The proposal for next year’s budget by Superintendent Thomas Taylor emphasizes adding more special education teaching positions and increasing funding for the special education department. While this may seem like it will be an easy and beneficial move for MCPS and its students, it’s going to prove very difficult to find teachers to fill those added positions and make use of that funding.

If the proposed budget is approved by the County Council this spring, more than $46 million dollars will be invested into the department to add 688 positions. This is partly to meet current staffing guidelines. Additionally, school-focused support teams with experts will be assigned to school clusters. Some of these subject experts will be trained in special education.

Increasing staffing for the special education department will lighten the load on current  teachers and be beneficial for students with special needs and their learning. This is especially true because “identification of students with disabilities who need special education and related services has gone up post-Covid closures,” according to Diana Wyles, the Associate Superintendent for the Office of Special Education.

However, staffing special education positions has been difficult for years, and the struggles for MCPS will only increase when it has more positions to fill. With the influx of students requiring special education or related services also comes the lack of trained teachers with enough qualifications to teach special education students. Schools around the country are starved for special education teachers, and it isn’t getting better as fewer people are going to college to get into the special education field.

A few other districts in Maryland have offered incentives for special education teachers in hopes of hiring more. However, “this is a challenging time for funding public education, which impacts the ability to offer some of the incentives that were once available,” noted Wyles.

The professional responsibilities of a special education teacher goes beyond instruction in the classroom and working with students. “Specifically, there are a lot of paperwork requirements, meetings, and assessments that have to be completed for students with IEPs,” explained Wyles. “Many teachers leave the field of special education within the first five years because the job is not what they thought it would be.” Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) are special education students documents that specify what students are required by federal law to have in school in their specific areas of need.

These challenges may have contributed to heavy staff turnover in Sherwood’s special education department in which a number of teachers have retired or transferred to other schools in recent years. “The primary reason for turnover of special education teachers is burnout from heavy caseloads, paperwork, the emotional aspects of the job, and the fact that all of the work is difficult to get done in a regular workday,” expressed Wyles.

Maryland has taken steps towards making it easier to hire special education teachers. To teach special education you are required to be certified for it and have taken a certain number of related college-level classes, according to Caitlin Ennis, the head of special education services at Sherwood. “However, because of the state of special education across the nation, [Maryland] has allowed people who are in the process of getting their special ed certification to get provisional certifications,” Ennis explained. This would allow the teachers with a bachelor’s degree to finish their special education certification while working at schools.

Wyles encourages anybody interested in education to consider working in special education. While challenging, it is extremely rewarding, and helps to “develop a sense of compassion and empathy for students with disabilities,” said Wyles.