The Kentucky Grissom Award for Innovation in Special Education Is Accepting Nominations. The Stories of Past Winners Will Inspire You.

The Grissom Award has a subtle stubbornness to it. It doesn’t come with the grandeur of a corporate ceremony or the cacophony of a national award. Every spring, it appears in Frankfort, is given to individuals who appear uncomfortable being identified, and then vanishes back into the routine tasks of Kentucky classrooms. Nevertheless, it consistently identifies the individuals who go on to make a significant impact.

The deadline for nominations for the 2026 cycle is May 15 at 3 p.m. Eastern time, according to the Kentucky Board of Education. The mechanics are fairly straightforward. A name can be submitted online by anyone, anywhere in the state. The winner or winners will be recognized at the August meeting after the board has reviewed the results. It is more difficult to explain in a press release why this specific award seems to draw the people it does.

The award is named for Johnnie Grissom, who worked for the Kentucky Department of Education for the majority of her career before becoming associate commissioner for the Office of Special Instructional Services. The words “reliable,” “exact,” and “generous with her time” are frequently used by those who have worked with her. Her belief that no student is unreachable—only underserved—seems to be partially reflected in the award.

Those who have won in the past don’t pursue fame. One of the two honorees from the previous year had accomplished something truly challenging: rebuilding a district’s special education services from the ground up in order to remove it from corrective status. A glossy brochure would not use such language. That entails years of meetings, parent calls, IEP revisions, and the gradual, frequently undetectable process of altering adult perceptions of children with disabilities.

It’s difficult to ignore how frequently the winners refer to the award as belonging to their families, teachers, and assistants. In contrast to other areas of the field, Kentucky special education has a culture that is deeply rooted in humility. If you walk into any of these districts, you’ll see classroom doors decorated with names spelled in glitter, bulletin boards still adorned with student artwork from the previous semester, and other small signs that the teachers genuinely care about the kids they teach.

The criteria themselves are simple. For students with learning or behavioral differences, the award is given to those who lead or implement innovative practices that improve learning, postsecondary, or workforce outcomes. Schools or districts that consistently demonstrate excellence are also qualified. In practice, that can take many different forms, such as a behavior framework that ultimately ended the suspension cycle for one persistently underprivileged group, a reading intervention model in a rural elementary school, or a transition program for high school students heading toward careers.

Here, there’s something worth stopping for. The state of special education in America is peculiar. Uncertainty surrounds federal funding. The teacher shortage continues to grow. After years of fighting for services that shouldn’t require fighting, parents are worn out. In light of this, an award from a single state that honors the workers in any case feels, to be honest, more significant than it might have ten years ago.

The pattern is likely to continue whether the 2026 honoree is a young teacher or an experienced administrator in a county that most Kentuckians could not locate on a map. Someone will be taken aback. Someone will shed a few tears. Someone will say that a colleague should have received it. And Monday morning will see the continuation of the actual work, just as it always has.