I am a parent of a fifth grader at the Kennedy-Longfellow School in Cambridge. When we learned last November that the school would close at the end of this academic year, our community knew we were experiencing the end result of a long, long series of incremental decisions and neglect that resulted in unbalanced outcomes for students throughout the Cambridge Public School district.
And we were mad. We said we wanted to make sure what happened to K-Lo never happened again. We want to prevent systemic imbalance and lift up policies that prioritize and center the needs of all kids in the district. Because we at K-Lo know intimately that being considered “low priority” actually just shows a district’s priorities.
This experience makes the Feb. 19 Harvard Crimson article “Department of Ed Report Finds Massachusetts Fails to Support Students with Special Education Needs” frustratingly familiar. That article says that children with special education needs – kids whose education is, at least for now, protected under the law – have not been well-served in this state. In Cambridge, effective special education service delivery has often been buried under a morass of revolving-door hiring, cover-your-ass communications practices, continued overinvestment in education products vs front-line people and panicked attempts to pacify the loudest voices. But haphazard priorities result in uneven outcomes.
A management case in point: Kids whose medical or learning needs require a 1:1 aide for them to successfully access the curriculum.
In Cambridge, 1:1 instructional aides (also known as 1:1 special education paraprofessionals) have and do exist, and kids who have them frequently benefit from this form of support. But though the Office of Special Education does post and try to hire for a 1:1 para assigned by an individualized education program team, the practice itself is deprecated in Cambridge. As a result, the assignment process is inconsistent, opaque and murky, differs significantly between schools within the district and seems to indicate an institutional case of mixed signals and commitment issues. But while there may be better ways forward, the coordinated will to discover, innovate and put more effective systems in place has been lost in departmental fragmentation of budgets and personnel.
Here’s a possible way this could play out in action:
Consider a kid struggling to regulate their behavior in a general education setting. Maybe that student previously had a 1:1 aide, maybe they didn’t, but for whatever reason, things have deteriorated for the student and for their classmates. While a behavior plan to help the student was developed, the attention of the district’s consulting behavior specialist has been spread so thin by dipping in and out of multiple cases at several schools that events have progressed past their awareness. Now all recommendations are stale.
The classroom teacher is doing their best to provide differentiated trauma-informed instruction with consistently high expectations and outcomes, and at the same time, they’re being told by district middle management that 1:1 paras are an ineffective support strategy that fosters learned helplessness.
But the student’s needs and classroom safety issues keep escalating.
Faced with the departmental decisiveness of Jell-O, school-based administrators might find themselves problem-solving by assigning a building substitute or a classroom paraprofessional as an ad hoc 1:1 paraprofessional to assist that student. This child is in distress; other kids have to learn somehow. What other choices do they have in front of them?
But because the support of a 1:1 paraprofessional was not determined by an IEP team, as per state guidance, the ad hoc 1:1 paraprofessional has been put in a very difficult position. They have not received supervision or guidance from the school district’s Office of Special Education. They may or may not have had training to support a student in crisis. They may or may not feel comfortable in the assigned role. And they are no longer able to fulfill their actual duties as a building substitute or a classroom paraprofessional. Amid the best of intentions, this “solution” has now hurting multiple students, potentially across multiple classrooms.
This worst-case scenario begs many questions.
How many students in the district have 1:1 paraprofessionals as part of their IEPs? How many students have unofficial 1:1 paras? How do the outcomes for those students compare with those of classmates with similar learning and behavioral profiles? How many principals have made the difficult decision to reassign a building sub to an unofficial 1:1 para assignment? How do those decisions affect the student in question and their classmates’ learning environment? If you’re pulling a building sub or even a general education paraprofessional into that role, how are you filling (or are you filling) the job that individual was initially hired to do? And, finally, when individuals are reassigned to jobs that they did not seek and may not be trained to do, what is the impact on staff morale and retention?
So much swirl leading to poorer (and more expensive!) outcomes for everyone, all wrapped up in the extra staff time that it took to deal with the administrative problem of grownups who forgot that the responsibility in front of them was much clearer than the anxieties they brought to the question. Their loyalty and their priority should be to the students, not to the department.
This budget season, I urge the School Committee to get back to the one core truth embedded in an individualized education plan: What are the individual needs of the kid in front of you? How can that child access a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment?
The right way forward is often far simpler than we make it.
Anne Coburn, Otis Street, Cambridge
The writer is parent of a fifth grader at the Kennedy-Longfellow School in Cambridge.
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Good points, Anne. It’s very important that paraprofessionals receive support and supervision. It’s a role that can have a very positive effect on a classroom, but there are many pitfalls as well. Your return to the fundamental guiding questions is wise.