Sequestration: No Relief in Sight for Teachers

The election is over, but don’t start cheering yet. The past several years have been really lousy ones for educators, and there’s no reason to assume they’re going to get any better. That feels particularly true, here in Oregon, but it probably is true for just about everyone, everywhere.

Those of you who are coming into the home stretch and finishing up your teacher training programs (and are starting to think about jobs)—my heart goes out to you. Most of the people I know in the field have been laid off (multiple times), are only working part time jobs, or have only been able to find temporary long-term sub jobs.

SPED teachers are no longer safe from widespread layoffs either—I’ve known plenty of SPED teachers who’ve gotten laid off in the past 3 years, and SPED historically was a bastion of job security since there’s far fewer qualified people willing to take those jobs. Even getting into the sub pool is almost a non-possibility since several local districts laid off tons of teachers, so they get first priority in the sub pool, so forget coming in as a newbie. (On a slightly rosier note, I noticed that the elementary school down the street hired multiple teachers, and two of them were student teachers who had done practicums at that school…so you just never know.)

If you’re still in school and haven’t finished up your Master’s Degree, you might as well stay in and do that, if you can afford it.

I was very blessed to be working this past school year, but am probably going to be out of commission for at least the next couple of years. Granted this was my own choice—I wanted my husband to have a full-time job (which was never going to happen in Lincoln County where I had a very satisfying full-time teaching job, but an unemployed spouse). But enough about us…

It doesn’t look like things are going to get any better anytime soon, which is why I’m probably going to be sitting on the sidelines for a while. It’s hard to imagine them getting worse, but apparently they are about to do just that. The key word here is “sequestration” which is a series of automatic federal spending cuts that are poised to take a huge bite out of special education. This won’t happen until next year (Jan 2013), but they’re coming.

This is of course a direct consequence of our deeply divided, highly partisan congress, and the subsequent refusal or inability of our elected officials to work together long enough to actually deal with the budget problems in a rational manner. So in the meantime, during the 2013-2014 school year, 12,000 special education teachers and aides are projected to lose their jobs. Basically what’s coming down the pipeline is an 8.2 percent cut to almost every U.S. Department of Education program.

Consequences of this will no doubt include:

-Fewer special education teachers: You can expect this to result in larger class sizes, making it hard to provide adequate supervision (of kids that tend to need a lot more of it). You can also anticipate that this will dramatically reduce the amount of time available for licensed teachers to directly work with kids (because if you have more students, you have to spend more time on IEPs/paperwork, and therefore get even less time to work directly with students. This also means more kids with IEPs will probably be mainstreamed (into already crowded mainstream classrooms), which without an adequate level of support would probably result in little to no academic progress.

-100,000 fewer children enrolled in Head Start, and 20,000 fewer Head Start employees: (Headstart is one of the best early intervention programs we have) -16,000 fewer teachers and aides working in Title I schools: which greatly impacts the ability of a school to meet the educational needs of low-income families (Title I students are often ELLs or SPED or both). Then the school gets penalized because too many students are failing the state standardized tests. You see where this is going to go…

-4,300 fewer at-risk youth in the Job Corps education and skills training program: The waiting list to get into Job Corps is already pretty long. Job Corps is a kind of last-resort program for a lot of at-risk youth who could not make it in a regular high school. It’s a self-paced program (which takes most kids about a year to complete) where young adults can earn a high school diploma or GED and get vocational training and on the job experience in a variety of fields. Large percentages of Job Corps students have the following factors in common: many have learning disabilities, have been homeless, are parenting, are in recovery, many are older newcomers/refugees (SIFEs) who aged out of school—so in other words, it’s the kids who are hardest to serve in a standard public school setting. That would be like closing 19 (of the smaller) Job Corps centers.

In a state like Oregon, you cannot expect the state to make up what is cut by the feds, and thus can assume that things are only going to get a lot worse than they have been…and if you can imagine it, worse than they are now.

My chances of getting a job in the Portland Metro area in the current climate are probably about nil.

-Jobs of Thousands of Special Education Teachers At Risk, Nirvi Shah, EdWeek, October 16, 2012

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/speced/2012/10/jobs_of_thousands_of_special_ed.html