measuring a pair of scissors to see if the blades were long enough to count as a dangerous weapon according to the law. We weren't measuring this for something that happened with a high school student or a teenager. It was a second grade student, and it was towards the beginning of the year. It was a student that had been identified the year earlier, and he had an emotional impairment. He had some pretty significant behaviors. We had tried breaks, behavior charts, all kinds of different strategies, the normal things that you would go through. That didn't work. And so he ended up spending more and more time in the resource room until eventually he got to the point where he is in the resource room almost all day and he had a one-on-one support with him. Despite all of that extra support, he reached a moment where he became dysregulated. And I want to point out the student did not have warning signs that we could see that he was dysregulated. It looked like a snap. And so he was fine one second, as far as we could see. And then the next second, he had picked up the pair of scissors he was working with, turned to the student next to him, and attempted to stab him. Luckily, the student that he attempted to stab was wearing a thick coat. And so the scissors didn't cause very much damage, but it certainly could have been a lot worse. So here I am with the principal, and we're measuring the scissors to see does this count as a dangerous weapon? Because if it does count, then we could have put some other processes in place and move the student towards an alternative placement or some other services for him. In this case, the scissors were not quite long enough. We're about a half inch too short, and so we were not able to use it in that way. I'm using this story to illustrate some of the pitfalls that come with least restrictive environment or LRE. LRE is part of the federal special education law, and the intent behind it is really good. I want to say that right off the bat. I believe that the intent of LRE is wonderful. The idea was to not exclude students. Before we had LRE, before we had these laws in place, if somebody had a disability that the school decided was too severe or too expensive, they could just put that child in a self-contained classroom that may or may not have been a match for their needs. So a lot of students, if they were deemed too difficult, were just put into a self-contained classroom. And those classrooms sometimes didn't have very high standards. And so we had students that were certainly capable of a lot that were being kind of shunted away and out of sight, out of mind, which is not good. And I don't want that to happen. And I hope we never get to that point again in our educational system. So the idea of LRE is that a student will be educated in the environment that's the closest to general education as possible. That has been a little bit twisted over time, where people now think that that means that all special education students need to be in the general education classroom all the time. And that has created a ripple effect that we're really feeling in classrooms today. I also want to point out that IDEA 2004 is very old. It's a law that should have been reauthorized, but it's something that nobody wants to touch right now. We have on both sides of the aisle, there are different opinions about what should be happening with education. And special education is a pretty hot button topic that nobody really wants to tackle at this moment. So I don't know that it's going to be reauthorized and changed anytime soon. So we need to work with what we have. If we look at nationwide averages, about 20% of students have an IEP. So think about one in five students has an IEP of some sort. Many of those don't have challenging behaviors or very high academic needs. And there are also a lot of students that don't have IEPs that have high behavior and high academic needs. So I'd want to make sure that we're not just picking on special education kids and saying they're the only ones that are having challenges because that's not true. We've always had students that had behavioral challenges, but as we see class sizes get bigger, we see schools with less funding, we see more pressures being put on schools from communities and political organizations. It's turning into a pressure cooker where these behaviors related to LRE are becoming more and more of a topic of conversation. In a recent report, over half of the teachers said that managing behavior was a major stressor of their job. In fact, it was the number one ranked stressor that they gave. We also need to consider teacher retention. That is becoming more and more of an issue. And in some areas, it's even a crisis. 43% of teachers said that they intended to quit because of violent behaviors and classroom climate. That's significant. If we think about how many teachers are either not entering the profession or entering and leaving, or entering and very stressed out and not feeling like they're able to teach because of behavior, it's a significant portion. We're looking at half or even more than half of teachers that are impacted. I want to talk a little more about the intent of LRE and the good sides to it, because there is a reason that we have the least restrictive environment as part of IDEA and part of our schools. First, it protects special education students from exclusion. And that is important. As somebody who has worked with students with disabilities throughout most of my career, I feel very strongly about these students being included in the classroom to the extent possible. It not only benefits them, but it benefits the other kids when it's done right. There's study after study that shows that having a student with disabilities in the classroom helps other kids with empathy. The strategies that you use with that student benefit everybody in the class. It can be a good thing. The other part of LRE has to do with discipline. Without the idea of least restrictive environment, we would have even more disclusionary and discriminatory discipline. It's something that we still have a problem with. We have not figured it out yet. If you look at discipline data as far as expulsions and suspensions, it's still disproportionate when it comes to race and gender. There's still an issue, but it would be even worse without LRE. We also use more restorative practices when we are thinking about least restrictive environment. And that's a good thing for all students. And maybe most importantly, in order to provide FAPE a free, appropriate public education, we also need to consider the least restrictive environment. FAPE might not be everybody's favorite thing because it can be related to complaints and some sticky issues that we get into. But the idea of FAPE, a free, appropriate public education, is a foundational belief that we have in the United States when it comes to education. And again, I don't want to throw that away. So we have all this good intention behind LRE. There's a reason that they put it in the law. There's a reason that we consider it in schools. But what happened? Why are there all these extra challenges now, mostly related to behavior, but also sometimes with the wide academic gaps that came from LRE? How did this happen? As with most issues, it wasn't just one thing that caused the difficulty, but a number of things that kind of happened at the same time. We have limited staffing. Class sizes are going up because there's not enough teachers or there was not enough money to hire more teachers, or maybe there's not the facilities. We have some teachers trying to fit over 30 kids in a room that was only designed to fit 20. So the limited staffing is adding pressure to the system. We also have limited alternative placements. My little boy with the scissors needed a self-contained classroom. But even once I was able to get through the process of getting parent approval and all the stuff we had to do to make that change, I had a really hard time finding a program that had an opening. So even if you have a child where a self-contained classroom is the least restrictive environment for them, you might not have a place to put them. So then you have to keep them in the general education classroom or in an overloaded resource room, which is not ideal. Although I think we're recognizing the need, there's still insufficient mental health services in many parts of the country. I lived in a rural area that had really limited mental health support. Sometimes our families had to wait months before they could get into a counselor because there just weren't enough people to go around. Most schools, if they have a social worker, they need to work just with students with IEPs, and they might have massive caseloads where they're not able to give the time and attention that they would like to. We don't always have enough of that mental health support to go around, and that also adds pressure to the system. With all of these additional pressures, what's essentially happened is we've systematically lowered the school's ability to remove students without proportionally increasing the capacity to support students. We end up with this reinforcing loop. We have students that have high needs that are in the general education classroom. That puts a greater demand on teacher capacity as they try to balance the needs of all the students in their class. That in turn increases stress and risk of burnout. If that teacher does get too stressed or gets burnt out, they might leave the profession or they might transfer to a different district that maybe has some more supports. So now the teacher is gone, and we end up with either fewer teachers to cover the same load, or we might end up with less experienced teachers. So now your tier one is weaker because you don't have the same capacity delivering that instruction and behavioral support as before. That in turn increases the difficulty in meeting the behavioral and academic needs, which leads to more serious problems from the student because their needs are being met at an even lesser rate, which then starts the process all over again with the higher needs in gen ed, the greater demand on teacher capacity, and it just keeps going. So this cycle gets worse every time. It's going to get harder and harder. And that's been happening for a long time. And it's one of the reasons that we're talking about it so much more now than we were a little while ago. This is part of systems thinking. When you have a system that's getting feedback and reinforcement, it just keeps getting stronger and stronger. And so in this case, the reinforcement is negative because we have classrooms that just don't have the capacity to meet the needs of the students, which is going to make the student behavior increase and the student academic needs increase, and it just keeps reinforcing itself. The only way out of that is to interrupt the cycle. Otherwise, it's just going to continue again and again and again. With fewer alternative programs and budget constraints, there's a higher pressure to maintain the setting that you're in. I had to go through that with the little boy I was talking about. I didn't have an alternate placement for him right away. And so we had to try to figure out how to make it work where we were. I also had some parental pressure where the parents were not in agreement right off the bat of moving him to a self-contained classroom. And so we were going through some process with that. I was in a school that was fortunate enough to have the budget where I could hire a one-on-one to stay with that student. Most schools don't have that. So you would have the student that has the high needs and they're going to be in a classroom and they don't have the extra support even within that classroom. And that puts a lot onto the actual setting. What it really all boils down to with LRE and other things of this nature is you can't subtract exclusion. You have to add capacity. Keep in mind that this law is over 20 years old, and the world was very different in 2004 than it is now in 2026. Everything was different. This is pre-COVID, pre-AI, pre-everything that we have going on right now. And even at that time, there were concerns about capacity and funding and everything else that came with it. But I think that there was a little more hope and dream involved of being able to do everything that was promised in the law. But here we are today. And what happens when we end up not having the capacity? When the system breaks down the way that it has, we don't often recognize that it's a systemic breakdown and a systemic lack of capacity. And instead, we have migrated the responsibility onto teachers. And this is the problem. This is the route that I really want to talk about. And this is the route that needs to be addressed. Since I don't have the power to write a brand new special education law, we have to look at what we do have power over. And this is it. What we've done is we have made this a teacher problem. We tell teachers, you need to have positive relationships with your students. True. We need to differentiate instruction. Also true. Make sure your lessons are engaging. Yes, for sure. Make sure that you have behavior plans for your students and you're following them. Of course. That's what we want to do. We want to help these kids do better. Those are all good things on their own. I agree with all of them. But they are not enough to counteract the lack of capacity that we have in schools to handle students that have a wide range of behavioral and academic needs. I also want to look at the time involved with each one of those. Positive relationships, 100%. I agree with that strongly. I think that needs to be part of every single teacher's day. That is crucial. You can't teach if you don't have positive relationships. It's very, very important. However, that is not enough to counteract somebody's sensory needs. A positive relationship isn't going to override somebody's ADHD needs. It's just not. Those needs are still there. The student isn't acting out because they don't like you. They're acting out because they are dysregulated, because the inputs are too much for them right now. They can't control it. That's why it's a disability. So to say that positive relationships is all you need to do is honestly insulting, but I've heard it said over and over again to teachers. So yes to positive relationships, but let's be really careful about what we're saying that those positive relationships can address. Differentiated instruction is something else I strongly believe in. It's also something that takes a lot of time. And it's also something that has limits. When you have a class that has everything from a first grade reading level to an eighth grade reading level, you can't differentiate that. You can't. You can do some differentiation. You can do some changes. There's some stuff that you can do to hit parts of that range. But it is not possible for you to teach all kids in that range equally. You can't. That seems to be a controversial statement nowadays, but I've been doing this for a long time. I'm a very good teacher, and I can't do that. And I don't know how to tell another teacher how to do that. I can help a teacher differentiate by interest. I can help a teacher differentiate different products. I can help by what will engage certain students. I can help all of that. And I can help you if you have a few years span. I can do that too. But we are in a lot of situations where we have somebody in high school who can't read. And to expect that teacher to somehow differentiate that when they have 35 students in their class is not possible. And we shouldn't be saying that. Engagement, yes, we make our lessons as engaging as possible. But also sometimes kids are just going to have to do things that they don't want to do. And in order to have that happen, we do need parental and administrative support and we need structures in school to show that that's going to happen. As teachers, we're trying to compete against a lot of really cool entertainment out there, and we can't. I don't even think we really should be trying. I think we should make things stimulating, we should make things challenging, we should be in the zone of proximal development, we should do all those wonderful things. But there are still going to be times when students are not engaged because of a disability or because of trauma that they're bringing in from home or because they're tired or a hundred other reasons. So we're going to do our best as teachers. But again, it's not going to fix it. It doesn't fix a capacity issue. And then behavior plans. I do like behavior plans. I write behavior plans. I use behavior plans all the time with the students that I work with. They are necessary and they do make a difference. But we have to be very careful as special education teachers and counselors that we're writing behavior plans that are doable. Again, teachers have big classes. We can't have behavior plans that consume a lot of time. I can't expect a classroom teacher to check in every five minutes with my one special education student because chances are it's not even just that one. There's probably five of them. And they can't do that and take care of the rest of the students. So, yes to behavior plans, but we need to be realistic. And sometimes that means that we have to write a plan that isn't quite as strong as we would like it to be because we have to consider capacity. So again, it helps, but it's not going to be a fix. None of these things will fix a capacity issue. They will help, they're good teaching, they're things that we need to do, but we have got to stop putting the blame on teachers and putting the responsibility on teachers to fix this problem that is in reality a systemic capacity problem. Exclusion has costs, but so does non-exclusion. I don't want to go back to exclusion. I don't want students shunted away into a self-contained classroom. I don't want that. But I do want to be realistic about the costs of inclusion. I'm willing to pay that cost, and I think most teachers are willing to pay the cost as long as that cost is reasonable and possible. And that's where capacity comes in. So what are we going to do about it? I just talked about all the things that are going wrong in the system and all these huge capacity gaps and the law that we can't change. What do we do? The first step is to do a capacity gap audit. And I actually prepared one for you. You can download it for free. The link will be in the show notes. The capacity gap audit is asking a question. What is the system asking teachers to absorb? I think this is something that leaders should ask all the time, not just with issues related to LRE, with behavior and academic needs, but really all issues. Leaders should constantly be asking us, what are we asking teachers to absorb that really belongs in the system? And truthfully, sometimes it's what are we asking our leaders to absorb that should be kept in the system? A little quick side note, that's why I wrote Beyond Relationships, to help leaders find those gaps and stop carrying the load by themselves and stop expecting teachers to carry it. We need to put stuff in the system that belongs in the system. All right, back to this. So what is the system asking the teacher to absorb? In order to answer that question, we need to look at a few things. Number one, we need to find the pressure points. You might look and say, well, obviously the pressure points is, you know, we have all these behaviors or we have high academic needs. But I would like you to look a little bit deeper into that and look for patterns. You can't fix everything, but if you look at your signals, if you look at the data that you have, you will find some patterns. And once you have patterns, you can do something about it. You can remove some friction, you can make some things easier. Step one of the audit, find the pressure points by looking for patterns. Step two is to name the missing capacity. You need to look at what the situation requires in order to function reliably. The missing capacity could be expertise, it could be time, supervision, specialized instruction, authority, coordination. There's a lot of different conditions that could be the missing capacity. So you're going to look at your patterns and you're going to look at the situation and identify what it is that's missing and who is making up the difference. Because I can almost guarantee there's somebody or multiple somebodies that are stepping in to fill that gap because that's what teachers and leaders do. And so those people are doing more than they should. They're they're being compensatory heroes, they're filling in the gaps, they're propping up the system, and you need to help them out by fixing the system so that they don't have to prop it up. When you name the missing capacity, you are translating the invisible work that those people are propping up into an observable load. That is huge for leaders to do. Once you're able to do that, that's when you say, oh, this person has been doing all this invisible work that I didn't even recognize. And I can take that load off of them. Don't put it on yourself, but I can take that load off of them and I'm going to put it back into the system so this teacher or this leader or this person can go back to doing what I hired them to do instead of propping up something that doesn't even belong to them. After that, you're going to classify the gap. And there are different types of gaps, and they have different responses. There's everything from a Practice gap that is instructional, and this would be tied to teachers. Maybe you see that the teacher really does need to increase some skills in a certain area. When you look at the patterns, you realize maybe it would be a good idea for everybody to teach expectations in the first couple weeks, and that might be a pattern that we notice that we haven't really put effort into that. That's a skill gap, that's a practice gap. And so you can make a plan for how to fix that. You might have something structural like an allocation gap where people aren't positioned where they need to be in order to meet the concern. Is there a way to move people around and maybe shift the services to where they're needed more? It might not even be numbers. It could be a place that doesn't have as many students, but maybe they have higher needs. And so you need to shift more people into that area. So that would be an allocation gap. There are also procedural gaps. One example would be a coordination gap where you have the relevant resources, but the schedules or communication or responsibilities or something is preventing them from being used operationally. You need to help with coordination so the right people are talking to each other or have common time to work with each other. You might also have an authority gap where the system has a possible response, but it's unclear of who to go to or what the threshold is to reach it, or there's something that's preventing the actual procedure from happening. There's all these different kinds of gaps, and they can be instructional, structural, or procedural. And the type of gap and what's going on is going to impact what you do next. So you'll identify that gap and look at what the primary gap is, because you'll probably have more than one. So you're gonna pick one. And then once you have that picked, step four is to choose the smallest system move. I say smallest because you can't just change an entire system overnight. You need to start with something small, preferably something that will give you an easy win or something that will quickly remove some amount of friction. There's often something simple that you can do that will make an impact right away. And you can do that while you're working on some of the bigger things. That smallest system move might not totally eliminate the gap. That's okay. We're just looking at some sort of elimination of friction so that we start moving in the right direction. When you decide that move, you'll need to also figure out who owns it, when's it going to start, how are you gonna measure whether it's working. You'll go through that process on this map as well. Step five is to name the remaining gap. After you've identified your small system move, you have to look at what else remains. Maybe you realize you had a coordination gap and you're looking at it and saying, okay, we need to make sure teacher A, teacher B, and paraeducator C all have a common planning time. So we're gonna make some changes in the schedule in order for that to happen. That's a small system move and it might give you a good benefit because you're able to increase that coordination. Once you've done that, then you need to look at what's left, what's the remaining gap that you have in place. So you have reduced it a little bit, but now you want to see what else you can do. So you're going to look at the remaining gap and talk about what needs to happen next for that. Towards the end of the map, there's a capacity gap decision summary so that you can put all of your stuff into one chart and easily see it. And then you're going to pick a review date and decision because anytime you make a change, you need to circle back to it so you can see how it's working and what you need to do to change next. As a reminder, that audit is free. If you find it useful, please let me know. I really enjoy working on systems and I would love to hear from leaders and teachers that are trying these different tools and how they're working out for you. If you are interested in more tools like this, please check out my book, Beyond Relationships. It's available on Amazon and any major retailer, and there are lots of tools and strategies to help you integrate systems thinking into your school so that you can constantly remove friction and make the job easier for you and for your teachers. Capacity gaps aren't the only place where people create workarounds when the official system doesn't meet a need. Sometimes the workaround is less visible, and it sounds a lot like gossip. Gossip gets treated like a people problem. Someone is negative, someone likes drama, someone needs to stop talking about coworkers and focus on their job. And sometimes that's exactly what it is. But sometimes gossip is doing a job the official system is not doing. Think about what happens when people don't know why a decision was made, when there's no safe way to raise a concern, when information moves inconsistently, when people don't trust that asking a question will get them an honest answer, or when something important is happening and leadership is not acknowledging it. The need for information doesn't disappear just because the official system isn't providing it. So people build an unofficial one. They ask the person next door, they compare what they've heard, they try to make sense of a decision with the pieces that they do have. They warn each other about things they think others need to know. That information network becomes what we call gossip. That's what I want to look at next time. Not whether gossip is good or bad, because there is bad gossip, and not how to get people to stop talking. I want to look underneath it. I want to look at why the gossip happens in the first place. So the question will be: what is gossip doing for the system that the official system is not doing? If gossip is carrying information, creating psychological safety, making sense of confusing decisions, or giving people a place to surface concerns, telling everyone to stop gossiping does not remove the need. And in fact, it's probably just going to make the gossip worse. If the unintended school is helping you see some of the things happening in your school a little differently, please take a minute to follow the show and leave a rating. Those small actions help other people find the podcast and they help me know that you like what I'm saying and I should do more of it. And I'm going to ask you to do one more thing. Please think of two educators who would have something to say about this episode and send it to them. Podcast spread by word of mouth, and if you like this, I'm asking for your help to spread it. I feel like these are the kinds of conversations that get more useful when we stop having them alone. The more people that get involved, the better the change can be. Until next time, look past the problem you can see and find the system underneath it.