Jennifer Thomas Brings a Career in Special Education to SEDOL and Its 31 Member Districts

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Photograph published on SEDOL's superintendent page and offered for use by Superintendent Jennifer Thomas.

The organization Jennifer Thomas took charge of this summer has no line in the Illinois enrollment file. Search that file by name, by its Gages Lake address, at the state, district and school levels, and the Special Education District of Lake County returns nothing at all. A special education joint agreement does not register students in the state count. Its students are recorded at the districts that enroll them.

Those districts are countable, and there are 31 of them. SEDOL publishes its member roster openly, and together those members enrolled 68,411 students in 2025-26, the most recent school year in the state's published data. Of that group, 11,258 have an Individualized Education Program.

Both figures count everyone the member districts enroll. Neither is a count of the students SEDOL itself teaches, and Thomas drew that line herself after reading a draft of this article. "These do represent the population of our member districts. Actual students served by SEDOL is smaller," she wrote. "We have approximately 525 students currently enrolled in specialized programs through SEDOL." That figure is the cooperative's own count of its own program enrollment. It appears nowhere in the state file, which has no field for cooperative placement, and no figure computed below rests on it.

"I am the new Superintendent of the Special Education District of Lake County (SEDOL) as of July 1, 2026," Thomas wrote in response to questions from The ILEdTribune. She wrote that Dr. Judy Hackett and Dr. Tim Thomas "served as the Interim Superintendents of SEDOL for the last two years."

"My entire career has been spent in special education," she wrote, describing a path that started with work as a school psychologist, continued at the Massachusetts State Department of Education and led to a series of special education administrative roles.

"SEDOL is the largest special education co-op in the state, serving 31 member districts with a wide variety of specialized programming to support students throughout the county and beyond," she wrote. She named her opening priorities in the same answer: "My early priorities as Superintendent include fostering communication among all of our stakeholders and providing high-quality programming that is responsive to the needs of the students we serve."

The membership average hides the membership

In aggregate, the 31 districts look like Illinois. Their combined IEP share is 16.5%, against 16.8% for the state, a difference of 0.3 percentage points. Statewide, Illinois reported 1,821,157 students in 2025-26 and 305,555 with IEPs.

Member by member, that resemblance breaks apart. The share runs from 11.6% at Aptakisic-Tripp CCSD 102^↗ to 23.2% at Rondout SD 72^↗, a spread of 11.6 percentage points. Thirteen members sit above the state share and 18 sit below it.

Thomas treats that variation as the working condition of a cooperative rather than a problem to be flattened.

"In identifying any priority, I think communication between SEDOL and the member districts is imperative, and the exchange of information drives both the shared cooperative answer as well as the supports that are tailored to each local district's needs," she wrote.

"As a co-op, we have a responsibility to provide guidance based on the ever-changing laws and regulations at both the federal and state levels. Within that guidance, each district may have unique needs that impacts how the guidance is implemented," she wrote. "Districts must have the autonomy to make the appropriate choices for their district as partners with SEDOL who provides guidance and support to the districts, in addition to specific services for students."

Rate and caseload rank the members differently

The percentage a district reports and the number of students behind it are two separate facts, and they order the membership almost in reverse. Rondout SD 72 has the highest IEP share of any member and the smallest count: 32 students. Round Lake CUSD 116^↗ has 1,151, more than any other member. Five members together account for 35.2% of the membership's 11,258 students with IEPs.

The distinction matters for anything a cooperative delivers per student rather than per district. SEDOL's itinerant programs include adapted physical education, hearing, vision, orientation and mobility, and services for students who are English learners. A specialist's schedule is built out of individual students, so a 23.2% share attached to 32 children and an 18.5% share attached to 1,151 are different assignments, whatever the percentages suggest.

Size does not settle the question either. Member enrollment runs from 138 students at Rondout SD 72 to 6,212 at Round Lake CUSD 116, a factor of 45. The five smallest members do not behave as a group: their IEP shares range from 12.6% to 23.2%, nearly the full width of the membership.

What the cooperative runs itself

The programs behind that figure are the part of the job the state file never sees. She wrote that SEDOL's specialized programs span ages 3 to 22 and serve students who are deaf and hard of hearing, students who are medically fragile, students who have autism and developmental disabilities, students who have social, emotional and behavioral needs, and students in post-high school transition programs. "We also partner with the Lake County Regional Office of Education for the Safe Schools program," she wrote.

A second line of work does not involve enrolling a student at SEDOL at all. Thomas wrote that the cooperative sends specialists into member districts on request, among them psychologists, social workers, speech pathologists, audiologists, hearing and vision itinerant teachers, and behavior specialists. That is the mechanism behind the itinerant catalog above, and it is why a member with 32 students who have IEPs and a member with 1,151 can both be SEDOL districts without either handing its program over.

Membership is not a transfer of responsibility. "The districts all also offer special education services within their districts, independent of SEDOL," Thomas wrote. "Programming through SEDOL adds additional options for the districts in the continuum of programming options for students." Read against the spread in the chart above, that is the cooperative's actual design: 31 districts each running their own special education program, buying the pieces they cannot run alone from a shared one.

Where families come in

Asked how she wants families and member districts to experience the change in leadership, Thomas put families first.

"I would like our families to feel seen and heard as they are the pivotal member of the Team that works to provide an excellent education for their students," she wrote. "Expanding opportunities for parent engagement regarding the ways that SEDOL can support families is a priority at SEDOL and part of our Continuous Improvement Plan."

She also named the partnership itself as the reason she took the job. "The incredible work supporting students through the partnership of the member districts, Lake County Regional Office of Education, the families and caregivers, and the community as a whole drew me to SEDOL," she wrote.

The state file cannot follow her much further than this. It records every student at the district that enrolls them and carries no field for cooperative placement, so it cannot say which of the 11,258 receive a service through SEDOL, or which members depend on the co-op most. Thomas answered the first half of that at the cooperative level, with her own count of the students enrolled in SEDOL programs; the member-by-member version is not a number anyone can look up. It cannot be read backward either: Illinois reported this figure as a rate without a published count through 2024-25 and as a headcount in 2025-26, so this year's numbers do not extend an earlier series and no trend is available. Membership is also not the same thing as geography. Lake County has 47 public school districts in the state file, 16 more than SEDOL's roster.

What the file does establish is the shape of the job. Thirty-one districts that do not resemble one another, a caseload that concentrates in five of them, and a superintendent whose first stated priority is the exchange of information among all of them. The Continuous Improvement Plan she cited is where that promise becomes a schedule, and the members will read it against numbers that are already public.

Enrollment and IEP counts come from the Illinois State Board of Education public enrollment record for the 2025-26 school year. SEDOL's member roster is published on the cooperative's own site. Thomas responded in writing on two occasions, and quotations are reproduced from her emails. Her count of students enrolled in SEDOL programs is her own figure, not a state record.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Rondout SD 72 - EdTribune IL - Illinois Education Data

Jennifer Thomas Brings a Career in Special Education to SEDOL and Its 31 Member Districts

The membership average hides the membership

Rate and caseload rank the members differently

What the cooperative runs itself

Where families come in