Teaching diabetes self-management effectively requires addressing complex patient needs over a lifetime. Public schools face challenges in providing diabetes education due to limited resources, competing priorities, and lack of specialized training for teachers. Diabetes self-management education (DSME) programs have more flexibility but struggle with variable funding, voluntary attendance, and lack of age-appropriate curricula and differentiated instruction. Both systems would benefit from identifying best practices for efficiently educating the growing number of students and patients needing diabetes self-management skills.