Tag: special-education

Special Education Staffing Shortage Featured on Morning Edition Today

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A first step to increasing staff retention is simply keeping data regarding injuries and dangerous and destructive episodes.

Here’s the special education hiring pitch: The job pays poorly, is dangerous in many cases, you will be under intense scrutiny, with the specter of legal complications always hovering.

Especially given that unemployment levels are generally low, you can see why it is nearly impossible to staff a school appropriately. In the big picture, this all reflects badly on our values as a society

This report out of Texas on Morning Edition today is about staff injuries in special education. The consequences of the report’s central story are extreme, but the circumstances and the state of special education programming described are very familiar here in Massachusetts and across the country.

What I usually find in special education programs serving students with significant social, emotional, and behavioral challenges is that the school does not keep information on staff injuries.

There are several disincentives for keeping information about staff injuries. Administration is not well-motivated because any record of injuries doesn’t look good for them. -Similar for special education teachers in leadership positions. At the bottom of the staff power structure, the teaching assistants most frequently getting injured are often in a situation where it feels as if getting injured is their own fault, and/or their job.

It takes leadership willing to forcefully buck these trends and disincentives, and establish data tracking for staff injuries as well as dangerous and destructive episodes. It’s so important to keep this data, for reasons beyond the obvious benefits of having the information. What is even more directly helpful about tracking staff injuries and dangerous and destructive episodes is it goes a long way toward preventing a program culture where injuries and dangerous and destructive episodes become normalized. This normalization should never occur but often does, and it is very harmful to the education and development of the students being served, as well as everyone in the program community.

Also complicating matters are the poorly understood and sometimes incoherent laws and regulations regarding how to respond to students posing a safety threat to themselves or others. I have tried and failed to engage the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to understand their process for updating the laws and regulations.

I have written about safety concerns quite a bit in my blog, and in my book with Laura Balogh, The Therapeutic Inclusion Program.

The Importance of “We’re All In This Together”

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When you hear “that’s not in my job description” it’s a discouraging indication regarding staff morale and staff’s ability to work as a team.

I’m writing from a place centered on inclusive school programming for students with significant social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties. These programs are sometimes called “therapeutic programs.”

What our students need most from staff is reliability and adults who work together. The best way to provide this dependably is through the overlap of staff functions. When the abilities of staff members largely overlap, a resilient and flexible net is created, with the security provided by redundancy. By “redundancy” I mean that if one staff member is out sick or otherwise unavailable, other staff members are capable of doing the same work.

I visualize this as overlapping circles of ability and responsibility. This is what we want, as opposed to unique staff abilities and responsibility gaps that make a program rigid and unreliable.

So, what does healthy staff overlap look like in more specific school situations? Here’s a concrete example of what I mean: If a therapeutic program has a counselor and a special education teacher, the special education teacher will be doing plenty of counseling, and the counselor will be educating. They will often work side by side. I advocate for referring to them both as “therapeutic educators.” 

Naturally, over the course of their time and experience, they will both become better teachers and counselors. We should continue to respect their individual expertise and leadership within their unique roles, while adopting a flexible approach toward responding to the needs presented by the students.

Supervision is an important part of the program model I advocate for, which is an essential support to anyone doing therapeutic work – counselor, teacher, and paraprofessional included.

Similarly, when therapeutic program staff supports inclusion in a general education classroom, the ‘all in this together’ mentality makes all the difference. The general education teacher is responsible for educating all the students in the room. The therapeutic program staff member is responsible for providing needed support and accommodations to program students so that the general education teacher can deliver instruction.

Without losing sight of these clear priorities, there is room for overlap and flexibility, making for a much richer and more collaborative experience. The therapeutic program staff member can be supportive of the entire classroom. If the general education teacher and therapeutic program staff member are both sufficiently skilled they may trade roles at times, with the general education teacher providing specialized support while the program staff member holds and teaches the classroom group. In practice, this can be quite fluid. (If you’ve ever played basketball, it’s a lot like switching your defense assignment on the fly in person-to-person defense.)

Every staff member in the school is ultimately responsible for doing what they can to make the whole school function the best that it can. This mindset mutually supports the inclusive mindset we must have with the students. Alternately, when program staff has a siloed mindset, the program students experience siloing as well.

As a staff member of a therapeutic program, helping students and staff during the random opportunities that come up in a school day supports your prime responsibility of helping your program students receive non-stigmatizing, appropriate, inclusive education. I suggest seizing any opportunity that doesn’t actively interfere with your ability to attend to your primary responsibilities. 

As far as your job description/contract goes – I do think it’s important to maintain your lunches and preps, and to keep your work within your paid hours. That is part of avoiding burnout, staying with the work long-term, and building program stability.

When you’re ‘on the clock’, and not in your prep or lunch times, just do whatever you can to help the school. It will pay off in a better experience for your students and your school community.

References
Murray, M.A. & Balogh, L. (2023) The therapeutic inclusion program: Establishment and maintenance in public schools. Routledge.

Where Special Education Law Meets Imposter Phenomenon

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Constrained Psychology of Educators (and Administrators) Pt 2

In part one I explained how a fundamental idea in school culture – the idea that teachers have the answers – constrains the creativity and effectiveness of educators and counselors. 

This cultural belief pressures teachers and counselors into thinking they should be able to provide easy and effective responses to complex and challenging social, emotional, and behavioral presentations of students. And if they don’t have easy-to-understand solutions ready to implement, they better find them soon! 

You would be hard-pressed to design better conditions for developing imposter phenomenon in school staff. The staff role at this point can become less about improving access to education for students, and more about maintaining an image of knowledgeability and competence to administrators and colleagues.

This constrained thinking runs in opposition to the kind of curiosity, wonder, and patience required to form real relationships and real understanding. I find it fascinating that relationship is a buzzword in educator professional development, but somehow does not have the same cache in the school counseling community.

This school culture problem of feeling pressured to behave as if easy answers are available extends into the individual education program (IEP) process as well. People find reassurance in the idea that special education law is clear and easy to understand, but this is not the case. Important parts of special education law are squishy, unclear, and sometimes not particularly coherent. Unfortunately, you won’t hear very many people acknowledge this truth.

This set of circumstances leaves parents at a disadvantage. They are generally counting on the school’s educators and especially administrators to be expert on the implementation of the law. Educators and administrators often claim, or have come to believe (with the help of a big dose of imposter phenomenon), that the laws are straightforward. 

Many school administrators and staff do not make distinctions between their district policies and practices, and what the law dictates. This all makes for a very confusing and disempowering experience for parents.

Here’s a demonstration of this phenomenon from a conversation in a teacher Facebook community. Someone asked: “How shortly after the IEP meeting should parents receive a copy of the written IEP?” 

A Facebook user responded “All this information is readily available on Google and standardized on the federal level.” receiving a shower of likes and loves for this comforting but incorrect idea.

Here is the actual law, which is not easy to find nor clear to interpret. 

Beyond that, there are separate memorandums from the state regarding the interpretation of the law.

As educators, school counselors, and administrators, we would all be better off to be patient with ourselves, acknowledge complexity and ambiguity – especially when working with parents – and support each other through a complex process.

What Kind of Teacher Doesn’t Know the Answers?

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spoiler: sometimes not knowing the answers is what makes an educator great

The Constrained Psychology of Educators Part I

I’ve had time to observe many of the psychological pitfalls of being an educator in K-12 schools. The effect is one of constraint, where educators experience a limited scope of what is possible in the classroom. 

My work has been primarily with students in special education programs due to significant social, emotional, and behavioral challenges, and their educators. The intensity of the issues presented by these students bring school culture concerns into clearer focus, but many of these issues are pervasive throughout schools.

The layers of these constraining problems are built on a foundational idea about school: teachers have all the answers. What a reassuring idea! In some parts of school life, it’s true. Your second-grade math teacher has in fact memorized the multiplication tables, and more. 

It can be largely true in more complicated situations as well. Your special education teacher may be able to administer assessments and know quite confidently what reading intervention is likely to be effective. Special education teachers are often amazing.

And then we encounter a student who is really struggling emotionally. This emotional distress is showing up in their behavior and interfering with their access to education, and to some degree even interfering with other students’ access to education. The usual incentives and disincentives for “good student behavior” are ineffective. We have reached a point where we educators no longer know the answers. 

This is a frightening crossroads for many, cutting to the heart of the teacher identity. What kind of teacher doesn’t know the answers?

Blocking out this troubling question, educators seek quick answers, hoping to return to their regular knowledgeable position as quickly as possible. Someone administer an FBA! (Functional Behavioral Assessment) 

Educators are increasingly taught that the answers lie in data. Let me be clear, data is a fundamentally good thing – more information is better than less. But, educators fall prey to the comforting illusion of easy and understandable answers. They feel the pressure of the expectation to be an expert, and an expert teacher (or school counselor) must know the answers. Welcome to perfect storm conditions for imposter phenomenon. 

Children, their families, and classroom groups are complicated. An individual child can’t entirely account for their behavior, thoughts, and feelings. -Nor can we do it on their behalf. We can’t even entirely account for our own behavior! Have you ever done something you intended not to do, or not done something you intended to? Why do you keep doing that?

However, we can move toward deeper understanding together. Part of what Laura Balogh and I advocate for in our book The Therapeutic Inclusion Program is shifting the classroom culture toward curiosity, wonder, and collaboration. We can think about it together. The more we do that, the more we will understand, but we still won’t know all the answers.