Sign up for Chalkbeat Detroit’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and Michigan education policy.
As the Detroit school district continues to experience special education teacher shortages, its superintendent is proposing ways for more teachers to enter the field.
Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of Detroit Public Schools Community District, said due to the increase in children being diagnosed with autism statewide, he wants the Michigan Department of Education, or MDE, to expand access to special education programs and offer incentives to bring in more people to the profession.
“That’s the challenge we’re facing here [in DPSCD], but this is a statewide challenge,” Vitti said during a school board meeting last month. “There’s just so few teachers that are generally going into the profession, but especially special education. And then adding that special education endorsement just creates another barrier.”
Currently, an aspiring teacher needs a bachelor’s degree in general education and a special credential called an endorsement. If they want to teach children with a specific disorder, like autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, the person needs an additional endorsement.
Michigan has seen statewide teacher shortages for at least the last 15 years as educators leave the field at an unsustainable rate. This has forced schools to rely on those with temporary or interim credentials, according to a report released last month from the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan State University. That is especially true for special education, where vacancy rates are nearly double the statewide average. More than 5% of all special education full-time positions were vacant in the fall of 2024, far exceeding the statewide vacancy rate of 2.8%.
Across much of the state, the lack of staffing has resulted in teachers with no special education credentials instructing students with disabilities. Lacking enough specialists, districts apply for temporary approvals from the state to put general education teachers in classrooms even though they haven’t yet earned the added credential. This can stretch school resources and, critics say, shortchange the education of the district’s most vulnerable students.
The shortage is not only confined to teachers – Michigan also lacks speech language pathologists, social workers, and paraprofessionals who work with students with disabilities.
At a board meeting on Feb. 10, Vitti said DPSCD had 28 teacher and 32 support staff vacancies. That includes six paraprofessionals in the Exceptional Student Education, or ESE, department, 10 occupational therapists, six physical therapists, and one speech language and pathologist. However, Vitti said the district is “overstaffed” for the first time during his tenure with 107 full-time and contracted psychologists. ESE is the district’s name for its special education department.
The number of children in Michigan being diagnosed with autism is also rising. According to a 2024 report from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, 25,315 Medicaid-eligible children – birth through 18 years – were evaluated or reevaluated as having a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in 2022. The following year, 27,449 children were evaluated or reevaluated, a less than 1% increase. Meanwhile, the Michigan Department of Education reported that 25,147 of all children enrolled in grades K-12 during the 2022-23 school year were assigned autism spectrum disorder eligibility.
With new state Superintendent Glenn Maleyko leading the Michigan Department of Education, Vitti is hopeful he’ll be open to possible changes to the certification process.
“The remedy to this is maybe require the special education certification and then give the teacher with that certification some time to gain the endorsement in the specialization area so that we can have more certified teachers in the classroom,” Vitti said during the meeting. “But we can’t do that unilaterally without MDE approving that.”
Finding autism spectrum disorder teachers ‘particularly challenging’
In an email to BridgeDetroit, Vitti said that the supply of educators statewide is not meeting demands when it comes to staffing and support for special education, or Exceptional Student Education, DPSCD’s name for the department.
“This is particularly challenging in areas like Autism Spectrum Disorder,” he said.
DPSCD’s special education department offers several programs specifically for students with disabilities, including autism spectrum disorder. The programs that saw the biggest enrollment increases in recent years were Mild Cognitive Impairment and ASD, according to a 2025 district report. Enrollment for the autism spectrum disorder programs increased by 100 students between 2022 and 2024, from 311 to 411. The number is projected to rise again to 438 students in the upcoming 2025 report.
Autism spectrum disorder classrooms should have no more than five students to a class, so at least 400 additional teachers are needed based on the number of children with autism recorded in the department of health and human services report, Vitti said. Between August 1, 2024, and July 31, 2025, 138 prospective special education teachers took the state autism spectrum disorder test, with 128 people passing. The exam is part of the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification, or MTTC.
Aspiring teachers can become certified in special education in one of three ways, Michigan Department of Education spokesperson Ken Coleman told BridgeDetroit in an email:
- They can attend a traditional preparation program offered at a four-year university for initial certification. This lets students earn a general education endorsement and a special education endorsement simultaneously, along with a bachelor’s degree. This includes at least 30 credit hours of content-focused coursework and a minimum of an 8-week internship in a special education placement as well as at least 50 student contact hours in the area of the general education endorsement. These all contribute to the required minimum of 600 hours of clinical experiences prior to certification recommendation.
- Students also have the option of taking an expedited special education program. Expedited programs allow students to earn a special education endorsement without the additional general education endorsement, along with a bachelor’s degree. Completers hold a standard Michigan teaching certificate with a particular special education endorsement. This includes at least 30 credit hours of content-focused coursework and a minimum of a 300-hour internship in a special education placement. This is incorporated into the required minimum of 600 hours of clinical experiences prior to certification recommendation.
- A person can take an alternative pathway program, which trains people who already have a bachelor’s degree. They can earn one of the following special education endorsements: cognitive impairment, emotional impairment, physical or other health impaired, and specific learning disabilities, as well as a general education endorsement on a five-year Interim Teaching Certificate, or ITC. Alternative route candidates earning special education endorsements must complete at least 32 credit hours of content-focused coursework, pass the Michigan teaching certification test and complete an eight-week internship before they can add the endorsement to their interim teaching certificate.
For teachers already in the field, they can add a particular special education endorsement to their certificate through a traditional or an alternative route program, Coleman said. The time frame to become certificated varies, he said, but a bachelor’s degree and certification coursework typically take four years to complete, while teachers earning an additional endorsement typically enter programs that last between 1.5 to 2.5 years.
That makes their college training more costly. And once they graduate, many if not most districts don’t offer a pay bump for the extra training.
Ben Hicks, the associate executive director of training and development for the Michigan Association of Administrators of Special Education, said the costs along with the time frame to become certified is one of the challenges he hears most from educators.
“It becomes more costly and time-consuming and then on top of that, with the certification plus the endorsement, you have to student-teach twice,” he said.
Coleman added that the Michigan Department of Education has made several changes to the certification process in recent years to streamline the experience of prospective special education teachers.
Some of those changes include launching the Special Education Teacher Tuition Reimbursement Grant in 2021 to incentivize certified Michigan teachers to earn an endorsement in special education for employment in a program for which they are currently not qualified, allowing waiver requests for teacher placement in certain special education programs beginning in 2023, and approving preparation standards last year for a new stand-alone special education teacher credential.
The endorsement is intended to stand alone on a Michigan teaching certificate but can also be combined with other endorsements in general or special education, the Michigan Department of Education said in a news release. Prospective special educators will enter the new programs this fall, and teachers will begin to enter the field with the new special education teacher endorsement by spring 2028.
Vitti believes one possible solution to the shortage of autism spectrum disorder teachers is for universities to expand access to endorsements. Twelve colleges across Michigan offer autism spectrum disorder endorsements, including Eastern Michigan University, Madonna University, Oakland University, and Wayne State University.
Alternative pathway programs like Talent Together, which pays school employees and community members to get teaching credentials, offer special education certifications in areas like autism spectrum disorder, cognitive, and emotional impairment and learning disabilities.
DPSCD’s teacher preparation program, On the Rise Academy, does not offer autism spectrum disorder as an endorsement, but educators can become certified in cognitive impairment in addition to one of the program’s general education endorsements.
“Our hope would be that the ASD programs are more accessible at universities and through alternative providers — and that there are incentives tied to increasing the number of ASD-certified teachers for university preparation programs,” Vitti said.
Ensuring teachers are adequately trained
State lawmakers have also taken notice of the teacher shortages in special education. In 2021, Michigan’s Legislature budgeted $1.5 million to study how to “attract, prepare, and retain qualified personnel for children with disabilities.” That task force would become Optimise. The group identifies barriers for special educators, partnering with professional organizations, institutes of higher education, and the governor’s office to come up with recommendations to those barriers. The group has several action teams, with teacher credentialing and standards being one of them.
Laurie VanderPloeg, consultant for Optimise, said incentives have been a topic of discussion for some of the groups. Group members have mentioned giving special educators a stipend for their tuition reimbursement for school and paying teachers overtime for the paperwork they can’t complete during the school day. The group has also talked about reducing the amount of time in teacher prep programs, but guaranteed that there’s an increase in rigor.
“We’re really looking at how do we beef up and change some of our preparation programs to be less timely, which would reduce the cost for overall tuition, but increase the quality of what’s being taught, and retaining the rigor of the program so that parents can be very comfortable with the fact that the candidates are coming out well prepared to meet the diverse needs of their children,” VanderPloeg said.
Heather Eckner, director of statewide education for the Autism Alliance of Michigan, also recognizes the difficulties school districts in the state face in hiring special education teachers and staff. The nonprofit works with students with autism and their families statewide.
While administrators may feel pressured to fill those vacancies, what Eckner hears from families is that they want districts to ensure teachers have adequate training and credentials. When teachers don’t have that training, she has seen cases of educators using exclusionary discipline tactics like seclusion and restraint.
“If we think about it from a family/student perspective, it’s like, we need people in these positions, but we need personnel who are appropriately trained and adequately supported to meet the needs of kids,” Eckner said. “When that’s not in place, we see a rise in things that nobody really wants to happen, where kids get pushed out and underserved or inappropriately served. Higher ed teacher prep programs really have not evolved to better prepare teachers for the student populations that they encounter in any setting in schools now.”
Like Vitti, Eckner wants to see more alternative teacher preparation programs that offer special education endorsements.
“Special education is often left out of the plan for comprehensive reform,” Eckner said. “Now you’re getting these pathways underway like TeachMichigan and Talent Together. But where’s your plan to help build a pipeline to increase how many special education-endorsed teachers we have?”
Bridge Michigan reporter Isabel Lohman contributed to this report.
Micah Walker is a reporter for BridgeDetroit. You can reach her at mwalker@bridgedetroit.com.
