HUMBOLDT — Formed in 1971, the Humboldt-based ANW Cooperative was designed with the goal of providing a full range of services to students with special education needs across southeast Kansas. The timing was propitious. The early 1970s inaugurated a cascade of landmark legal precedent, and eventual legislation, guaranteeing students with disabilities the same rights and opportunities as their “non-impaired” cohorts. It’s the basic standard emphasized in ANW’s mission statement today: “Special education cannot and should not be developed separate and apart from regular education.”
Because, as with any civil right, majority sentiment lags well behind point of law, special education groups across the country realized the importance of selecting as their representatives good, strong advocates.
ANW Co-op believes it has found in its newly named director, Doug Tressler, just that. Tressler, who will take over the role from Bob Coleman in August, arrives to the directorship not from a lifetime of administration but from the ranks.
“I certainly climbed the ladder,” explains Tressler, who has taught special education in Humboldt, Iola, Yates Center and Burlington, and was, for the last four years, one of the co-op’s regional coordinators.
Even then, it was never a straight line with Tressler. The Colony native — who, at 50, has accumulated too many degrees, certificates and qualifications to count — started his work-life fixing front ends on the floor of Iola Auto Body.
“I always wanted to be a teacher,” remembers Tressler. “But, then, I never really had the money to do it. So I figured I’d go and get my mechanic degree” — which he did, after high school, from Coffeyville Junior College — “and I planned to work my way through college. But, you know — life happens.”
Ten years passed, Tressler’s twenties came and went; he’d reached the urgent age of 30. “One day it was just really hot in the shop, about 108 degrees, I was sweating and I thought ‘I can’t do this my whole life.’ So that day I went and enrolled at Allen County [Community College].”
From there, he went on to earn his bachelor’s degree from Newman University, in Wichita, and set the gears in motion on a career that would define the majority of his professional life.
“You have a choice if you’re an intelligent person,” said Tressler, “you can serve yourself or you can serve others. I always wanted to use my abilities to help other people. I think that’s a teacher’s nature.”
And yet Tressler has been around long enough to know that there are some problems for which temperament alone is no match.
REFLECTING on the progress achieved in special education across ANW’s nearly 50 years, it’s with apparent disappointment that Tressler describes the lineaments of the current situation: “I think budgets have pushed us backwards, unfortunately. Nationally, we’re seeing fewer services for people with disabilities.”
That’s at the federal level. But of course fans of regression have a huge ally in the Kansas Statehouse, too. “What’s happening in Kansas is compounding our problems. Here, you’re seeing services reduced for the disabled, the elderly, for children, for people with the least amount of voice.”
One potential casualty of the lapse in school funding, explains Tressler, is the relationship a special education cooperative like ANW enjoys with the greater general ed population — primarily because it appears to place the two sides, whether accurately or not, in competition for the same shrinking pool of finite resources.
Tressler has a talent for explanation, and so it’s worth quoting him at length on a subject that will likely occupy much of his time as director:
“The funding situation is a little different for special education. See, it’s not like we can cut a program. We have to have these programs. And so the problem is, when the cuts hit, when we lose money, the districts have to make it up. That’s hard on the district and that’s hard on us. As costs go up, contributions from our districts have to go up.
