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Not to worry: By the middle of last week, Hibbert was preparing for today’s opening day at Disnard Elementary School, under the tutelage of colleague Ben Cooper, a nine-year veteran of the school with a total of 30 years as an educator.
“Right from the start, I got a real sense of welcoming and sense of community,” Hibbert, who lives in Hillsborough, N.H., where she grew up, said on Friday. “It felt like it would be a good place to start my career.”
Administrators in Claremont’s School Administrative Unit 6, in Newport’s SAU 43 and elsewhere in New Hampshire hope to find more where Hibbert came from. After hiring Hibbert, and going into Labor Day weekend, SAU 6 still counted openings throughout the system for a total of five special education teachers and 18 paraprofessionals, the aides who help students with special needs adjust to the classroom.
Among 1,745 students expected to start classes at Claremont public schools this week, between 375 and 400 are diagnosed with special needs requiring a variety of services. That’s about 22 percent of the student body, close to double the statewide average, SAU 6 special education director Benjamin Nester estimated.
“We’re short of paraprofessionals in every building,” Nester said on Wednesday. “There always seems to be a shortage. I think that is pretty consistent statewide.”
Indeed, SAU 43 and a number of school districts around New Hampshire are looking for more teachers and more paraprofessionals, as well as for more support staff in areas such as occupational therapy assistants. While the New Hampshire Department of Education is just starting to count the needs for certified teachers this year for its annual “critical shortage” report, the department’s Bureau of Credentialing expects to see shortages comparable to last year’s.
“In 2017, 193 special education positions were available at some point during the year,” Bill Ross, who conducts the survey, said on Friday. “At the beginning of August 2017, there were 41 positions still to be filled.”
Newport accounts for two of New Hampshire’s open positions as school re-opens this week.
“This is an exceptional year for us,” said SAU 43 superintendent Cindy Gallagher, whose duties include supervising district special-education staff. “We lost a number of relatively new case managers (special education teachers) with prior experience, who we’d trained, who were able to leave for higher-paying positions elsewhere.”
One of the teachers Newport lost, Gallagher added, resigned for lack of an affordable place to live in the area. So when Gallagher found a qualified teacher from one of the Plains states, through a website for special education administrators, “I started chasing down housing for the woman coming from Oklahoma.”
Ronda Baril, a 40-year veteran of the Claremont school system who currently oversees special education at the middle school, said the many challenges for paraprofessionals include finding and training people who can “strike a balance between teaching the kids independence and dealing with learned helplessness. You have to meet their needs so that the teachers can deal with the academic side, but it’s not about doing the work for them.”
While Gallagher said that Newport isn’t as short of paraprofessionals as Claremont, word is getting around the Granite State about shortages of teachers and paras as well as “related-service” professionals such as occupational therapy assistants. The nonprofit NH Parent Information Center, for example, has been hearing confirmation about the personnel shortages.
“Most of the contacts we’ve had from parents … have been about paraprofessionals and language pathologists,” said Bonnie Dunham, assistant director of the information center’s special education project. “Paras can be a real difficult area because traditionally they don’t get paid very well. Right now the economy is good and the job market is relatively great. The bad news is that that person looking for a job, they don’t need to take something that isn’t paying that well unless it’s their passion.”
Baril, who started in the Claremont district as a speech/language pathologist, worked in a variety of settings, including as a fourth-grade teacher, before becoming a mentor to the district’s special education teachers and, most recently, coordinator of special education at Claremont Middle School.
“Overall, the biggest impact on teachers in our district and elsewhere is burnout,” Baril said on Thursday. “The paperwork alone is so much more of a burden, partly because we have become so much better at determining who truly has an educational disability so there’s more to document and plan for dealing with. It’s a hard time right now, especially for our elementary schools that are not fully staffed.”
In Vermont, observations about staffing needs vary. Agency of Education spokesman Ted Fisher said last week that “we currently don’t have a teacher shortage in licensed special educators. Paraeducators aren’t licensed so we don’t have any data about them.”
At Thetford Academy, special education services director Deb Sanders-Dame, who oversees a staff of seven full-time paraprofessionals, a part-time paraprofessional, a part-time coordinator of special education and five teachers, is hearing a different story.
“(At) group meetings and on our group emails … people are constantly looking for special educators, speech pathologists and other related personnel,” Sanders-Dame wrote in an exchange of emails last week. “Our recent hunt for a para ended abruptly only because a student moved. … At this time of year, it would have been hard to find someone otherwise.”
William Bugg, Thetford Academy’s head of school, observed that even at schools with full staffs of special education personnel, educators are dealing with challenges that their predecessors a generation ago couldn’t have imagined.
“Some special education students, and regular education students as well, face significant challenges outside of school, including poverty and other societal problems,” Bugg wrote in an email. “Student needs are greater than ever, and our country’s and state’s social service programs are not keeping up with these needs. Increasingly, schools are becoming social service centers, for the simple reason that before we can educate our students, we have to ensure that they are well fed and emotionally ready to learn.”
Mandy Hibbert said she heard the call to work with children less than two months after she graduated from Plymouth State University with a degree in business management in 2006.
“I was working at a bank, and it was miserable,” Hibbert said. “I’m the kind of person who needs to be engaged and moving around, really working with people on an intense basis.”
She met that need first by going to work at a summer camp for kids with emotional disabilities. Over the next 12 years, she worked at “therapeutic schools” of the sort to which public schools sometimes send students with particularly difficult needs, students with a wide range of emotional, psychological and physical disabilities.
“The experience in those places motivated me and inspired me to pursue my certification,” said Hibbert, who completed her education at New England College in Henniker, N.H., this year. “I have seen a lot.”
And she’s seen a lot more than disabilities that children were born with, or that they developed through illness or physical injury.
“At my interview, we talked about how a lot of special education now is focused on trauma, from problems outside of school like addiction in the family,” Hibbert said. “That’s becoming more and more common. They’re coming into school with problems that are affecting them in school. It’s a totally new thing over the last few years.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304. Education news also can be sent to schoolnotes@vnews.com.