SDEA/SDUSD Joint Special Education Committee Update

A team of SDEA educator leaders meets monthly with the District’s Special Education leadership as a joint Special Education committee to discuss strategies to alleviate educator workload. The role of this committee has taken on additional importance this year as we absorb the impact of vacancies of classified and certificated special education positions that have been driven by the pandemic.
SDEA special education site leaders and SDEA members of the committee met last week to brainstorm on appropriate educator roles within the district’s learning loss recovery support process that intends to address lack of student growth on goals due to the school shutdown last school year and current staffing shortages. We then advocated for the implementation of these collectively developed measures at our monthly meeting. Action items from our meeting on Monday are: 1) the district will release guidelines on developing site plans for learning loss recovery support that can inform decisions at IEP meetings and 2) the district and SDEA will send a joint communication to case managers clarifying that the staffing shortage leading to students’ Specialized Academic Instruction (SAI) hours not being met does not equate to case managers being responsible for taking on all the extra work that this generates for students on their caseload.