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Friday, July 20, 2007
Fighting The Teacher Shortage: The Special Education Front
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As most of you know, along with math and science, special education departments have been struggling with a chronic teacher shortage.
According to the latest data from the Professional Standards Commission, more than 5,700 new special education teachers were needed in Georgia classrooms during the 2005-06 school year. But fewer than 300 teacher program graduates opted to go into special education that year — a huge gap, to say the least.
A few years ago, Gwinnett County began using a private firm to specifically recruit special education teachers from India. And Clayton County had a big marketing and recruiting push about two years ago to find 100 new special education teachers.
Now, according to Kristina Torres’ story from yesterday, DeKalb County is taking a $2 million federal grant to lure non-educators into the special education teaching ranks. DeKalb officials plan to work with the University of Georgia to get the recruits the training and credentials they’ll need.
What’s different here is that officials plan to create an intensive mentoring and support program so that they have a better chance of holding onto the rookie educators. But, just in case, they’ve also stipulated that those admitted to the program will have to commit to DeKalb for five years.
It’ll be interesting to see how many stay on after the five-year mark.
