Special Education programs are designed to help students who have special needs with their education. One thing that really helps is if the Special Education program, itself, is as stable as possible. In New Jersey, lawmakers are trying to pass a bill that would require Special Education programs to have more stability than they do right now.
Right now, there are a whole lot of people who are unemployed. A bunch of them are teachers who were laid off in the past couple of years. The recession caused school districts to make cuts in order to balance their budget.
It used to be unheard of for schools to willingly reduce the number of Special Education teachers, the number of paraducators, (or teacher’s aides), who worked with students who have special needs, and the number of support staff, (like school counselors, reading resource teachers, and speech teachers). However, this is exactly what happened in the recent recession.
This, of course, has a huge impact on the students who rely on those Special Education teachers, paraeducators, and support staff. Kids who have ADHD, or an autism spectrum disorder, tend to have extreme difficulty dealing with a change in routine. This means that every time a school chooses to dismiss a paraeducator, in favor of hiring a new person to do the job (for less pay), it causes harm to the students. Every time a school counselor is laid-off, it destroys the trust that students had not only in that counselor, but also with other school counselors that the student will encounter in the future. This type of instability has a huge impact on students who have special needs.
In New Jersey, a bill has been cleared by the state’s Assembly Education Committee. If it gets passed into a law, it would require the state’s Board of Education to create regulations that would make school districts develop a plan to establish stability in their Special Education programing.
Assemblyman Daniel Benson is the co-sponsor of the measure. He said:
“Transition and change in routine are very difficult for children suffering with Autism or other developmental disabilities. Those who are shuffled from school -to-school are often prone to regression, which, in some cases, makes learning setbacks almost impossible to overcome. This situation is incredibly frustrating for parents and often times confusing and scary for their children. We can and must do better and hopefully this bill will see to it that we do just that”.
Part of the requirements would directly involve the planning of a student’s individualized education program (IEP). The team putting together the plan would have to consider the consistency of the location of services when they are determining in-district Special Education programs.
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