Special Education Layoffs Hurt Classes, Students, Teachers

The Reduction in Force, firings, transfers and changes in Special Education this year in the name of RIF and Highly Qualified are going to severely hurt teachers, classrooms, students and ultimately, parents.

Special Education students make up ten percent of all student population on average. Because they are considered a special population, like gifted and talented, they also bring in more state and federal dollars than other students. Employing teachers, therapists, paraprofessionals, diagnosticians, is a huge endeavor.

The buzz around the district headquarters and Human Resources was that Special Education was "overstaffed" in general - thus many teachers lost their jobs. While HR tried to make it seem as though many in administration also lost their jobs, this simply was not the case. Most jobs that were lost were teachers and paraprofessionals. 

Now add "highly qualified" into the equation.
Anyone out there know what the definition is? Probably not. The meaning of it does change, has changed and is not clearly explained to staff - for good reason. If you can find the definition of highly qualified on paper, you're one of the lucky ones. Department chairs, administrators and even some in HR don't even know what highly qualified means. And yet HR makes decisions - hires, fires, and (mostly) moves people into different positions based on which employees may or may not be highly qualified. (But not all the time!) Sometimes there are exceptions - left to the discretion of HR with little or NO input from department chairs, administrators or ANYONE from the school.

The point: Teachers and paraprofessionals who have been doing excellent jobs in their positions, who have consistently done well in teaching their students, who have had NO complaints throughout their careers, who are well educated, who have had MANY dedicated years of service to their schools, colleagues, students and parents are being moved, given subjects to teach that they DO NOT KNOW how to teach, relocated, or even fired - all in the name of "highly qualified".

And where does this writer get off saying all this? I guess you'll just have to trust that I'm "highly qualified".