Special education faces unique challenges amid a pandemic

Cody Wilson, a paraeducator at Scottsbluff High School, stood at the white board writing down differences between fact and opinion when he noticed one of his students.

“Can you put your mask up, Seth?” he asked, repeating a request he’d made earlier. Seth Boyer, a freshman, pulled his mask up over his nose. It falls down a few seconds later, but he leaves it there until Wilson asks him to pull it back up again.

This is just one of the routine challenges that Wilson and other special education staff face as they attempt to teach their students through directed health measures that have been put in place due to COVID-19.

“It’s not fun to not see a student’s face, because a face is worth a million words,” Wilson said. “If they can’t see my face and the way my reactions are toward them, they could take it in a different way … In special education, they need to see that face, and they need to see that smile.”

The pandemic has provided a unique set of challenges for students, parents, teachers and administrators since its onset. Those challenges are amplified for those students who require special services.

“It was very difficult, obviously,” Seth’s father, Bill Boyer, said. “He thrives on structure and not having that on a day-to-day basis was very difficult for him. And missing the interaction with teachers and classmates was very difficult as well.”

Seth has a rare chromosome disorder called 2q23.1 microdeletion syndrome, the general symptoms of which include a deficiency in speech development, intellectual disability and repetitive behavior.

Boyer said that during the national closure, he continued to go into work while his wife worked from home. However, because Seth is not a typical 14-year-old and requires supervision, it made at-home learning and remote working a challenge.

“Luckily, we had someone to come in to help watch him,” he said. “It would have been virtually impossible to watch and educate him and work at the same time.”

Seth is one of around 450 students in the Scottsbluff Public Schools District with an Individualized Education Program (IEP). This means they require learning services specific to each individual student. Generalized teaching strategies don’t necessarily work for them.

However, when school districts across the country went full shutdown in March, many teachers and administrators were doing their best to adjust to a new reality of teaching, trying to provide services to the general student population.

“The Department of Education, when (the pandemic) initially began, gave the district’s leeway because they were overnight trying to develop remote options,” said Amy Rhone, state director of the office of special education at the Nebraska Department of Education.

There are a lot of legal implications that affect how special needs students are taught and provided services, Rhone said, so her office began providing resources for teachers right away. Pamela Brezenski, director of special education at ESU 13, said the legal elements were a challenge during COVID-19.

“There was nothing in the law that was established prior to this to know what was going to happen,” she said. “We wanted to make sure we were doing things correctly and the right way. We were gaining info as it was given out.”

According to a Questions and Answers document from the national Department of Education, states are responsible to provide free appropriate public education (FAPE) to students with disabilities only if the school districts are providing educational services to the rest of its students.

“States said, ‘We’re not doing any additional learning; we’re just going to do enrichment, and if we do enrichment, we don’t have to provide special ed services.’ There were states that said that to their staff and to their teachers,” Wendy Kemling-Horner, executive director of student services for the Scottsbluff School District, said. “Our state was very proactive, and as a district, we were very proactive.

“We said that is absolutely not where we want to be. We want to provide additional support and education to our students and our families.”

Rhone said while her office provided as much guidance as it could to the districts, the Nebraska Department of Education has received an increase in special education disputes across their four dispute resolution options — state complaint, mediation, due process and IEP facilitation — since March.

Kemling-Horner said Scottsbluff schools managed to meet with every student and his or her parents/guardians in the spring to address how students with disabilities would continue receiving their education. Despite their efforts, though, virtual learning was still hard on teachers, students and their parents.

Maggie Anderson, a special education resource teacher at Scottsbluff High School, said it is hard to know if a student is grasping the material without being present with the student.

“It’s definitely not the way I’d prefer to teach,” she said. “I like being hands-on and know they’re understanding and not just saying, ‘Yeah, I get it’ because they want you to stop talking.”

Seth attested to the challenge of remote learning. He said he liked being in school, but the pandemic was still difficult to deal with.

“I feel bad because of COVID,” Seth said through his once-again fallen mask. He said wearing a mask was hard. Wilson asked him why. “Because they are hard to breathe.”

Despite the challenges of adjusting to go back to school, and a new school for Seth, who moved up from the middle school this year, Boyer said it was worth getting that structure and socialization back into Seth’s life.

“We’ve been visiting with our doctors and they think that the risk of him getting COVID-19 or having something serious from that is far less than any damage that is done by not being in school and getting that socialization,” he said. “It’s not just about him being happy, but to develop as a person. It’s vital to find creative ways, and (the school) has done a good job of that, to keep kids in the classroom.”

*Originally published in Scottsbluff Star-Herald on Aug. 29, 2020.