New school year — but same old troubles await special education students
New school years feel like a promise of opportunity for most teachers and parents. For teachers, it’s a chance to create an even more amazing classroom environment to meet the needs of all their learners. For parents, it’s a chance to watch their child grow by overcoming challenges and milestones with a positive mindset about their future and abilities.
That’s what the new school year used to resemble. Instead, for both parents and teachers of students with disabilities, the public school system has become a sinking ship where we have begun asking ourselves, “Can I jump off yet?”
A special education classroom is for learning, not babysitting. There are many tools, resources, and people needed to ensure that the classroom flows smoothly and allows for learning to occur. However, parents and teachers of students with disabilities are being given empty promises from their administrators and finding out that reality is vastly different.
The California Teachers Association recommends that students in Individual Educational Programs (IEP), otherwise known as special education programs, have one teacher for every eight mild-moderate students and one teacher for every six moderate-severe students. However, Turlock Unified School District’s website, for example, reveals they serve 1,400 special education students with 90 special education teachers, a student-teacher ratio of nearly 16 to 1.
An inadequate ratio of teachers to special education students creates parental fear for student safety, educational growth, and overall social emotional well-being.
With a nationwide teacher shortage, proper staffing in special education classrooms is even more difficult, leaving rooms with no substitutes if a teacher or paraprofessional gets sick or needs time off. Working myself as a teacher in special education classrooms in the Atwater Elementary, Chatom Union and Empire Union districts, it is a very real and scary situation when there are multiple students with safety needs and one teacher to see to their needs.
Parents of students with disabilities are hyper-aware of what is and isn’t a safe environment. They live with their child and know the realities of what it would take to have a classroom full of students who have similar needs. These students deserve a safe and healthy environment to learn. Without safety, learning cannot take place, further pushing them back.
Yet, districts are turning a blind eye to the chaos, crippling stress, and needs that their teachers and parents of students with disabilities have. Administrators tend to ignore emails requesting help from teachers and manipulate the truth for parents to cause them to believe the situation and classrooms are receiving more help.
Unfortunately, we are starting to see the effects of these inadequately run programs in testing scores and student proficiency in subjects such as math and language arts. According to Public School Review, Stanislaus County Special Education, for example, was ranked within the bottom 50% of all 9,659 schools in California for the 2018-19 school year. Less than 5% of Stanislaus County Special Education students are proficient in math compared to California’s average of 40%.
The solution for all educators and parents of students with disabilities is a setting that fits student needs — not standardized schooling and an outdated system.
Many parents and teachers of students with disabilities are taking matters into their own hands and deciding that the mainstream public school system isn’t cutting it. Homeschool applications for California have more than doubled since the 2018-19 school year. According to the California Department of Education, private school affidavits submitted for five children or fewer increased from 14,548 in 2018-19 to 30,280 in 2021-22.
At this point, homeschooling and public virtual charters are becoming an attractive solution for treating students with disabilities with dignity and providing high quality education.
Caity Carter has taught special education in the Atwater Elementary School District, the Chatom Union Elementary School District, and the Empire Union School District. See her blog: theschoolhive.com .
