Special education needs soar

From the Centre Daily Times

Special education needs soar
Dena Pauling Monday, Aug. 04, 2008
EDUCATION: Certification to help Pa. teachers with changing classrooms

Pennsylvania expects children with special needs to be taught in the same classrooms as their peers whenever possible — not segregated in special rooms for the entire school day.

This “least-restrictive environment” approach toward special education has been around for years. But with about 70,000 more children enrolled in special education statewide than just a decade ago, the State Board of Education has made sweeping changes to ensure that approach is being followed.

All newly certified teachers — regardless of whether they teach history, physics, art or elementary education — will be required to have extra training in special education. And those who do pursue special education certifications must have a second certification to achieve what is known as “highly qualified status” to be able to better assist other teachers.

Though the new requirements won’t begin to kick in for another three years, Kelly Watson hopes students such as her daughter, who has autism and bipolar disorder, can get help.

“We have struggled,” she said. “Our daughter has been in four different schools and home-schooled.”

Watson, who lives in the Philipsburg area, said schools just aren’t equipped to know how
Advertisement

to handle children with special needs. Too often, children with Down syndrome and autism, for example, are just “lumped together” in the same special education classrooms for extended periods of time, she said.

“Nobody seems trained well enough to be able to handle her situation, and that’s very frustrating for us,” she said. “We just want to get her educated, and we can’t seem to do that.”

The push behind the changes in teacher certification initially came from “parents coming forward and saying our kids are not getting the services they need in general education classrooms,” said David McNaughton, an associate professor in Penn State’s department of educational and school psychology and special education.

Part of the reason could be traced to the sheer volume of children now being identified with special needs. Deneen Keller, a Penns Valley special education teacher, and Ellen Campbell, a State College English teacher and reading specialist, say they see more children with special circumstances each year.

Autism, in particular, Keller said, “has grown phenomenally.”

State Department of Education statistics prove those assumptions. While total enrollment has remained flat both statewide and locally, the number of children in special education has risen significantly during the past 10 to 15 years.

Excluding gifted and pre-school- aged children, there were 272,255 students enrolled in special education statewide in 2006-07, up from 208,421 in 1990-91. That’s a 30.6 percent increase.

In the Central Intermediate Unit 10, which includes school districts in Centre and Clearfield counties, there were 4,304 students enrolled in special education in 2006-07 — almost 1,000 more than in 1990-91.

In anticipation of the upcoming requirements, colleges and universities are revamping their educational programs to prepare students and retrain teachers.

“Things are just constantly changing,” said Keller, who has taught special education for 17 years. “And for me, it brings me up to speed on what is going on statewide.”

Keller is among those enrolled in Penn State’s new EPIC program, short for Evidence- Based Practices for Inclusive Classrooms and Differentiating Instruction. McNaughton is one of the instructors.

The courses are designed to help teachers learn strategies they can use to help children with all kinds of specific physical and behavioral issues including autism, blindness, attention- deficit hyperactivity disorder and mental retardation.

Keller said she’s seen a “definite push” toward the strategy of co-teaching. Two teachers, one of whom could be certified in special education, work in the same classroom at the same time. The state, in developing the new Chapter 49 regulations, expects co-teaching to take place.

“To me, co-teaching was a thought, an idea. But it’s evolved into so much more all of these years,” Keller said. “I can see a lot of things coming through the state, one is a definite push for inclusion and for co-teaching to be more than just one teacher and one coach.”

Campbell has worked in several inclusive classrooms. She doesn’t have a social studies background, but she has taught alongside a history teacher to help improve the reading skills of the special education students in that class. In turn, she said, it helps all students.

But even with her experience, Campbell said she too enrolled in EPIC to make sure her strategies “were as up to date as possible” and to better learn how to teach students with very specific disabilities.

“We have to be very deliberate and very mindful of including kids and making accommodations for different kinds of learners,” she said. “... When you make those accommodations, it’s good for the general education learners as well.”

According to the state Department of Education, three of every 20 students have a disability or are still learning English. And 96 percent of students with a disability have at least some of their education provided by a regular education teacher.

“All teachers have interaction with students in special education,” Department of Education spokeswoman Leah Harris said. “And even though they are not certified in special education, regular teachers still need to know the unique characteristics of special education so they are better able to instruct those students.”