I became the special-ed lead. Why don't I teach kids anymore?

You took this job to do more good, and now you spend your days in budget meetings and staff reviews instead of with students. That gap feels like proof you made a wrong turn. It is not proof of anything except that the job changed. You did not. Here is the honest accounting: you were promoted because you were good with students, and the promotion removed you from students. No one told you that trade plainly when you accepted it. But you did accept it, and the resources you fight for and the staff you manage now stand between you and every student in your building — for better or worse, depending on how you do the job. The question is not whether to go back to the old role. That role is gone. The question is whether the fights you pick and the people you manage are actually reaching students, or whether you have let the job become its own purpose — meetings for the sake of meetings, budgets defended out of habit rather than aimed at a child.