Morgan Hill – Special education students in the Morgan Hill Unified School District are still waiting for some services that are required by their Individual Education Plans (IEPs), but district officials are up against a shortage of specialists as they try to fill openings.
“It’s a slow process, it doesn’t happen overnight,” Director of Special Ed Salli Welsh said. “We are really heavily recruiting, but it’s a struggle. It’s heartbreaking for me as the person who wants to make it happen.”
The district has hired one full-time occupational therapist who started work last week, and has two others working three days a week.
Welsh is still looking, however, for speech therapists, talking to contractors and even vendors on the East Coast in the hopes of filling the district’s empty slots.
“We lost two, we could use two,” she said. “I’ve talked to local contractors and universities – (Cal State) East Bay Hayward and San Jose State about getting their new grads and interns … But if they have options to work closer to home, they do. Some of them go into a clinic where their caseloads are lower or a vendor situation where the conditions are different.”
According to the California Department of Education, there is a statewide shortage of speech therapists, and there are a variety of reasons for the shortage.
“What we see is that there aren’t enough schools that have enough spots for graduate students,” said Shelly Ross, special education consultant for the CDE. “It’s an expensive program, and students need to have a certain number of contacts and a certain number of clinical hours, hours they are supervised, in order to complete the degree requirements.
“The university will say they don’t have enough clinic hours for the students to get the number of hours the need,” she said. “Each organization points the finger at another organization. It’s not that students are not interested in becoming speech and language therapists, but there are not enough spots for them. They have to get a master’s degree. We are looking at special education in the way services have been traditionally provided, but we need to think outside that.”
Ross said because of the shortage – and because of unfunded government mandates – universities educating these specialists as well as districts that hire them would do well to reconsider how they may be utilized.
“Any child not developing appropriately would benefit from these (special education) students,” she said. “I can see that there might be some type of an articulation program, some way these students could also help children with less serious communication issues … We’re trying to spread the word that there are other ways, but people are comfortable with the way they’ve always been doing things. If you look at the students you’re serving, you can benefit general ed teachers. We’re trying to send a statewide message that we need to look at different kinds of kids working with the classroom teacher or with the resource teacher.”
Special education parent Veronica Hoyle-Kent agrees with Ross in that she believes the district could benefit from using classroom aides rather that one-on-one aides, with this “pooling” of aides costing less and helping more children.
Welsh said her department is considering many options to meet its IEP obligations.
Marilyn Dubil covers education and law enforcement for The Times. Reach her at (408) 779-4106 ext. 202 or at md****@mo*************.com.
