Despite the importance of special educators in the current era of educational reform, there is no overarching portrait of special educators' roles, especially in rural schools where the provision of services is especially challenging. Using latent class analysis and data from a national sample of rural school districts, we identified four distinct types of special educators and related their prevalence to key policy variables. Our findings provide a way of understanding the use of special educators in rural schools and current needs in special educator training. They also suggest means of studying special educators' roles more generally.