Prince William special needs students lack required resources

Opinion 

Many in the community should now be aware of the financial challenges facing Prince William County Schools. I want to commend the school system for taking unprecedented efforts to engage and inform the community.

As the division officials have clearly laid out, county supervisors and the state control the funding, and the School Board controls how that funding is spent.

Prince William County has hundreds of critical unmet needs, and the only way to meet any of them is by making strategic decisions with the funding we do have. Wisely using the resources we already have will help re-build taxpayer trust.

It would be a logical fallacy to continue with the same practices but expect different results. Therefore, we need to do a deeper examination of Prince William County’s leadership, staffing, and practices in special education so that we can best meet the needs of our students.

In the midst of this budget discussion, the school system has shed some light on areas of unmet critical needs. This information is available on the school district website, which I highly encourage the residents of Prince William County to visit. A quick summary reveals more than 300 unfilled positions. Although some of these positions are central office positions, most are instructional. However, the needs that I find most striking are the ones listed under the Department of Special Education.

Recently, I have begun visiting voters and talking to them about issues facing their children. I am hearing the greatest concerns from parents of students receiving special education services.

One woman broke down in tears as she detailed the lack of support her son received in the school system. Another parent detailed how he contemplated filing a due process claim because he believed the current level of services were not meeting his child’s needs.

We as a school division must provide more support and better allocate money to these critical areas, so the quality of education improves for all students in our school system.

Sadly, this list of unmet needs only confirms the lack of funding our special education department is receiving.  According to the Critical Unmet Needs document, we need school psychologists, speech therapists, and numerous special education classroom positions. 

Even more troubling is that when you compare the current school budget to the 2007 budget we are $3.3 million short of adequately funding special education programs, according to Mr. Dave Cline’s slide in the budget presentation. Many students receiving special education services are also part of the economically disadvantaged population, where we have an appalling $12.2 million shortfall. This raises questions of where our actual tax dollars are going, and how are we so far off from adequately funding the four critical needs areas outlined in the current budget?

The available data only highlights the major struggles facing our division, families and students receiving special education services. Across the country, students receiving special education services are not achieving in math at all school levels. Special education in math is a glaring weakness across our county, and across all school levels.

According to the Virginia Department of Education, Prince William County did not meet the Federal Annual Measurable Objective in 2014-2015 in this area. In my magisterial district, only 25 percent of students receiving special education services were proficient at Potomac High School, and 43 percent services were proficient at Forest Park High School. The data is similar for all PWCS high schools.

According to the Virginia Department of Education, 47 percent of Prince William students receiving special education services were deemed proficient in math. Fairfax is 52 percent, Loudoun is 50 percent, and Stafford is 48 percent. As evidenced in the data, math, and special education clearly require more resources.   

Yes, in a perfect world it would be great to invest $50 million to close these gaps, not just for students with disabilities, but all critical need areas. Unfortunately, we are not in a perfect world in Prince William County. As we work to invest any new funding, we need to be extremely intentional and purposeful by finding our greatest needs.

Currently, the superintendent’s plan is to reduce one student in Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II classes across the county by adding funding for one math teacher at each high school. I wish we could do more and fully tackle the class size reduction.

Unfortunately, we do not have more, but if we only have roughly $1 million, I propose we address class-size reduction with a more intentional and purposeful strategy.  A more efficient use of resources will maximize student output and build goodwill with county taxpayers.

Our school system could consider spreading this investment equitably across the four critical needs areas of special education, ESOL, Gifted and economically disadvantaged students. However, spreading such a paltry sum across four areas would make the impact negligible. Instead, I propose we focus on the greatest need: math for students receiving special education services.

The available $1 million should go to hiring special education teachers. Those teachers should be distributed based on the number of students receiving special education services in each school.

By increasing funding to hire additional math specialists, we can augment and help the current math staff teach the current population. This would provide more opportunities for collaborative planning and implementation between special education teachers and general education math teachers. Special education teachers are experts in learning strategies and differentiation that can be used to benefit all students. This also would bring us closer to having general education and special education teachers leading a classroom together, potentially reducing the student-to-teacher ratio for all students.

This is only one of many steps that need to come if we are going to make meaningful long-term change for the betterment of all students. However, every journey starts with a first step, and this would be a very strategic, data-driven first step. 

Justin Wilk is the author of this post. He is running for the Prince William Potomac District School Board seat.