FCPS struggling to recruit staffers

By JILLIAN ATELSEK

jatelsek@newspost.com

Frederick County Public Schools is still struggling to recruit special education staffers, district officials told school board members at their Wednesday meeting.

The system is short of 33 special education instructional assistants, who support teachers in day-to-day classroom management. Vacancies are measured by full-time equivalency, which counts a parttime worker as half an employee.

Vacancies at the elementary level make up 20.5 of the openings, said FCPS’ achievement and equity director, Keith Harris. Five are at the high school level, and 7.5 are at the middle school level.

Thirteen special education teacher positions across the district’s virtual program and Rock Creek School, FCPS’ school for students with significant disabilities, are currently filled by contractors rather than district employees. One contracted special education teacher is working at the elementary level, and there are two unfilled positions at that level.

Fourteen speech language (See BOE A14)

Bass

(BOE from A1 ) pathologists across all levels are working as contractors. The district is also still trying to hire a special education community liaison, who will run the currently inactive “Partners for Success” program. The program connects parents of special education students to resources within the school system.

The school board has had a standing agenda item to discuss special education since a U.S. Department of Justice report in December revealed widespread misuse of seclusion and physical restraint against students with disabilities. Board members have repeatedly expressed concern about understaffing in the special education department and what impact the DOJ investigation could have on the issue.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Harris presented data on restraint incidents since the DOJ’s report, broken down by race, grade and other factors. FCPS stopped using seclusion in December under the terms of a settlement with the DOJ, which also required an overhaul of the district’s restraint training and reporting practices.

FCPS staff have performed 48 restraints since Dec. 1. Forty of those involved students with Individual Education Plans.

During the 2019-20 school year, there were 232 restraints in that same time period, Harris said. He added that an informal review of the district’s reporting practices by the state education department found FCPS staff were recording a “significant number” of incidents as restraint that didn’t actually meet the threshold, like breaking up a fight or guiding a student to another location by placing a hand on their back.

That same review found FCPS needed to make changes “to ensure each school had adequate staff trained and their training is current,” Harris wrote in a presentation.

Despite the sharp decrease in incidents, Black students are still experiencing restraint at a disproportionately high rate. “Black and white students represent a similar number of incidences,” Harris said, each accounting for 37.5% of the restraints since Dec. 1.

White children represent 52% of FCPS’ student body, while Black children represent 14%.

Elementary schoolers are also far more likely to be restrained. Almost 80% of restraints since Dec. 1 have involved kids in pre-K through fifth grade, while about 20% involved middle schoolers. There haven’t been any restraints at the high school level.

“I would ask that we start getting to some of the ‘why’,” board member Liz Barrett told Harris and Linda Chambers, FCPS’ special education director. “There’s not restraint happening past eighth grade right now. … What’s behind this?”

Board member David Bass told Harris and Chambers he’d like to see a detailed account of which schools have made progress in implementing new crisis intervention training required by the DOJ settlement.

The officials didn’t have a clear answer on hand. FCPS has launched a new electronic system for reporting restraint incidents in real time. Chambers said special education experts were deployed to a school every time they got an alert.

“I would call that reactive,” Bass said. “I would not call that proactive. It’s after a situation occurs.”

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