Last March, on the final day of spring break, San Antonio Independent School District announced that its schools would close. By the time she launched her first virtual lesson, Erin Jaques had lost contact with five of her eight students. “It was scary,” Jaques, a former middle school special education teacher with San Antonio ISD, told the HPR. “I would be sending messages to whatever numbers I had. We were calling, we had the school calling, we had our person who did family engagements trying to make home visits, to no avail.”
The district continued to issue closure notices in several-day increments until Gov. Greg Abbott announced on April 17 that all Texas schools would close for the remainder of the school year. Jaques and her fellow special education teacher had no consistent contact with the majority of their students for the rest of the semester.
Thousands of miles and an ocean away, Kelly Teshima-McCormick encountered similar problems. When her school in Waimānalo, Hawaii, switched to remote instruction in March, she found herself unable to reach many of her kindergarten and first-grade special education students. When that happened, Teshima-McCormick told the HPR, there was little hope of providing these students with the services they needed. “If we were unable to connect with families, we could not get their consent to meet online with their students, set up a consistent meeting time, or even check in with how they were coping with the pandemic and school closure.”
Special education teachers are not the only ones who saw attendance dwindle as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened in the United States and forced schools across the country to close their doors. But the onset of the pandemic and the shift to remote education that followed has placed unique pressures on students with disabilities and their families. Students and parents have often been left to fend for themselves as they watch disability support services like speech therapy, physical therapy or counseling disappear alongside in-person learning — even though students are entitled to support services under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act — and education researchers fear that students with disabilities face a heightened risk of learning loss during periods of remote instruction. Education systems around the world have been buffeted by this crisis, and advocates worry that the scramble to find stopgap solutions could leave students with disabilities gravely vulnerable.
Problems of Distance
Of course, there is no single learning environment that works for every student with special needs, and remote learning is no exception. For that reason, it is crucial not to adopt an overgeneralized approach to this issue, said Anita Marshall, a lecturer at the University of Florida who studies ways to improve accessibility for students in STEM fields, in an interview with the HPR. “Everybody with a disability is experiencing this very differently,” Marshall explained. Some educators say it is that variety of experience — and the fact that remote learning cannot properly address it — that has made instruction so ineffective for many of their students over the past several months.
“The best teaching is done when you’re able to differentiate,” explained Jaques. “And that is a minute-to-minute process.” In the classroom, teachers differentiate by working with students individually or in small groups and adapting their approach in the moment to suit each student. The strategy is particularly important for students with disabilities, and special education teachers need a clear understanding of the classroom dynamic — something that can be impossible to discern during an online session — in order to determine, in real time, whether to stick to a teaching method or adjust it. “Those sorts of split-second decisions are what make good teachers, and you cannot do that on a virtual platform.”
Even if teachers could provide online instruction tailored to each student — and even if all students showed up to online class — many researchers and educators worry that students with certain kinds of disabilities will never receive the kind of instruction they need through an online platform.
“Most of the evidence-based programs in special education were not designed, and have not been tested, in a virtual environment,” Allison Gilmour, a special education researcher and assistant professor at Temple University’s College of Education and Human Development, told the HPR. “However, many students with disabilities have attention or behavioral challenges that may be hard for teachers to address when delivering instruction virtually.”
Teshima-McCormick agreed: “Because so much of special education is the relationship and interaction between students and their teacher, not being able to support students in person is very difficult in most cases.” When that relationship shifted online, her students’ attention, focus and organizational skills wavered. “Even modeling certain desired behaviors is part of the education process, which is very difficult online,” she said. “Missing out on those small interactions or personal moments with teachers can make progress difficult.”
Rob Gorski, a single father of three sons with autism, told the HPR that those losses were equally pronounced on the other side of the virtual classroom. When schools closed in Ohio, Gorski said that his sons, who range in age from 12 to 20, keenly felt the lack of student-teacher interaction. “There’s just a disconnect when you lose that in-person contact,” he said. “I think the screen is a disconnect.”
Gorski also mentioned that remote learning has scrambled the day-to-day patterns that were a source of comfort to his sons, and to many students with autism: “We had to change our routine from going to school to having school at home. That also forced us to throw out our at-home routine.” In Gorski’s experience, all these disruptions have combined to stall his sons’ progress in school. “None of these kids are achieving what they would achieve if they were in the classroom,” he said.
Special education teachers and researchers are similarly troubled by the prospect of learning loss — the possibility that students are not making the academic gains in the remote setting that they might be expected to make in the classroom. Research indicates that the entire U.S. student population, not just those with disabilities, has likely already experienced some degree of learning loss since schools went remote last spring. But Gilmour thinks the effects could be exacerbated for special education students. “It seems likely that students with disabilities may have even greater learning losses than their peers if they aren’t receiving the special education services they need to make progress,” she said.
For Gorski, academic progress is only one dimension of the issue. “My big concern is that this takes away his love of learning,” he said of his middle son. “He was so obsessed with learning, and now he wants nothing to do with it, and that worries me.”
Crumbling Communication
Control over the public education system is highly decentralized in the United States. The federal government holds some sway, to be sure, but individual states exert considerable control over their schools. The country also has a long record of local governance within states: There are over 13,000 school districts in the U.S., and all have their own internal administrative structures. In a state of emergency, many of these lines of communication seem to have faltered.
The school governance structure in Hawaii, where Teshima-McCormick taught last school year, might seem to facilitate communication: The state has a single school district. But even in that environment, collaboration stalled. “Almost every decision was made by our principal because the state was moving too slowly on protocol or guidance,” said Teshima-McCormick. “We had an obligation to our students and their families.”
Even within individual schools, levels of communication have varied throughout the pandemic, often with troubling implications for students with disabilities. Teshima-McCormick approved of her administration’s approach: “I felt that our school was doing the best it could with what resources and information we had at the time.”
Elsewhere, the story was different. Chantee Watts is also a special education teacher with San Antonio ISD, but unlike Jaques, who teaches students with disabilities in a general education classroom, Watts teaches in a classroom known as an Alternate Curriculum Environment, designed specifically for students with disabilities. Her students join their peers in general education for classes like art, music, and P.E. But this year, as some students returned to in-person learning, Watts found that her class had not been assigned time in those general education courses. “My class is on the back-burner for a lot of it,” she said, in an interview with the HPR, of her school’s day-to-day planning. “We’re kind of an afterthought.” In the end, she systematically scoured the schedule for times that would work for her students and brought the list to the administration herself.
On the other hand, after losing touch with most of them last semester, Watts is once again in regular contact with her students’ parents — another critical dimension of communication, especially for students with disabilities. Watts, Teshima-McCormick and Jaques all described the wave of challenges that the families of their students faced as schools went remote. All three worked in school districts with a high percentage of low-income families; Teshima-McCormick recalls that many of her students lacked access not only to a stable internet connection, but to other basic amenities. “My particular school community has many challenges surrounding housing, food insecurity and electricity,” she said. “Most of our remote learning challenges stem from those out-of-school factors.”
Socioeconomic disparities are an urgent concern for the entire U.S. student population, and they have only been exacerbated during the pandemic. On top of those pressures, parents of students with disabilities have faced the loss of support services that their children would ordinarily receive and to which they still remain legally entitled. Parents find themselves having to provide the kinds of support that researchers say only specialists can and should be expected to provide, and the strain takes a toll. “Finding a balance for me as a parent is very, very difficult,” Gorski said. “I’m not a replacement for a teacher.”
Watts empathized. “It’s not that they’re not trying,” she said of her students’ parents. “They’re just not teachers, and they’re specifically not special education teachers. They know how to love their child, they know how to care for their kid, but it’s a lot to try and teach them three times three.”
As the new school year approached, many education leaders tried to mend those communication channels and strengthen the collaboration between states and their school districts, as well as between parents and educators, that proved so inconsistent at the end of last year. Russell Johnston, senior associate commissioner and director of special education at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, readily acknowledges that the state education agency was unprepared for the kind of emergency that COVID-19 triggered for the Massachusetts school system. “Last spring, we were really caught off-guard. We’d never done anything like this before,” he told the HPR. Everyone, he added, had to cobble together solutions in real time. “I really appreciate the ingenuity that people applied,” he said, “and yet, it also left a lot of questions about how we can do better.”
One of the most crucial efforts by the DESE, Johnston said, was to provide districts with detailed guidance early in the summer, well ahead of the new school year. Because only some students would be able to return to in-person learning in the fall of 2020, the DESE made sure the guidance was clear: Students with the most significant disabilities should be offered the chance to return to the classroom first, if they so choose. With that guidance, “there’s not as much guesswork between districts,” Johnston said. “There’s more consistency — as much as possible — about who’s prioritized for in-person learning.”
Johnston also agreed that consistent parent communication and support is crucial. “At the end of the day,” he said, “special education is really about families and educators coming together with their shared knowledge of what will work for students.” To facilitate that collaboration, the DESE issued guidance that included a discussion template for district administrators to use, if they chose to, in their planning meetings with the parents of students with disabilities. Johnston emphasized, however, that non-binding guidance is not sufficient on its own. The DESE has tried to implement a number of concrete supports for parents and families, like an interpretation hotline that can be used by special education teachers and parents who speak a language other than English. “We put out guidance; we tell people what to expect,” said Johnston. “But we also have to create the structures, the supports, the resources to make it happen.”
A Force for Accessibility?
As the pandemic has worn on, the country has realized that remote education will likely continue, at least in some form, for months. For some students with disabilities, said Marshall, the researcher at the University of Florida, that may not be a bad thing. For students with physical disabilities or chronic illness, for instance, moving online can greatly increase access to coursework that would not have been available to them before. “I hope it’s one of the small silver linings that we get out of this whole mess,” she said. “I think we won’t ever go back to what we had before, where there were no virtual or remote options for a huge part of society.”
During a pandemic, this kind of access has been crucial for some students with medical needs. Laura Spiegel, whose seven-year-old daughter has cystic fibrosis, told the HPR that her family needs to be vigilant about the spread of germs even in normal times: People with CF are much more prone to lung infections, and those infections are more likely to become severe and require hospitalization. Spiegel said that when her daughter’s school in Indianapolis announced the transition to remote learning, “it was actually a little bit of a relief.” Spiegel explained, “We spend a lot of time as a family focusing on, how do we not define our daughter by her illness?” Spiegel was relieved for her daughter that the school’s plan was compatible with her medical needs; otherwise, she said, “That’s just one more thing that makes you different.”
While empirical research remains unclear about the potential benefits and drawbacks of online learning for students with sensory disabilities and learning differences, Marshall said one thing is certain: “Technology is only as good as its application. When it comes to online learning, as with any sort of technology, accessibility has to be at the front.” Educators and administrators, she said, should follow the idea of universal design; no matter what kind of educational program they are designing, they should “build it from the ground up with the principles of accessibility in mind.”
Johnston agreed. “Don’t try to tack on the needs of students with disabilities after you’re done with all your other planning,” he said. “They need to be involved from the beginning.” And if there does seem to be a problem? “Start figuring that out now,” he said. “If a student isn’t participating in remote learning, reconvene the team. Get to the bottom of what’s happening now.”
Keeping these principles in mind will likely strengthen special education services during the period of remote learning. But perhaps some aspects of education just cannot be reimagined in a digital form. For Erin Jaques, that is true of the person-to-person connections that she developed with her students. “Relationships with my kids have always been my number-one priority,” she said. “I’d have a group of students who would see me in between classes, or they’d come and have lunch with me — all of that stops.” For her students, “those spaces and opportunities were no longer there.”
These experiences suggest that more resources, better planning and strengthened communication could go a long way toward improving remote learning for students with disabilities. But they also reaffirm the country’s obligation to those students — to all students — to follow the guidance of public health experts and take the measures that will weaken the hold of the pandemic, so that schools can reopen and begin to recapture those aspects of education that do not translate into digital form.
Image by Kelly Sikkema is licensed under the Unsplash License.
