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Chicago Board of Education members are calling for more transparency from the district on cuts and changes being made to special education staffing positions.
“Our parents are saying that their children are not receiving their services,” said elected board member Jitu Brown in an interview with Chalkbeat. “So these cuts have hit the classroom, and it’s not acceptable to bake that into what education is going to look like this entire school year.”
Karen Zaccor, an appointed board member and former Chicago Public Schools teacher, told Chalkbeat in an interview that board members have heard concerns from parents and teachers about the impact of cuts to special education classrooms in previous board meetings.
She has also visited schools in her district where she’s heard from principals that schools are short on special education classroom assistants, also known as SECAs, and special education teachers.
Over the summer, the district’s Office for Students with Disabilities cut staffing and made changes within the department. In the second week of school, about 200 students with disabilities had yet to be placed in a classroom. CPS officials said Thursday that 285 are awaiting placements, including students who qualified since the start of the school year.
“You have schools where children don’t have a special education instructor after a month into the school year. You’ve seen the loss in the combination of special ed teachers and SECAs,” Brown said.
Chicago Public Schools said in a press release Thursday that 96% of students with disabilities who have Individualized Education Programs are receiving required minutes under law and that it is “working in earnest to ensure that all students receive their required services.”
“We got to figure out a better process,” said appointed member Michilla Blaise. “I’m sure they had grand reasons as to why they do things the way they do, but it’s not working, so we have to do something else.”
Several board members held a press conference downtown Thursday morning to request more information from CPS regarding special education staffing at schools. Earlier this week, WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times reported that the district cut 250 special education teacher positions along with almost 700 special education classroom assistants, but some of those positions were added back after the start of school on Aug. 18.
The report also found that principals tried to appeal special education staffing allocations over the summer, but 75% were turned down.
Zaccor wants the district to provide members with a report on some of the staffing concerns raised by parents, teachers, and school administrators at the next school board meeting on Sept. 25.
Josh Long, chief of the Office for Students with Disabilities, said that this year, the district used data from May 5 to help assess how many teacher and special education classroom assistant positions to allocate. Using an enrollment count from May helps because the number of students with disabilities tends to increase during the year, he said.
And, in a departure from the past, CPS did not use enrollment projections to allocate special education positions for the fall, Long said. Many principals appealed, but Long said they were rejected because the district waited until the fifth day of school this year to add staff.
Long said that students who are projected to show up on the first day of school, or who principals believe will show up, often do not make it. “That opens the opportunity for us to get that wrong, and by getting that wrong, that means that we are further perpetuating a system of inequity by overallocating in some places,” he said.
Long reiterated Thursday that the changes to special education are not related to the district’s budget deficit.
Placements happen on a rolling basis based on evaluations done by teams of specialists at schools, he said. This year, 110 students in the first 10 days of school were determined to need to be placed “in the most restrictive setting in CPS to receive their education,” Long said.
Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.
