Cuts in Special Education Department are Inexcusable

For the next school year, the district has placed 139 teachers on excess; 13 of them are from East. Four of the 13 of those teachers are in the special education department; it’s unacceptable that one department of 12 represents 30 percent of the teachers placed on excess. In excess, these teachers will not be hired back unless 139 other teachers in the district choose to retire or leave—something Principal Karl Krawitz thinks is unlikely.

The cuts come as a result of federal and state funding cuts the Shawnee Mission School District has been forced to enact this spring. According to Dr. Krawitz, the state has not been issuing their full allocation of funding to districts since January; he says the district is “literally running on reserves.”

“That’s where we’re at, because we’ve already cut to where there is no more,” Dr. Krawitz said. “It’s like starving the cow where there is no more fat, and now we’re cutting into the heart of what makes you tick.”

The special education department will unfairly suffer the most; according to Dr. Krawitz, the staff will drop by one-third, from eight to 12. This includes a Transition Specialist, who helps students with special needs find jobs or further their education after high school.

Even with cuts, the East administration needs to allocate more funding to  the department so that it can maintain quality of instruction and keep student-to-teacher ratios from raising. Cutting one-third of a department is an unacceptable drop, especially when the bigger cuts are yet to come; Dr. Krawitz thinks the budget situation could result in 15-20 more teachers being put on excess next year.

Special education depends on hands-on teaching (see “Sharing Their Skills,” pages 16-17), something that is lost when significant numbers of a department are put on excess. The teachers will also have to oversee more Individual Education Programs (IEPs), which are the academic programs tailored for both gifted and special needs students. Special education teacher Maureen Johnson is afraid the increase in case loads might pull the department too thin.

“As a teacher of students with severe disabilities, history of special education tells us that they are the first ones to kind of be pushed aside to sit and do activities that are not meaningful, like sitting and doing puzzles and coloring all the time, because that’s the easiest thing to get them to do so you can focus on other tasks,” Johnson said. “That is very sad and unfortunate, and I don’t want to see that happen.”

The case load could also be reduced if IEPs were assigned more sparingly to gifted students. While some gifted students do indeed benefit from the specialized curriculum, the teacher’s time could be better spent on special needs students; the gifted students should not have to opt-out of the IEP, but rather opt-in annually if they want the extra guidance that an IEP provides. Otherwise, valuable teacher time is wasted on students who will benefit less from the added attention than a special needs student would.

Dr. Krawitz insists that the state is responsible for 75 percent of Special Education funding, but says that the school has received in-between 62 and 68 percent in recent years. The rest must come out of school’s general education funding. According to an article published in the Lawrence Journal World on Feb. 23, Kansas has been mandated by the federal government to increase special education funding by $26 million.

This state boost in funding will help, and it is important that the state gives more money to special education–even amidst general education cuts–so that individual schools don’t have to decide whether to reduce the department or pull more money from the general education fund.

The federal government has realized the importance of special education, and it is imperative that the state and district follow suit, even when cuts are made to education elsewhere. It is understandable that some teachers from each department would be put on excess, but it is inexcusable when one of the departments that supports students the most is given the least funding.