Special education plans released

Howard County school board Chair Jolene Mosley sat at the dais at a recent board meeting and fired a question at Superintendent Bill Barnes.

“Mr. Barnes, are you guys committed to changing special education so that it will be better for our students and staff, or is it just an activity, again repeating the same activity?” she said.

The room was filled with a sense of frustration as leaders debated short-term plans to address issues with special education that have been at the center of a fight led by families and educators for years. Advocates with the Special Education Citizens Advisory Committee waved away the heat hanging over the room and the discussion at hand with fans that read “HCPSS Special Ed: Stop being late, Start being great.”

Educators have been raising concerns about overwhelming workloads and a lack of support, while parents have shared stories of their children not receiving the services they need.

Barnes said Mosley’s question was “the exact right question.” He wants to “put some stakes in the ground” and build the school system’s values, he said, starting with ensuring all students receive the high-quality education and support they deserve, preferably at their home school.

Some of the school system’s initial actions must focus on alleviating a “workload crisis” and making the district a desirable place to work while working toward reducing the reliance on nonpublic placements, Barnes said. Resources will need to be redirected and vacancies repurposed during a tight budget season as school system leaders work to implement short-term plans to address immediate concerns ahead of a special education program review and strategic plan that will be finalized in the coming months.

“I will say that I’m impatient because we’ve, for a year, been working with our staff, our bargaining units, our community members, and we’ve listened to concerns, and so I have been impatient to begin the problem solving, in earnest,” Barnes said in an interview.

For years, community members have testified about problems with special education in the county. In recent months, individuals and groups have been pleading for urgent action during school board meetings. During the April 9 board meeting, the discontent reached a boiling point.

“Central office operates with the urgency of a snail and the transparency of a cataract when it comes to special education, and I say that with tears in my eyes,” said Dianne Henry, secretary of SECAC, while choking up. “I say that as a parent out here who has been listening to parents for the last 10 years come here to talk about their … children being harmed in our schools.”

She’s left wondering what to say to parents anymore.

“We’re out here advocating, and it’s not working,” Henry said.

Community members have continuously come before the board with their stories of students who’ve been without a special education teacher, children who haven’t had consistent speech services because of frequent turnover of speech pathologists, long commutes to non-public placements and other issues.

There are systemic problems with a lack of training, resources being directed away from special education, communication failures and families continuously having to fight for services, Darria Wise, co-chair of SECAC, said during the board meeting.

It’s a fight all too familiar for Erica Gordon, who described the process of trying to get the right services and placement for her son as stressful and hard, leaving her feeling helpless.

“Just to get him an IEP for the school district, it’s a fight because it’s not that easy to get an IEP,” Gordon said. “It is not easy at all.”

Gordon said her son wasn’t receiving the services outlined in his Individualized Education Plan, which is a legal document, at his middle school. Her son was kicked out of his school and sent to different nonpublic placements where he was bullied, attacked and still wasn’t receiving the proper services, Gordon said. She even enlisted the help of Kennedy Krieger Institute to help advocate for her son to receive the right services and placement. However, many families don’t know how to advocate for their children with disabilities, Gordon said, leading them to end up in the wrong placements.

Several factors have combined over decades, leading to the current state of special education in the county, Barnes said. Over the years, the school system would identify the need for more staff but would have to pull back on some of its requests due to the amount of funding received from the county, creating a personnel shortage.

At the same time, Barnes said, the district also began feeling the impacts of the national shortage of special education teachers and related service providers, such as speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and reading specialists.

The school system is experiencing an increase in student needs as well, with a “sharp increase” in students requiring special education services after the COVID-19 pandemic, Barnes said. The district went from serving just over 5,000 students with disabilities to more than 6,500 in the last seven to eight years, he said.

“So, we have low supply and high demand,” Barnes said.

There are about 100 vacancies for special education teachers, support staff or related service providers, and about an additional 100 positions that are still needed, Barnes said. School administrators, special educators, related service providers, and others have called for more staff to be hired to alleviate the burden of overwhelming caseloads, prompting the Board of Education to add more positions to its budget request.

As times have changed, the district’s staffing model hasn’t, said Benjamin Schmitt, president of the Howard County Education Association, the union representing the county’s educators. Special educators and paraeducators working with students with special needs are “wearing three, four or five hats a day,” and “burnout is beyond high,” Schmitt said.

Investing in bringing down staff caseloads could help attract more students to the field of special education after college and help motivate them to stay, Schmitt said. He would also like anyone working with students with special needs to receive differentiated pay. And as special educators continue their advocacy, they want leaders to listen, take them seriously and act quickly, Schmitt said.

Rather than looking at special education programming with a wide lens, the school system has “continued to fly the plane as we build it,” Schmitt said. That plane is held together “with duct tape and bandages, and it’s not helping students,” he said.

In November, the Board of Education voted to hire Research Triangle Institute to conduct a special education program review, which will look at current services and supports, comparing programming to other counties and offering recommendations for improvements.

The review is expected to be complete in June. With the review at about its midpoint, Terri Savage, HCPSS chief academic officer, and Richard Jeffries, executive director of special education, presented short-term plans for changes that can start to be implemented for the upcoming school year.

“We know that resources will continue to be a challenge on the county level, on the state level and on the federal level, and we know that that will continue to be the case, so that’s why we need to use this opportunity to reimagine and to provide the best services as possible for special ed students and general ed students,” Jeffries said in an interview.

One of the first actions needed is tackling the “workflow crisis,” Barnes said. The short-term plans include establishing a pool of individuals interested in becoming non-teaching instructional team leaders to help ease workloads; substitute days for special educators to complete caseload management; and more program assistants for elementary and regional programs.

Other actions include office hour check-ins for first and second-year teachers, a partnership with Towson University for targeted recruitment, and additional efforts to help retain staff. The Superintendent’s Special Education Advisory Group and an Autism Workgroup will be relaunched as well.

However, the plans were met with frustration by some. Antonia Watts, District 2 board member, said that the ideas were nothing the school system hadn’t heard before, explaining that there is distrust from the community that change will occur.

“I’m just frustrated. I’m not sure what we’re going to see different that’s going to be impactful, or that’s going to be helpful, or that’s actually going to take us in a different direction and change what we’ve been experiencing, seeing over, even before me,” Watts said.

Barnes said he understood the loss of trust, but that means “it’s either you get up off the ground and start walking forward, delivering, or this isn’t going to work out.” Now in the fourth 90 days of his term, Barnes said he is anxious because he spoke about reimagining and rebuilding special education in his first 90 days. It is “go time,” he said.

With the full review expected to be complete in June, a special education strategic plan will be developed and put in place by Aug. 1, Barnes said. Jeffries also presented a timeline outlining different steps from April to July, with the Superintendent’s Special Education Advisory Group to be established in May and the Autism Workgroup in June.

Barnes, in an interview, said he remains committed to working collaboratively with stakeholders through the rest of the school year and the summer to ease workloads, create a better program for students with disabilities, and foster better working conditions for staff.

“Our students deserve better. Our staff deserve better,” Barnes said. “And as I tell them all the time, there is no one simple solution.”

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