Elena Rettiger-Lincoln

Elena Rettiger-Lincoln is an advisor and technical assistance provider for multiple state agencies on IDEA general supervision systems, legal compliance, and educational benefit processes and serves as a project director or senior consultant for a number of national centers. As a technical assistance liaison for the Center for IDEA Fiscal Reporting (CIFR), she serves as a content expert, communities of practice facilitator, national presenter, and develops tools, resources, technical assistance, and professional presentations on federal fiscal requirements for state special education and school finance leaders. 

Lincoln also serves as a task lead for the Strategic Funding and Finance Center (SFF), a national content center leading partnerships with state education agencies, school districts, and local leaders across the country to help them understand, coordinate, and optimize federal, state, and local funding streams to support student success. She has supported multiple special education cost studies as well as served as project director for a state landscape analysis on subrecipient monitoring and differentiated monitoring systems.

Lincoln’s primary areas of expertise include IDEA general supervision, dispute resolution, and special education law. She has over three decades of experience in K-12 education and has decades of experience analyzing, applying and presenting on special education law, administration, and policy. She is a former executive director of special services for a local educational cooperative, state assistant director of special education, state department of education dispute resolution attorney, education lobbyist for a state professional education association, private education consultant, and secondary English teacher.