DLC community, We’re writing to share an important update about the next chapter ahead for the Diverse Learners Cooperative. After founding and leading DLC over the last nine years, Brooke Allen will be closing her time with the organization this summer to begin a school founder role with the Nashville Incubator. DLC began when Brooke saw a critical need: teachers and leaders of diverse learners required better support. What started as one person leaning into

The full program study is available now. Read it here! Nashville’s charter schools have changed significantly over the past decade. Most are fully grown now, with experienced leaders, stable communities, and students who have been with them for years. For many of those schools, the question has shifted from how do we build a special education program to whether what we’ve built actually works for every student who needs it? In partnership with Tennessee SCORE,

If you talk to almost any school leader who serves students with disabilities or multilingual learners, you’ll likely hear some version of the same teacher retention story. They tried a new onboarding process, stipend, or a restructured planning block. For a while it worked, or seemed to, but then the school year picked up, priorities shifted, and by spring, things looked pretty much the same as before. Rarely is this a story about bad leaders

Three years ago, the Diverse Learners Cooperative published a teacher retention report that named what many schools already felt: special educators and multilingual learner educators were leaving at rates the field couldn’t sustain. The report identified the conditions that made it possible for educators serving students with the most complex needs to stay, thrive, and build careers in schools. Over the past three years, DLC has been treating that report as a call to action,