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FRIENDLY FACES, SUPPORT WOULD MAKE SPECIAL ED TEACHERS STICK AROUND
By Mary Hillebrand
August 20, 1999
A friendly face and encouraging, supportive feedback could go a long way toward keeping special education teachers on the job, teachers and administrators say. The nation's school systems are wringing their hands over the lack of well trained special ed. teachers and paraeducators to serve their students, with Chicago, Fairfax County, Va., and Rapid City, S.D., among those reporting the shortage predicted over the next several years has already arrived.
As Congress grapples with the issue of qualified teachers and state and local governments search for answers, one fact is becoming clear: Opening checkbooks will not solve the problem. "I don't think it's a money issue at all," says Beverly McCoun, student services director for the Mt.Horeb, Wis., school district. With other means of special ed. teacher and paraeducator support, McCoun said, Mt. Horeb competes successfully with nearby Madison, where teacher salaries are higher. "We have to do something that is not salary and it's not benefits. It has to be self-worth," she said.
If Not Money…
Intangibles such as a feeling of self-esteem and belonging can be powerful motivators, McCoun and others said. Special educators want to know they are a valuable part of a school's team, they said. "The biggest key is having special ed. teachers treated and respected by building administrators as equal to everyone else," says Jonathan McIntire, a special ed. administrator in Vermont. The same goes for paraeducators, he added. "You have to treat them like a respected professional on the team. Their value is tremendously important."
In Mt. Horeb, special ed. and general ed. teachers and paraeducators have opportunities to talk face-to-face in summer meetings McCoun arranges. In addition, she said she tries to recognize special ed. staff through weekly notes expressing thanks for their hard work and in monthly teacher staff meetings. Some are also sent to training workshops away from the school district and asked to come back and use their newly acquired knowledge to train their peers. While costly, such programs boost the special ed. teacher's or paraeducator's pride and sense of value to the school, she said.
McIntire and McCoun also serve on the Council of Administrators of Special Education, a division of the Council for Exceptional Children.
Top-down Support
Many special ed. teachers feel they are treated like "a bastard, female step-child in China," special ed. teacher Magi Shepley, of Elizabethtown, Pa., says. "Support from administration helps morale tremendously," Northern Virginia special ed. teacher Margy Natalie agreed.
School principals must make an effort to understand the daily life of a special ed. teacher or paraeducator, McIntire argues. "A lot of principals don't have a clue. They don't get close enough to their special ed. staff," he said. The behavior is more based on precedent that malice, McIntire added. "They just historically are not people that have a decent experiential basis of what is special ed. and what it's all about."
Heidi Graw, mother of a special ed. boy in Mission, British Columbia, argues the lack of interest or positive attitude may reach higher than the school principal in some districts. "Much of the onus for developing a positive and cooperative existence would depend on the district's superintendent - his or her caliber, style and personality," says Graw, who home-schools her son after years of dealing with her local school district. "If the top leader presents a good, positive, loyal, supportive and enthusiastic example, he or she sets the tone by which everyone else can gauge their own attitude and behavior."
Establishing such a base of understanding could help the administrators address more specific complaints from special ed. staff. For example, McIntire said, they would assign more reasonable caseloads and would be more supportive of the teacher in confrontations with parents and advocates.
Special ed. teachers rarely get enough time to deal with paperwork, Natalie agreed. "And for new teachers, [they need] help in figuring out how to deal with paperwork, not just in-service workshops, but someone to sit with you when you have to write your first IEP or to look over your documentation to see if it looks okay," she said.
Are Mentors the Answer?
Mentoring and training programs would make a difference, Natalie and others said. But they must be well-planned before they are dangled in front of incoming teachers as a source of support. "Would a frazzled teacher be a good mentor? How about that dour-faced administrator with his eyes on the budget? He's virtually buried in paperwork, and mentoring is just another load to add to the desk and filing cabinet," Graw noted. "It would seem to me that any mentoring program would need teachers who have the time and energy."
Shepley, in Pennsylvania, has seen the downside firsthand. "I was given a mentor that the whole building hated, so everybody started off hating me. What a boost to a brand new teacher," she said. "My second year, in a different district, my mentor was an eighth grade English teacher. I was a seventh grade special ed. teacher. We weren't even on the same schedule!"
Despite the horror stories some teachers tell, the American Federation of Teacher and the National Education Association are both firm supporters of mentoring programs for all teachers, including those in special ed. On their web sites, the AFT and the NEA offer teachers and school districts several publications to help them design and implement mentoring and peer review programs.
The AFT also provides local teachers unions guidance to include mentoring programs in their contracts. In Boston, the AFT teacher contract reads: "The [school system] and the Union agree that a mentoring system to provide support and training for new teachers and a structured system for veteran teachers to continue to gain and share expertise is an essential goal for developing excellence in the Boston Public Schools."
The NEA cites a study recently released by Recruiting New Teachers Inc. as reason to expand its own programs to support new teachers. The NEA plans to launch a new initiative called "Helping New Teachers Succeed" this fall.
According to the RNT study, "Learning the Ropes: Urban Teacher Induction Programs and Practices in the United States," school districts responding to the study reported an average 93 percent retention rate for teachers participating in their new teacher mentoring and training programs. More than 50 percent of first year public school teachers participate in some type of induction program, RNT said.
Mentoring by veteran teachers is one of the most common activities cited by school districts as part of their induction programs, the study found. "But the roles, responsibilities, training, and deployment of mentors vary enormously across different school systems. In addition, not all districts offer release time, stipends, graduate credits, tuition or other incentives to mentors."
Mentoring programs demand administrators that believe in them enough to find funding in the school or district budget to ensure they can be carried out properly, several teachers said. Such active support will most likely come from administrators who have taken the time to understand the challenge of teaching special ed. students, said McIntire, who survived his first year as a teacher of blind students in New Jersey with the help of a mentor.8
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