■ Some caught by surprise as director of special services ends 28-year district career

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Dr. Linda Cole’s retirement announcement caught some in the Benicia Unified School District by surprise. And it saddened everyone associated with Benicia schools.

The director of special services announced her intentions last week. But she insisted that though she’d given little hint of her plans, the main reason for her retirement was a simple one: She had miscalculated.

“I had made an appointment to see if I could retire last year, and I found out last Tuesday that I would be able to retire this year,” Cole said Monday.

“My retirement was imminent, I just didn’t know it would be this year.”

Janice Adams, superintendent of Benicia schools, called Cole’s retirement a “tremendous loss to BUSD.”

“She has made a positive impact on the lives of students and families in our district,” Adams wrote in an email Tuesday. “Linda’s expertise in special education has helped BUSD provide outstanding service for our students with disabilities.”

Cole’s ties to Benicia go back even further than her 28-year career with the school district. She moved to Benicia in 1980 and raised her family here. “I loved it as a family community,” she said. “There are good schools, and it is good from the perspective of a parent.”

Cole started with BUSD as an intern while she attended UC-Berkeley’s school of psychology. Twenty-three years later, after rising to director of special services and curriculum director, she left — temporarily — to open her own grant-writing and planning business.

But after six years, the call of public education — specifically special education — was too strong, and Cole went to work for the Vallejo school district.

“I realized that my heart was with special education, so I went back to Vallejo. I loved working in Vallejo, I have a lot of respect for that district, though it’s troubled,” she said.

Soon the position of director of special services became available in Benicia, and Linda Cole returned home.

“This is my home, this is where I know so many people,” she said. “I knew a very large percentage of the staff. It was a good match.”

The special education department has had its share of triumphs and challenges. “Almost all of the triumphs are individual children that I remember a story about,” Cole said. But there have been triumphs in the program itself, too.

“There’s something called ‘key performance indicators’ that are statewide, federally mandated measures of special education,” she said. “They’re very stringent. We have been working on bringing our math score up to the expected standard. The bar has been rising, so we’ve been moving up but then it moves ahead. This year we met the standard.

“That was a great deal of work on the part of the staff. We have put a lot of staff development in. I was so happy to see that.”

Cole said that while there are separate indicators for special education in English, language arts and math, “just like for general education, they have been raising that standard every year because of No Child Left Behind.”

Yet special education in Benicia has seen high rates of success, to which Cole credits the efforts of staff.

“They either graduate with a diploma, or they move on to an adult program,” she said of Benicia special education students.

“We follow up a year later after they graduate, and they’re going to community college, they’re working. It’s always my favorite thing to do each year is do the follow-up survey, because of the success of the students.”

Challenges remain. One of the biggest, Cole said, is state funding.

The low point may have come when hours for special ed aides were cut for the 2011-12 school year, prompting the aides and parents of children with special needs to protest the move en masse before the school board in October 2011.

“When I got to the district, the special education budget was extremely high, and it needed to be brought in line with other, similar districts,” Cole said. “It involved some reorganization. I just made a recommendation to cut aide time in a way that didn’t work. It wasn’t successful.”

She acknowledges that it wasn’t the best decision.

“I recommended cutting an hour a day, and I recommended across all programs. It was a very bad recommendation. It wasn’t a very good way to save money in special ed.

“The families and the teachers responded and we restored that.”

But, she said, sometimes strife builds strength in unexpected ways.

“That parent group has gone on to form a very effective community advisory group,” Cole said. “They’re called SELAC: Special Education Local Advisory Council. They went on to form a very positive, proactive group that has contributed a lot to the district and community in terms of special ed.”

Cole’s retirement is effective June 30. She said she plans to travel and do some form of community service.

“I’m planning on doing some hospice work. I’ve done some of that in the past and found that very rewarding. I can’t imagine not doing some service.”

She wants to work with senior citizens, too. “I live in Rancho Benicia. I love that community. That puts me in a natural environment to support seniors.”

Meanwhile, BUSD will have to move on. And so will the many staff who have come to know Linda Cole.

“Personally I will miss Linda’s calm, insightful leadership. She is a wonderful leader and I will miss her greatly,” Adams said.