The Garden City Telegram
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Special education a concern of parents
Published 12/18/2008 in News : Education
By EMILY BEHLMANN
A nationwide shortage of special education teachers is leaving Garden City USD 457 with vacancies and some parents with concerns, and one community group is looking for solutions.
Roger Bradshaw, a local nurse and foster parent to two special-needs children, is working with his wife, Caroline, to organize a focus group aimed at improving what he said is "a special education department we feel like is broken."
The problem
For the Bradshaws, the No. 1 issue is what Roger Bradshaw said is a lack of trained and educated staff in the school district taking care of children with special needs.
According to Karen Johnson, director of USD 457's special education department, the district, like many others, has had vacant special education teaching positions for a long time. Currently, five spots are filled by long-term substitutes who don't have a teaching license, while several others are filled by certified teachers working on their special education licenses, she said.
That's a problem, because those filling the classrooms sometimes lack the training they need to educate special-needs children, the Bradshaws said at a meeting Tuesday night that they organized. About 15 people attended, including several representatives from USD 457's special education department.
"This causes detriment to our children, regression to our children, harm to our children," Roger Bradshaw said.
He said the group is willing to take action -- perhaps fundraising to bring up salaries or provide scholarships for training -- and if the school district is "unresponsive," his group is willing to go "outside the traditional channels" of school district personnel to improve the situation.
"I do not wish litigation to be the route that is first chosen, but we're not willing to take that off the table," he said.
Johnson said the school district does everything it can to maintain well-trained personnel through a variety of recruiting, retention and training techniques. She said she recruits at 36 job fairs across the country and is even looking to hire from foreign countries.
In the meantime, she and her two coordinators, along with school psychologists, consultants, other special education teachers and school administrators, provide training and oversee the work of long-term substitutes and are available whenever questions arise, she said. The certified teachers working on special education licenses receive the same sort of oversight and also have mentors for their first year in the district.
USD 457 also offers a reimbursement program for those working on master's degrees in areas including special education, and those who take advantage of the partial degree funding are obligated to work for USD 457 for five years or pay back the money.
Shortages
It's hard to find training programs nearby, Johnson said. And the truth is, very few people are trained to teach in functional programs, which are designed for children with more severe disabilities than adaptive programs, typically reserved for those with mild learning disabilities or mental retardation. That makes recruiting and retention tough, too.
USD 457 isn't the only one short on special education personnel, USD 457 Superintendent Rick Atha said. The issue is nationwide.
According to the Center on Personnel Studies in Special Education, a partnership between the University of Florida and Johns Hopkins University, more than 50,000 teachers are needed across the country to solve what it calls a "special education shortage," with 98 percent of the nation's largest school districts reporting they don't have enough educators to fill all their special education positions.
School districts like USD 457, however, are in a tougher spot than some, since the research group reports that attrition rates are highest in rural schools with high populations of low socio-economic students, along with urban schools. The annual attrition rate nationwide for special education teachers is estimated at 13.5 percent, resulting in an annual loss of about 22,000 teachers.
It's the same story in the region, according to Mike Lewis, director of the Ulysses-based High Plains Educational Cooperative. The cooperative provides special education personnel to 17 school districts in southwest Kansas, including most in The Telegram's coverage area except USD 457.
He said he always struggles to recruit enough personnel, and to fill his ranks, he relies on long-term substitutes and a state waiver program that allows regular certified teachers to work in special education classrooms as they're working on their special education license -- something USD 457 also takes advantage of.
Yet in a nation that lacks teachers in general and special education teachers in particular -- in part thanks to a generation of retiring Baby Boomers and insufficient graduates to replace them -- Johnson said she's also not looking to hire just anyone for her department. A good special education teacher is someone who "has the heart for it," she said.
"It's not for everybody," she said, mentioning the variety of needs children have and the high level of paperwork that tends to be involved. "You have to be comfortable with it and have a desire to do it."
Brainstorming solutions
The Bradshaws and Tami Schwindt, executive director of the Garden City center of Families Together, a support group for families of children with disabilities, said they were willing to work with the school district to support its effort in finding more trained personnel.
Roger Bradshaw mentioned fundraising for salaries, though Johnson said teacher pay has to be set through a negotiated agreement hashed out by the Board of Education and the Garden City Educators Association union.
The school board and administrators have brought up the possibility of differentiated pay for hard-to-fill positions, including special education, science and math, and Atha said Wednesday that the district is open to the idea. However, it so far hasn't gained much traction in negotiations.
For now, the focus group is exploring other possibilities, such as advocating for more support from the Legislature or assisting with scholarships for teacher training.
"I think they would like to be part of the solution, and I certainly would welcome that," Atha said of the group. "We want to put a licensed teacher before our kids 100 percent of the time, and I regret that we're not able to do that."
Found 2 comment(s)!
Teachers
If teachers were paid and respected for their duties, then the entire U.S. would benefit by being able to attract new candidates into Teacher Ed. programs. Teaching was once a prominent profession but society has decreased it to a second class job over the past two to three decades. I'm an administrator (not in Garden City) and know first hand the troubles teachers face with troubled youth, parents who don't care, or parents who condone misconduct of their children.
Posted by: Jayhawk on 12/19/2008
Help kids at home
Kids can't not learn at school then enough. They have to be thought at home too. So I believe if there a support group to help parents teach speacial kids at home would be great. Then we work at school with the same objectives as at home. The out comes would be more successful.
Posted by: anonymous on 12/18/2008
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