Fort Worth schools are hiring more non-certified teachers for special ed. Here’s why.
As schools in the Fort Worth area struggle to find enough teachers to cover their special education classrooms, some are increasingly turning to non-certified educators hired on an emergency basis.
The Fort Worth Independent School District hired nearly three times as many special education teachers on emergency permits ahead of the current school year as compared to the year before, district records show.
Special education has long been one of the hardest positions to fill for districts in Texas and nationwide. But as districts across the state struggle to find enough educators of every kind, officials in Fort Worth say the challenge of recruiting enough special education teachers has only gotten more difficult, often leaving them to choose between hiring a non-certified teacher or not hiring anyone.
Experts, advocates and parents of students with disabilities worry that teachers who aren’t certified to teach special education may not have the training necessary to give those kids what they need to be successful.
Emergency permits allow non-certified teachers to work in schools
In cases where school districts can’t find enough appropriately certified teachers to cover their vacant jobs, Texas allows them to hire non-certified teachers using emergency permits. Such permits are typically good for one year, and come with a requirement that the educator be working toward earning their teaching certificate.
Teachers hired on emergency permits to teach special education must also have a certain number of college credit hours in courses related to working with students with disabilities. In special education, districts could use emergency permits to hire either current classroom teachers who aren’t certified to teach special education, or teaching candidates who are not yet certified to teach anything.
Fort Worth ISD hired one special education teacher on an emergency permit each year in 2018, 2019 and 2020, according to figures the district released to the Star-Telegram in response to an open records request. For the 2021-22 school year, the district hired 11 special education teachers on emergency permits — four at the elementary level and seven at the secondary level.
But that total, which already represented a sharp uptick over the years that came before it, nearly tripled during hiring for 2022-23. For the current school year, the district issued 31 emergency permits for special education teachers: 17 at the elementary level, 13 at the secondary level and one for visually impaired classes.
That trend isn’t limited to Fort Worth ISD. This year marked the first year the Northwest Independent School District hired teachers of any kind on emergency permits, according to records obtained through a public records request. The district hired four special education teachers on emergency permits, records showed. Last year was the first time since at least the 2018-19 school year that the district had a vacant special education position on the first day of school. Last year, the district had one special education vacancy at the beginning of the year, records show. This year, it had five.
But that trend isn’t universal: Neither the Keller nor the Crowley independent school districts have issued emergency permits for special education teachers since at least the 2018-19 school year, records show.
The state’s shortage of special education teachers isn’t new: A nationwide listing of teacher shortage areas published by the U.S. Department of Education in 2017 shows that special education teachers have represented an area of concern in Texas, as well as most other states, since at least 1990.
Mom worries emergency hires might not understand daughter’s needs
Wanda McKnight, of Fort Worth, said the number of uncertified emergency hires teaching in special education classrooms in Fort Worth ISD worried her. McKnight’s daughter is a student at the Leadership Academy at Como Elementary School. Her daughter has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and sensory processing disorder, and she receives special education services at school, McKnight said.
It’s often difficult to get teachers to understand what the girl needs, McKnight said. Sensory processing disorder affects the way the brain reacts to sensory information, often making the patient overly sensitive to stimuli that don’t affect others. Among other things, that means McKnight’s daughter won’t go to the bathroom without someone walking her there, because she worries that it will be too dark, too loud or unclean, McKnight said. There have been several times when teachers and aides didn’t understand that, so the girl waited to go to the bathroom until she wet herself, McKnight said.
McKnight worries that a teacher who isn’t certified to teach special education might have an even harder time understanding students like her daughter. She questions whether a teacher who doesn’t understand what sensory processing disorder is could give her daughter what she needs to be successful in school.
FWISD struggles to find enough special education teachers
Raúl Peña, chief talent officer for Fort Worth ISD, said the lack of special education teachers is a part of the larger shortage of teachers overall. The pandemic caused workers not only in education but across all sectors of the economy to rethink their relationships with their careers, he said. Many teachers decided that a career in education was too challenging, he said, so they either retired or switched careers. At the same time, the district has been able to find fewer and fewer graduates coming out of colleges of education at nearby universities, he said, so it’s become increasingly reliant on candidates coming from alternative certification programs.
Most applicants who are certified to teach special education are quickly hired, either by Fort Worth ISD or by some other district in the area, Peña said. When that supply of candidates is exhausted, the district has to turn to teachers hired on emergency permits, he said.
Before the first day of school, those emergency hires go through 10 days of professional development, during which they get training and support on curriculum, behavior management and the programs the district uses to handle students’ individualized education programs, or IEPs, he said. An IEP is a legal document that is drawn up for students when they are identified as having a disability and follows them throughout the time they receive special education services.
Much of that training is geared toward those teachers’ specific assignments, Peña said, because special education teachers’ duties can vary widely. For example, a teacher who works with students with disabilities in a general education classroom might focus on modifying assignments and tests and making sure those students are integrated into the rest of the class, while a teacher in a self-contained special education classroom would work with a smaller number of students with higher needs in a separate class.
Those teachers are also paired with mentor teachers on their campuses, who can offer support and guidance throughout the year, Peña said. The district’s special education department is also available throughout the year to offer support to campuses that need it, he said.
Most principals in the district try to be strategic about where they assign special education teachers hired on emergency permits to make sure they have the greatest possible chance of success, Peña said. But because of the number of vacancies, they don’t always have many options.
“When there’s a need, you’re going to have to place them wherever the need is, because there’s not just another option for that,” he said.
Senate bill would ease process of hiring retirees
A provision in a new bill in the Texas Senate would allow the state education commissioner to create a grant program to reimburse school districts and charter schools for certain expenses associated with bringing recently retired teachers back into the classroom to teach special education.
Senate Bill 1474 would also revamp the state’s special education funding system so that the amount of money allocated to provide for the education of a student who receives special services would be tied to the level of intensity of the services that student needs. The bill, which was filed March 3 by Republican Sens. Paul Bettencourt, of Houston, and Angela Paxton, of McKinney, would create voucher-like education savings accounts for disabled students.
Peña, the Fort Worth ISD official, said the portion of the bill that would reimburse districts for expenses related to hiring recent retirees to teach special education classes might be helpful in a small number of cases, but he was skeptical that it would go far toward solving the problem. The district hasn’t received many applications from retired teachers looking to come back to work full time since the pandemic began, he said.
Northwest ISD turns to emergency permits, long-term subs
Kim Barker, the assistant superintendent for human resources for the Northwest Independent School District, said the district has also struggled to find enough teachers who are certified to teach special education.
Like many other districts across the state, Northwest ISD has a grow your own program, where school officials work with non-certified employees to get them certified to teach, she said. Although officials hope that program will help put more certified teachers into the district’s classrooms in the long term, Barker acknowledged that it doesn’t do much to solve an immediate shortage of teachers certified to teach special education.
In cases where the district has an immediate need that it can’t find a permanent teacher to fill, it generally has to turn to certified long-term substitute teachers or teachers hired on emergency permits, she said.
“If there’s a way that we can help get someone in that classroom, we do our best to do so within the constraints that we have,” she said.
Texas requires that every new teacher — not just those coming into the profession on emergency permits — be partnered with a mentor teacher who can support them in the early years of their careers. For special education teachers, ideally that mentor is assigned to a similar type of classroom as the new teacher, Barker said. That’s especially important for special education teachers, she said, because they could be doing such a wide variety of things: Some might be working with high-needs students on basic skills like eating and using the bathroom, she said, while others might work side by side with a student who needs extra support in a particular subject because of a cognitive deficit.
Disability advocate worries about emergency hires’ training, experience
Steven Aleman, senior policy specialist for the nonprofit Disability Rights Texas, said the growing number of non-certified teachers working in special education classrooms is a cause for concern. Special education services are complex, he said, and the teachers and aides who work in that field need to be as highly trained as possible. The entire point of having a special education certification requirement is to ensure that the teachers who are delivering those services have a baseline level of skill and experience, he said. When districts hire teachers who don’t have that certification, it raises questions about their ability to do the job well, he said.
“An emergency certification just simply means you’re not where the state otherwise expects you to be to do this job, but we’re going to make an exception,” he said.
Aleman said he also worries about those emergency hires’ ability to manage classroom behavior without resorting to dangerous physical restraints. As the federally-mandated protection and advocacy system for the state, Disability Rights Texas investigates allegations of abuse or neglect against people with disabilities. Aleman said the organization has received a growing number of reports of teachers using harmful restraint techniques against disabled students at schools across the state — including the same techniques that teachers at a Fort Worth school for students with disabilities used against a student in 2021, leading to his death.
Although the organization doesn’t have data showing a correlation between the number of uncertified special education teachers in a district and the number of dangerous restraints against students, Aleman said he’s concerned that teachers who aren’t adequately trained in special education might also not have training in the kinds of de-escalation techniques that are intended to defuse challenging behaviors so such restraints are never necessary.
UT prof says most people have little exposure to world of disability
Katie Tackett, a professor in the special education department in the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education, said she thinks part of the reason for the shortage is that most people don’t have much exposure to the world of disability, and they don’t think of themselves as being connected to it, even though they live alongside people with disabilities. So even people who are considering a career in education don’t see themselves working in special education classrooms, she said.
Tackett said she’s also run across the belief that it takes a certain kind of person to teach special education, and most people don’t think of themselves as being that kind of person. She said that’s a misconception that unnecessarily limits the number of people who go into special education.
“I think a lot of people feel like you need to have this innate sense of patience and kind of be like Snow White, where wildlife animals are attracted to you and you’re quiet and calm and all of those things,” she said. “...I have not found that to hold water.”
Tackett said having teachers working on emergency permits serving in special education classrooms isn’t ideal. There’s a certain baseline of knowledge and skills that special education teachers need that’s both deeper and broader than that of a regular classroom teacher, she said. Generally, a teacher hired on an emergency permit won’t have that kind of background, she said.
Part of that broad required knowledge base comes from the way special education teacher certification is structured, Tackett said: while regular classroom teachers are generally certified to teach specific age groups, special education teachers are certified to work in grades pre-K through 12. That means those teachers could be working with students anywhere from age 3 through 22, she said. Special education teachers also need to know how certain disabilities affect students’ learning, what kind of support they need and the instructional strategies teachers might use to help them learn, she said.
Special education teachers also need to know how to manage students who sometimes exhibit challenging behavior in class, Tackett said. They need to be able to understand what those students are trying to communicate through that behavior and work with them to find replacement behaviors that aren’t as disruptive to the rest of the class, she said. They also need to be able to understand how to structure their classroom environment in a way that supports students so they don’t need to engage in those behaviors to begin with, she said.
Special education teachers also need to understand how to handle students’ IEPs. When Tackett teaches her college students to write IEPs, she reminds them that they are writing for four audiences: the student who is covered by the IEP, that student’s parents, other educators who will eventually work with that student and any lawyers who might be involved in special education litigation at some point. Even teachers who have years of experience in general education classrooms don’t necessarily have a background in navigating IEPs, she said.
All that being said, Tackett said, school districts that hire emergency certified teachers to staff their special education classrooms are usually doing so out of desperation. Often, they’re left with the choice of hiring a teacher on an emergency permit or no one at all, she said.
“I understand why districts are making the move that they are,” Tackett said. “There’s not a deep, wide pool of certified special education teachers that districts are choosing not to hire.”
