Grant Wood AEA chief poised to temporarily take on neighboring agency, too

CEDAR RAPIDS — John Speer, chief administrator of Grant Wood Area Education Agency — which has offices in Cedar Rapids — might also become interim chief of a neighboring agency, pending board approval.

Wednesday, the Grant Wood AEA board of directors agreed to pursue an agreement to share a chief administrator with Mississippi Bend AEA for the remainder of the fiscal year — or until June 30 — in an interim capacity. Mississippi Bend AEA chief administrator Bill Decker is retiring effective Wednesday.

“Our board not only weighed my personal capacity to share these duties but also the current political context in which we’re operating,” Speer said in an email to Grant Wood AEA staff this week. “I appreciate their support and anticipate the same” from the Mississippi Bend AEA board.

As chief administrator of Grant Wood AEA, Speer oversees the delivery of services to thousands of students and hundreds of educators in a seven county region. Grant Wood AEA is one of nine agencies across the state that assist students with disabilities and delivers general education and media services to educators. There are 74,000 students in the Grant Wood AEA region, which includes Benton, Cedar, Iowa, Johnson, Jones, Linn and Washington counties.

Speer’s salary is $227,041 annually. It is not the intention of either organization to propose a salary increase for the shared interim role, said Renee Nelson, Grant Wood AEA director of communications.

Mississippi Bend AEA serves 49,500 students in public and accredited non-public schools in five counties in Eastern Iowa, including Clinton, Scott and Muscatine, and employs about 300 staff.

“My attention will be focused on supporting both organizations during this time of change, and ensuring our AEA services remain responsive to the needs of our district and family partners,” Speer said. “We continue to support staff as they navigate these unprecedented times of unpredictability, and will do our best to provide assurances when we can.”

Iowa’s area education agencies are under heightened scrutiny since Gov. Kim Reynolds this month proposed changes that would upend the way the area education agencies function and what services they are allowed to provide. Reynolds said the agencies have become too top-heavy and strayed from their mission of serving students with disabilities — while Iowa’s special education students perform below national averages.

The governor’s bill, filed Jan. 10 as House Study Bill 542 and Senate Study Bill 3073, would prohibit Iowa’s area education agencies that provide expertise to educators and families from offering services beyond special education for students. School districts also could drop their current agency and look elsewhere for services.

Reynolds later proposed loosening a restriction in her bill, allowing agencies to continue providing general education and media services, if requested by school districts and approved by the Iowa Department of Education. The agencies also would continue to provide all special education services they do now, including Child Find and Early ACCESS for children from birth to 3 years of age, Reynolds said.

An amendment to the bill outlining those changes hadn’t been filed as of Thursday.

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