About
Written by a secondary special education teacher, for secondary special education teachers.
Not a curriculum company. Not a former teacher turned consultant. Every system on this site gets built and run in a real secondary classroom before it goes anywhere near this page.
Why this exists
Secondary SPED sits in an odd gap. Most classroom-resource sites are built for elementary — younger kids, brighter colors, worksheets with cartoon characters on them. Secondary students on a Certificate of Achievement pathway need something else entirely: tools that respect that they’re teenagers, resources that build toward actual independence and workplace readiness, and systems that hold up during a real class period with a real caseload, not a curated lesson-plan photo.
Every resource here starts as something built to solve an actual Monday-morning problem — a case management system that was falling apart, a classroom that needed a job-rotation structure, a transition program that needed a real production sequence instead of good intentions. If it doesn’t survive contact with a real classroom, it doesn’t make it onto this site.
Who this is for
- Secondary SPED teachers running life skills, transition, or Certificate of Achievement pathway programs.
- Case managers who need practical references, not another 40-page policy document.
- Anyone building a student-run vocational program from scratch and trying to avoid the mistakes that kill most of them in month one.
- General education teachers with IEP students mainstreamed into their classes who want to understand the systems, not just the paperwork.
The rules this site holds itself to
- Age-respectful, always. No childish clipart, no elementary-style worksheets stretched to fit a 16-year-old.
- Systems over inspiration. A routine you can run every week beats a one-time lesson that felt great and changed nothing.
- No fabricated results. No invented statistics, no manufactured testimonials, no promises that one resource fixes everything. If something’s a work in progress, it’s presented as one.
- Practical first. If a system can’t survive a Monday with two students absent and a fire drill, it gets rebuilt before it gets published.
Why “Bigfoot”
Secondary SPED is a niche most of the internet ignores — real, present, doing serious work, rarely seen. That felt like a fitting namesake. No mystery beyond that. Just practical systems, built by someone actually in the room.