Open Letter #2 to PGCPS about Lake Arbor Elm
The Issue
This is another letter from another Special Education teacher leaving the county! I am not the author I am only reporting what is happening.
"I am writing to stand with Ms. Gage, and to add my own account, because what she has described is not one teacher’s bad year. It is a pattern, and I lived it alongside her. My name is xxxx xxxxxx. I am a special education teacher and IEP case manager in the self-contained grade 1 autism program at Lake Arbor Elementary, and I am resigning from PGCPS effective June 30, 2026. I want to be clear and on the record about why I am leaving, because you should understand what is driving teachers out of this building, this county, and out of your Elementary Autism Program (EAP). I leave proud of the work I did for my students, but I leave with no hesitation, because the leadership and support structure here failed me, failed my coworkers, and most importantly failed our children. The core problem is not the students. It is not the families. It is a leadership structure that does not support its teachers and a district that does not equip them. New teachers are left to figure it out alone. Seasoned teachers, including general educators with 25+ years of experience, are not given the training or guidance to support students with significant special education needs, and they are burning out and leaving too. Across the building, we have all been “just getting by,” because that is all the support allows. When I advocated for what my students were legally entitled to, I was met with resistance and forced to escalate repeatedly to secure services that should have been routine. The same need, raised by a parent, would be granted immediately. The teacher, the advocate, the case manager closest to the child, was the last person heard. When students were physically aggressive toward staff, there was no crisis team, no consistent behavioral support due to CIRTs being stretched between multiple schools, and often no response from administration, sometimes at all. We were told to push through. The students paid for that gap, and so did we. There is also a pattern in how requests for help are received. When we call for support during a crisis, the phone goes unanswered, sometimes after several attempts. When we do reach someone, we are too often met with “did you notify your administrator?”, when the administrator was not in the building or did not respond. The support we are told exists is not there twenty-four seven, and it is frequently not there when we need it most. Worse, asking for help is treated as though we are the problem. Teachers who advocate for themselves and their students are made to feel diminished for doing so, as if the failure were ours rather than the system’s. That is not a culture that retains teachers. It is one that drives them out, and it has. One example stands out because it puts children in physical danger. Since the beginning of the school year, I raised clear safety concerns, including students leaving supervision and the lack of fencing around the play area. Those warnings were dismissed. Only after multiple elopement incidents, including students coming dangerously close to the street, was a fence finally installed at the very end of the year, and even that has been mismanaged, with staff unable to enter because no one had the code to the newly locked gate. This is what it takes to be heard here: a near tragedy, addressed late and incompletely. Student safety should never require that. This pattern is why you are losing staff. The lack of communication alone has made this building nearly impossible to function in. Decisions, schedules, and basic information arrive late or not at all, leaving teachers to operate in constant confusion. People have been placed in roles they were never properly equipped or supported to carry, and the result falls on the students and the staff closest to them. I also want to speak to how support staff are treated, because I would not have been able to serve my students well without them. Our paraeducators, ISEAs, and support staff are the backbone of the classroom and the building. They show up every day for some of the most demanding work in the school, and they do it with care. Yet they are routinely treated as interchangeable, moved and placed wherever is convenient without regard for the relationships and consistency our students depend on, and overlooked even in basic recognition, including not being acknowledged with an appreciation day of their own. To rely on these individuals as heavily as this building does, while treating them as an afterthought, is unacceptable. Pay them fairly and treat them with respect, and you may actually retain them, easing the very shortages that leave classrooms and students without the support they need. They deserve far better, and so do the students who count on them. This is not only my experience; it is documented at the state level. Publicly available state records confirm this pattern. Prince George’s County serves roughly 133,000 students, including about 17,000 with Individualized Education Programs. During the 2023-2024 school year, PGCPS had the highest number of special education staffing vacancies in Maryland, roughly 240, more than double the next-highest district. The following year, the Maryland State Department of Education received about 131 complaints about the district’s special education services, a 65 percent increase, and placed PGCPS under corrective action for special education. I lived the conditions behind those numbers. Every vacancy is a classroom like mine, where the remaining staff absorb impossible caseloads and the children pay the difference. These failures continue into the present. In the current complaint year, the Maryland State Department of Education has repeatedly investigated and substantiated violations against PGCPS, issuing formal Letters of Findings and mandatory corrective action. Recent findings include the district failing to provide a student with autism the assistive technology required by their IEP, failing to provide a student with special education instruction from a certified special education teacher, and failing to provide required adult support, alongside repeated procedural violations involving parent notice and IEP timelines. Several of these findings were addressed directly to the Office of the Superintendent. This is not historical. It is the present condition of special education in this district, confirmed by the state, while I was living it inside one of its classrooms. I want to say this plainly, because I think it captures the whole problem: I learned everything I know in this role through this school’s mistakes, not through the guidance of leadership. New teachers should be mentored and supported. Instead, we are left to figure it out by watching the system fail and correcting for it ourselves. That is not sustainable, and it is why people do not stay. I am speaking up because I can, and because many of my colleagues cannot. However, I still encourage them to speak up, as we have all lived this experience together. As Ms. Gage’s letter shows, I am not describing my experience alone, I am describing a shared one. The reason others stay silent is the same reason this has gone unaddressed for so long: a culture of intimidation that teaches people that raising concerns will be used against them, so they keep quiet and problems get swept aside. I am not afraid to put my name to this, and I am doing so on behalf of everyone who has felt they could not, as well as the vulnerable children I work with daily whom the system continuously fails. This is also not the first time I have raised these concerns. I have submitted complaints and formally pushed for better support, and each time I was met with silence, I escalated higher, all the way up to the Office of the Superintendent. The concerns did not stop being raised; the responses simply never came. I understand that leadership is busy. But this is a real and ongoing safety and equity issue that was brought to your attention again and again throughout the entire school year, and nothing changed. When concerns are escalated to the highest levels of a district and met with no response and no action, leadership is no longer simply unaware. It becomes complicit in the very conditions it has the power to fix. What happened after I filed is the clearest example of that pattern. I submitted my formal complaint on November 25, 2025. Three weeks later, on December 15, 2025, I was issued a growth plan citing two instructional components, 1c and 1e, as below proficient, the same two components on which the principal had rated me proficient during a recorded pre-observation conference on October 8, 2025. Nothing about my instruction had changed in those weeks. What changed was that I had spoken up about not being supported and being retaliated against, and I filed a complaint. The timing and the contradiction speak for themselves, and they are fully documented in my record. The pattern I am describing is documented in detail in my contemporaneous record of events, which I have attached. It covers my safety reports beginning in September 2025, the emergency response failures, my formal complaint filed in November 2025, and how that complaint was handled. This has not been a one-year problem. It has been allowed to persist, unaddressed, for far too long, and someone needs to say it plainly: the children in these programs deserve a system that sees them as individuals, not as bodies to be placed. Right now, they do not have one. When more than one teacher leaving the same program tells you the same thing in the same week, that is not a coincidence and it is not personal. It is a pattern. I hope this time it is taken seriously rather than swept aside. The children deserve that much." Again - sign this petition along with the other 2 for this school!
There are 4 active petitions for Lake Arbor Elm on Change.org. The principal know these exists and called us all "birds and stated that we are just chirpping" so chirp louder!
Please see previous petition on Dr. Sothern and please comment if you have something to share. Our children are losing valuable staff that care and our vulnerable special education students are not being heard.
68
The Issue
This is another letter from another Special Education teacher leaving the county! I am not the author I am only reporting what is happening.
"I am writing to stand with Ms. Gage, and to add my own account, because what she has described is not one teacher’s bad year. It is a pattern, and I lived it alongside her. My name is xxxx xxxxxx. I am a special education teacher and IEP case manager in the self-contained grade 1 autism program at Lake Arbor Elementary, and I am resigning from PGCPS effective June 30, 2026. I want to be clear and on the record about why I am leaving, because you should understand what is driving teachers out of this building, this county, and out of your Elementary Autism Program (EAP). I leave proud of the work I did for my students, but I leave with no hesitation, because the leadership and support structure here failed me, failed my coworkers, and most importantly failed our children. The core problem is not the students. It is not the families. It is a leadership structure that does not support its teachers and a district that does not equip them. New teachers are left to figure it out alone. Seasoned teachers, including general educators with 25+ years of experience, are not given the training or guidance to support students with significant special education needs, and they are burning out and leaving too. Across the building, we have all been “just getting by,” because that is all the support allows. When I advocated for what my students were legally entitled to, I was met with resistance and forced to escalate repeatedly to secure services that should have been routine. The same need, raised by a parent, would be granted immediately. The teacher, the advocate, the case manager closest to the child, was the last person heard. When students were physically aggressive toward staff, there was no crisis team, no consistent behavioral support due to CIRTs being stretched between multiple schools, and often no response from administration, sometimes at all. We were told to push through. The students paid for that gap, and so did we. There is also a pattern in how requests for help are received. When we call for support during a crisis, the phone goes unanswered, sometimes after several attempts. When we do reach someone, we are too often met with “did you notify your administrator?”, when the administrator was not in the building or did not respond. The support we are told exists is not there twenty-four seven, and it is frequently not there when we need it most. Worse, asking for help is treated as though we are the problem. Teachers who advocate for themselves and their students are made to feel diminished for doing so, as if the failure were ours rather than the system’s. That is not a culture that retains teachers. It is one that drives them out, and it has. One example stands out because it puts children in physical danger. Since the beginning of the school year, I raised clear safety concerns, including students leaving supervision and the lack of fencing around the play area. Those warnings were dismissed. Only after multiple elopement incidents, including students coming dangerously close to the street, was a fence finally installed at the very end of the year, and even that has been mismanaged, with staff unable to enter because no one had the code to the newly locked gate. This is what it takes to be heard here: a near tragedy, addressed late and incompletely. Student safety should never require that. This pattern is why you are losing staff. The lack of communication alone has made this building nearly impossible to function in. Decisions, schedules, and basic information arrive late or not at all, leaving teachers to operate in constant confusion. People have been placed in roles they were never properly equipped or supported to carry, and the result falls on the students and the staff closest to them. I also want to speak to how support staff are treated, because I would not have been able to serve my students well without them. Our paraeducators, ISEAs, and support staff are the backbone of the classroom and the building. They show up every day for some of the most demanding work in the school, and they do it with care. Yet they are routinely treated as interchangeable, moved and placed wherever is convenient without regard for the relationships and consistency our students depend on, and overlooked even in basic recognition, including not being acknowledged with an appreciation day of their own. To rely on these individuals as heavily as this building does, while treating them as an afterthought, is unacceptable. Pay them fairly and treat them with respect, and you may actually retain them, easing the very shortages that leave classrooms and students without the support they need. They deserve far better, and so do the students who count on them. This is not only my experience; it is documented at the state level. Publicly available state records confirm this pattern. Prince George’s County serves roughly 133,000 students, including about 17,000 with Individualized Education Programs. During the 2023-2024 school year, PGCPS had the highest number of special education staffing vacancies in Maryland, roughly 240, more than double the next-highest district. The following year, the Maryland State Department of Education received about 131 complaints about the district’s special education services, a 65 percent increase, and placed PGCPS under corrective action for special education. I lived the conditions behind those numbers. Every vacancy is a classroom like mine, where the remaining staff absorb impossible caseloads and the children pay the difference. These failures continue into the present. In the current complaint year, the Maryland State Department of Education has repeatedly investigated and substantiated violations against PGCPS, issuing formal Letters of Findings and mandatory corrective action. Recent findings include the district failing to provide a student with autism the assistive technology required by their IEP, failing to provide a student with special education instruction from a certified special education teacher, and failing to provide required adult support, alongside repeated procedural violations involving parent notice and IEP timelines. Several of these findings were addressed directly to the Office of the Superintendent. This is not historical. It is the present condition of special education in this district, confirmed by the state, while I was living it inside one of its classrooms. I want to say this plainly, because I think it captures the whole problem: I learned everything I know in this role through this school’s mistakes, not through the guidance of leadership. New teachers should be mentored and supported. Instead, we are left to figure it out by watching the system fail and correcting for it ourselves. That is not sustainable, and it is why people do not stay. I am speaking up because I can, and because many of my colleagues cannot. However, I still encourage them to speak up, as we have all lived this experience together. As Ms. Gage’s letter shows, I am not describing my experience alone, I am describing a shared one. The reason others stay silent is the same reason this has gone unaddressed for so long: a culture of intimidation that teaches people that raising concerns will be used against them, so they keep quiet and problems get swept aside. I am not afraid to put my name to this, and I am doing so on behalf of everyone who has felt they could not, as well as the vulnerable children I work with daily whom the system continuously fails. This is also not the first time I have raised these concerns. I have submitted complaints and formally pushed for better support, and each time I was met with silence, I escalated higher, all the way up to the Office of the Superintendent. The concerns did not stop being raised; the responses simply never came. I understand that leadership is busy. But this is a real and ongoing safety and equity issue that was brought to your attention again and again throughout the entire school year, and nothing changed. When concerns are escalated to the highest levels of a district and met with no response and no action, leadership is no longer simply unaware. It becomes complicit in the very conditions it has the power to fix. What happened after I filed is the clearest example of that pattern. I submitted my formal complaint on November 25, 2025. Three weeks later, on December 15, 2025, I was issued a growth plan citing two instructional components, 1c and 1e, as below proficient, the same two components on which the principal had rated me proficient during a recorded pre-observation conference on October 8, 2025. Nothing about my instruction had changed in those weeks. What changed was that I had spoken up about not being supported and being retaliated against, and I filed a complaint. The timing and the contradiction speak for themselves, and they are fully documented in my record. The pattern I am describing is documented in detail in my contemporaneous record of events, which I have attached. It covers my safety reports beginning in September 2025, the emergency response failures, my formal complaint filed in November 2025, and how that complaint was handled. This has not been a one-year problem. It has been allowed to persist, unaddressed, for far too long, and someone needs to say it plainly: the children in these programs deserve a system that sees them as individuals, not as bodies to be placed. Right now, they do not have one. When more than one teacher leaving the same program tells you the same thing in the same week, that is not a coincidence and it is not personal. It is a pattern. I hope this time it is taken seriously rather than swept aside. The children deserve that much." Again - sign this petition along with the other 2 for this school!
There are 4 active petitions for Lake Arbor Elm on Change.org. The principal know these exists and called us all "birds and stated that we are just chirpping" so chirp louder!
Please see previous petition on Dr. Sothern and please comment if you have something to share. Our children are losing valuable staff that care and our vulnerable special education students are not being heard.
The Decision Makers
Supporter Voices
Petition Updates
Share this petition
Petition created on June 22, 2026