When the pandemic suddenly thrust schools across Bergen County, New Jersey into shutdown in mid-March, Laura McKenna’s youngest son — who is on the autism spectrum — faced large-scale disruptions to his everyday life.
He went five weeks without any live classes at all: his only instruction came in the form of worksheet packets. When live classes finally did resume, McKenna said in an interview with the HPR, the teaching time sometimes only amounted to one hour a week. This lack of structure took a heavy toll on his education.
“Like many kids on the autism spectrum, he’s a creature of habit,” McKenna said of her son. “He likes routines, he loves school, he’s on the highest honor roll.” But the pandemic abruptly disrupted that sense of stability. “It ended overnight,” McKenna said. “And he had major anxiety issues.”
McKenna tried her best to fill the gaps in her son’s instruction. Yet the time demands involved with taking care of her son’s schooling meant that McKenna — who is a writer specializing in education policy — barely had the bandwidth to keep up with her own job.
The experiences of McKenna and her family are hardly unique. Across the nation, while the pandemic struck different homes, districts, and communities, the stories from last spring were similar. When schools closed, families of children with disabilities suffered the most.
The individualized services that students with disabilities rely on –– ranging from speech and occupational therapy to one-on-one guidance in the classroom –– are exactly those that are most difficult to replicate in virtual settings. When the pandemic closed schools, parents stepped into the roles usually filled by a team of trained educators and specialists –– adding stress that intersected with additional challenges faced by low-income and non-English speaking families.
With the start of the fall term, these children and their families are once again in a particularly vulnerable position. While administrators and teachers are working extra hours and improvising means to provide the services that students with disabilities are legally entitled to, school districts are finding themselves increasingly stretched past their limits. In the absence of clear federal guidance and additional funding, many parents, teachers, and experts worry that students with disabilities will face devastating and potentially irreversible learning loss as the pandemic takes its course.
‘They’ll Never Have that Window of Time Back’
Just half a century ago, children with disabilities were largely shunned from schools, with only one in five receiving a public education. Numerous state laws excluded children who were “deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed, or mentally retarded” from attending public schools, largely confining them to the margins of society.
Today, however, the right of all students with disabilities to a “free appropriate public education” is cemented in a cornerstone piece of legislation called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. There are now nearly 7 million students with disabilities in the United States, comprising 14% of the national public school enrollment. They include children with learning disabilities, speech or language impairments, autism, visual or hearing impairments, developmental delay, intellectual disability and myriad other conditions.
Under IDEA, children with disabilities must receive instruction in the “least restrictive environment,” meaning that segregation from general education classrooms should be minimized to the greatest extent possible. In addition, students with disabilities are entitled to special education and a variety of related services, ranging from life skills training to occupational, speech and physical therapy.
These services are extremely important to students’ progression, but they are challenging to adapt to virtual spaces because they require hands-on, one-on-one interactions with specialists. While some schools attempted to provide special education and related services remotely when the pandemic hit, other schools did nothing at all. In a survey conducted by the advocacy group ParentsTogether, 35% of families of children in special education reported that their kids were doing little to no remote learning, compared with 17% of their general education peers. Only one in five families of children in special education reported that they were receiving all the services their kids were entitled to.
These opportunity gaps tend to magnify existing inequities. Those most able and advantaged may be able to cope and adjust, but experts worry that the most marginalized students will fall behind. One of the greatest worries is regression: the theory that students with disabilities may lose crucial skills that they have worked long and hard to develop. When children with disabilities regress, it often takes them much longer to regain those skills compared with their neurotypical peers.
Furthermore, for some children with disabilities, time-sensitive and early intervention can be crucial to their future outcomes. Some children with autism receive 25 to 40 hours a week of Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy, for example. Yet as more time away from school passes, the window of opportunity to provide these services effectively is closing. “Right now, those kids have had nothing for six months,” McKenna said. “They’ll never have that window of time back.”
Uncharted Territory: ‘There is No Cookie-Cutter Approach’
In the spring, many teachers were given barely a day’s warning that their school would be shutting down, hurling them into a hectic and uncertain situation. Given the time buffer that the summer provided, many families and teachers are counting on school districts and governments to provide better guidance and preparation this fall. Yet much uncertainty still remains, with each individual school district scrambling to formulate its own unique plan, largely independent of others. “There is no cookie-cutter approach, there has been no major federal guidance that says this is what you have to do,” John Eisenberg, executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, told the HPR.
With cases still rising in areas around the country, public health concerns remain a hindrance to any semblance of normal instruction returning in the foreseeable future. As of Sept. 14 , 17 of the largest 20 school districts in the country have decided to start off the school year with fully remote instruction — only New York City, the state of Hawaii and Duval, Florida, have opted for a hybrid model.
As public education this fall remains largely virtual, the main outlying question on the minds of school administrators is how they might manage to continue meeting the promises of their students’ Individualized Education Plans. The Individualized Education Plan, or IEP, is the major governing document of the IDEA and keeps track of each child’s specific educational needs. Written and continually modified through discussions involving both caretakers and educators, it outlines information about the child’s educational performance, annual goals and benchmarks, and the services and supplementary support to be received.
The purpose of the IEP is not only to facilitate a planning process to meet each child’s unique learning needs, but also to hold schools accountable to IDEA standards. As such, when the coronavirus outbreak shuttered school buildings in March, many school administrators worried about facing legal ramifications from failing to provide the services agreed upon in their students’ IEPs. In fact, the School Superintendents Association lobbied Congress to lift the requirements of the IDEA, outlining their concerns about a potential wave of related litigation in a time when budgets were already severely strained.
To make matters worse, the U.S. Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos issued a confusing set of guidelines claiming that if districts did not provide educational services to their general student population they would also “not be required to provide services to students with disabilities during that same period of time.” Several school districts took the advice literally and ceased any form of instruction for all students in both general and special education classes out of fears of facing lawsuits.
Only later did Devos clarify that school districts could not opt out of distance instruction. “While the Department has provided extensive flexibility to help schools transition, there is no reason for Congress to waive any provision designed to keep students learning,” she said in a late-April statement. “With ingenuity, innovation, and grit, I know this nation’s educators and schools can continue to faithfully educate every one of its students.”
The updated federal guidance now makes it clear that school districts may not lawfully shortcut or circumvent the IDEA during the pandemic — or else parents have the right to sue at the state and district level. In fact, some lawsuits have already been filed, including one case signed by over 200 parents from 10 states seeking to reopen schools so that students can receive in-person services.
Eisenberg, however, maintains that parents and advocacy groups are generally understanding of the situation, and that many complaints can be resolved by “just making a phone call.” He said that the important thing is that schools do the best they can with the resources available.“You have to provide what was in the IEP as much as you can,” Eisenberg said. “And if you can’t, you need to be explaining to the parent why you can’t do certain things and how you’re going to address that after the pandemic through other means like compensatory services.”
“It’s an unprecedented pandemic, but people should not lose their civil rights to a high quality education with their non-disabled peers in the least restrictive environment,” he added.
‘I Can Only Do So Much in a Day’
While it will be no easy feat for school districts to fulfill their students’ IEPs virtually this fall, administrators and educators across the nation are fighting tenaciously to make the most of limited resources.
Ethan D’Ablemont, the assistant superintendent of the Boston Public Schools’ Office of Special Education, stressed that maintaining continuous dialogue with students’ families is a crucial ingredient to a successful fall. He explained that he was hosting large town hall-style meetings with families regularly, including sessions specifically for non-English speakers, in languages such as Cantonese and Somali.
“Family and community engagement is always tremendously important,” D’Ablemont told the HPR. “And in this environment, I would say it’s even more important because we’re just so integrated with the families now, trying to figure out how to make sure kids get what they need.”
Amanda Morin, who is a writer and senior expert at disability nonprofit Understood, said she hopes to see schools thinking outside the box and coming up with more creative ways to teach. She has already seen innovative approaches from some educators. “Some of them are doing things like porch classes, where they’re sitting six feet apart teaching on the porch,” she said in an interview with the HPR.
One of these teachers is L. Juliana Urtubey, a fourth- and fifth-grade special education teacher working in inclusion and resource settings in Las Vegas. Over the past year, she taught in a district with a large demographic of English language learners, most of whom are Latinx. Urtubey said when the pandemic hit, many of her students’ families were forced to move out of their households. “I work with a population that has … a pretty high population of mixed status households, so some people have documentation, some people don’t,” she told the HPR. “And I think that increases the vulnerability of families in terms of eviction prevention and services that might extend to people who are documented.”
Since many of Urtubey’s students did not have one-to-one access to technology, they often called into her classes from their parents’ cell phones, tablets, or laptops. For the 20% of her students who could not log into the online classes, she offered phone tutoring sessions as well.
Urtubey designed her lessons to be flexible to the students’ own interests, which she said was particularly effective for her students with disabilities. “I found that it’s important to continue to explicitly teach foundational skills, but create a bigger space for the students’ interests to drive our instruction,” she said. “Because that’s the only way that we’re going to keep them coming in and logging in every day –– if they love what they’re learning.”
Lauren Jewett, a primary school teacher in New Orleans, found similar ways to keep her students engaged and to meet their learning goals. She said she created supplemental videos that parents could watch with their child, each based on different skills that her students had on their IEP plans.
Still, while Jewett has accumulated strategies to promote accessibility in her remote teaching, she acknowledged that she and many other teachers in similar positions were being overextended. “I’m one person and I can only do so much in a day,” she told the HPR.
Despite the individual efforts of educators around the nation, many schools are struggling to make ends meet this fall. Districts are facing massive budget cuts due to the economic meltdown and losses in state revenue; at the same time, many are paying extra costs in providing digital learning devices and meal pickup services to families in need.
In March, Congress passed the CARES Act, a stimulus package that dedicated $13.2 billion to support K-12 schools. Since then, however, the House and the Senate have remained deadlocked on a new round of funding – with each chamber proposing its own bill. Eisenberg said NADSE has spent the summer fighting for Congress to include a $300 billion bailout in the next stimulus package, as well as to provide an increase in Federal Communications Commission funding that would expand broadband access to communities.
For McKenna, beyond the urgent need for additional funding, another concern is the lack of guidance and clear direction from the federal government. McKenna said while the federal government does not traditionally have a strong role in education, the nature of the current pandemic calls for greater involvement.
“I think that in a time like this we have a national crisis, we really do need more national leadership and guidance. These poor school district superintendents and principals – I feel sorry for them,” McKenna said. “They’re in over their heads.”
Image Credit: “Classroom” by Teacher McKinley is licensed under CC BY 2.0