Disabled kids suffer
Fams: Schools don’t have enough teachers
Scores of city students with disabilities are stuck in understaffed and over-enrolled remote education classes, leaving them frustrated and falling behind, a survey of more than 1,000 city families found.
Hundreds of students legally entitled to two teachers because of special education needs are often getting just one, while contending with online classes of up to 80 students, according to the survey from the parent advocacy group Special Support Services, LLC.
“No student is truly protected when our schools abandon their obligations to the most vulnerable children,” said Amber Decker, senior advocate at Special Support Services. “This is everyone’s problem. We must act now.”
The staffing crunch is especially severe for kids enrolled in “Integrated Co-Teaching” classes, where special education students are supposed to learn side-by-side with mainstream peers with the support of an extra teacher, advocates found.
Fifty-five percent of special education students in integrated classes who switch between in-person and remote classes reported having only one teacher on days they were home, the survey found. Nearly 40% of students who are fully remote reported only one teacher, the survey added.
Staten Island middle-schooler Teya Raccuglia, who receives special education services for an auditory processing disorder, had only one teacher for her core classes on the three to four days a week she was home for remote learning this fall, said her mother Joann Curich-Raccuglia.
Her remote science class ballooned to 80 students, the frustrated mom added.
“She’s easily distracted with 80 kids on a zoom call,” Curich-Raccuglia said. “There was no second teacher in any remote class ... she has a whole bunch of management needs … frequent check-ins to make sure she’s on the same page, if she comprehending, if she’s here. There’s no way they’re monitoring her goals.”
Parent advocates from Special Support Services launched the survey of special education families to try to provide more specifics about how kids with disabilities were faring in the city’s school reopening plan.
“Parents of this student population had limited opportunities to voice their specific suggestions or concerns about the upcoming school year,” the authors wrote.
Education guidelines allow schools to assign just one teacher to ICT blended learning classes on remote days, and to expand those remote class sizes to double the normal contractual limits. But advocates say some classes exceed those size limits, and argue the staffing arrangements violate state special education law.
Parents of kids with disabilities also expressed frustration that many of their kids couldn’t attend full-time in-person classes, despite small in-person class sizes and officials’ pledges to work to expand in-person offerings for kids with disabilities.
Education spokeswoman Danielle Filson said the “survey response pool was extremely limited and is over a month old,” but acknowledged “the realities of learning in a pandemic have been challenging, especially for our students with disabilities and their families.”