More than two months into the school year, San Diego Unified still doesn’t have enough special education teachers and aides to serve its students with disabilities, leading some teachers to worry that some students’ safety and learning may be at risk.
Labor representatives said recently that the district has about 100 vacancies for aides, whose job is to accompany students with disabilities on campus and provide instructional and physical support, which can include everything from feeding to help with the bathroom.
There also are about half a dozen vacancies for teachers who educate students with moderate or severe disabilities, labor reps said.
“A lot of teachers feel like we don’t have enough bodies in the classroom to support our kids,” said Kisha Borden, president of the San Diego teachers union.
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About 160 current aides were also given new assignments last month, said Michael Breyette, senior labor relations representative for the San Diego classified union that represents aides. The district re-assigns staff every fall to adjust for actual student enrollment.
Breyette said he thinks the large number of re-assignments have caused disruption to classrooms and weren’t made with enough union input.
“This was very much a top-down decision,” he said.
The staffing shortage isn’t unique to any one district. Poway Unified, which enrolls about 36,500 students, says it has roughly 100 vacant aide positions.
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San Diego district officials say the vacancies represent small percentages of their staff. San Diego Unified employs the equivalent of roughly 10,400 full-time staff and enrolls about 103,000 students.
But the vacancies are acutely felt at the schools that lack sufficient staffing for students with disabilities, some of the district’s highest-need students.
One of those schools is Zamorano Elementary in the Bay Terraces neighborhood, which needs at least one more teacher who can teach students with moderate and severe disabilities.
Tessa Proctor, the school’s only certified teacher for moderate-to-severe students in lower grades, said she began the school year with 18 students on her caseload. Now she has 20.
The maximum caseload for teachers like Proctor is supposed to be 12 students, according to San Diego Unified’s labor agreement.
Early in the school year, the district approved Zamorano for a moderate-severe substitute teacher, Proctor said. But out of the list of subs that the district offered Zamorano, nobody with a teaching credential would take the job.
The only substitute Zamorano could get was a non-credentialed person, Proctor said, which means she still has to handle all 20 of her students’ paperwork and oversee their individual education plans.
A non-credentialed substitute can’t supervise students in a classroom alone.
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The district recently approved Zamorano to hire an additional full-time, credentialed moderate-severe teacher, Proctor said. But a few days before the school was expecting a new person, Proctor was told the district had run out of new teachers.
Almost a month later, nobody has told Proctor when she can expect a new teacher to come.
‘Putting out fires’
Having 20 kids with moderate to severe disabilities has become a safety risk, Proctor said. She said it’s hard to take care of so many students in one room who have many specific needs.
Many of her students are vulnerable to sensory overload, so the loud volume of 20 kids in a classroom sets some students off, she said.
“I feel like the kids almost missed out on almost a month and a half of good learning and good services and good instruction,” Proctor said. “There was so much going on, you’re basically putting out the fires as they start each day, and you couldn’t really get ahead of everything that you needed to do.”
The workload has taken a physical toll on the school’s staff too, Proctor said. Proctor, who is seven months pregnant, comes to school half an hour early and leaves at least half an hour late every day.
She said she forces herself to work just one day on the weekends and to take the other day off.
“I know there is a problem in our district,” she said. “I know it’s not just our school. I feel like we are doing our jobs and we’re doing everything they ask of us and we still don’t get answers; we still don’t get the support.”
Special education is one of the hardest areas to staff in schools.
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Every year, thousands of people who lack proper certification end up filling in for special education teaching jobs in California public schools. They hold intern or emergency credentials.
In the 2017-2018 school year, there were more intern and emergency credentials issued than actual teaching credentials for special education, according to the California Teaching Commission.
Statewide there were 1,557 intern and emergency credentials issued for moderate-severe teachers compared to 741 actual teaching credentials, while there were 3,093 intern and emergency credentials issued for teachers of students with less severe disabilities, compared to 2,329 actual teaching credentials.
San Diego Unified has several vacancies partly because its special education population has been growing, said Sarah Ott, the district’s special education director. That’s on trend with California as a whole.
Last school year San Diego Unified had more than 14,000 K-12 students with disabilities, up from 12,247 students four years prior.
The district added 10 more special education teacher positions and 30 aide positions to accommodate growing student needs, said Acacia Thede, San Diego Unified’s chief human resources officer.
Last school year the district agreed to lower the maximum caseload for teachers of students with mild-to-moderate disabilities to 20 students, which is lower than the state maximum of 28.
But that decision did not benefit aides or teachers of students with moderate-to-severe disabilities. There were no changes to their work loads.
Adding more positions means the district has to find more people in an area where it’s already hard to find qualified people.
To fill in vacancies, Thede said, the district is asking teachers in other positions who have the right credentials to switch to teaching students with disabilities.
It also is encouraging aides to get additional training to become teachers, and it’s trying to increase the number of interns working in schools.
“We’re not understaffing,” Thede said. “We’re actually hiring, and we staff our schools based on the need of the students. That’s our ultimate responsibility.”
Borden believes other factors help cause the vacancies.
She said she thinks the district has been slow to hire staff for new school years and so loses candidates. She said some teachers have been told by the district that they have a job for the new school year as late as August, but other districts may notify teacher candidates in May or June.
“That’s something we’ve heard for teachers and for paraeducators, just the hiring process takes so long that people kind of give up and go to other places,” Borden said.
She also said that when staff feel like they’re not being supported enough by the district, such as when the district doesn’t give their school enough staff, it can deter teachers from wanting to fill certain positions.
The district has said it has a committee that looks at school staffing needs every week and addresses complaints of under-staffing.
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Dozens of special education jobs need to be filled in San Diego Unified - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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