Scholl Education

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01.23.09

There is a paradigm shift in the role of education, ushering in a new era where the emphasis has to be on getting our children ready for their future roles in society. One needs to be mindful of the fact that we have to look at the child today in the setting 2020 and cater to the advancement and developmental changes that are likely to change the way the world will be poised then.

Schools thus play a very important role in shaping the future and destiny of a child which brings us to the theme “School choice – foundation for life”. This conference aims to address some of the challenges facing the stakeholders and ponders over the alternatives before us so that the best way forward can be crystallized. Special education was originally a classroom full of kids who for one reason or another, couldn’t learn at the pace of their original classmates, or who had behavioral problems. Today there are several categories of special education and in most states, licenses to match those categories. That means special education teachers face an additional educational component for licensure and when they obtain it, will most likely be paid at a higher scale than regular classroom teachers.

The options for obtaining special education licensure are usually the traditional educational institutions because of the requirement for supervised classroom work that is a feature of any teacher education program. However there are a few schools with online programs that are accredited by the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) or by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). The University of North Carolina offers several online programs for licensed teachers. The East Carolina campus has a master’s program for licensed teachers that leads to a MAEd with emphasis on one of the following: mental retardation, emotional/behavioral disabilities, learning disabilities, or low-incidence disabilities.

The Chapel Hill campus has a MAT program with general training in special education for students with mild disabilities. The Western Carolina campus offers an online MAEd with three tracks: mild disabilities, severe disabilities, and gifted children. The University of Massachusetts Online (UMassOnline) has several special education options. There is a Master of Education in special education for children with impaired vision, and a MEd in vision rehabilitation. A MEd in Curriculum & Instruction is available with emphasis on children with autism. There is also a certificate program for Behavioral Intervention with Autistic Students.

The University of North Texas and the University of Minnesota/Mankato both have graduate certificate programs in special education. Florida State University offers the Master of Science in Special Education with specialization in severe disabilities (autism and severe cognitive disability), early childhood special education (birth through age 5 years), and high incidence disabilities. The University of Kentucky and Gonzaga University both have online graduate degrees in special education. The University of Missouri/Columbia offers a MEd in Mental Health Practices in Schools, designed for both teachers and administrators.

Most of these programs are designed to meet teacher licensing requirements in the state where the campus is located; however there is a license reciprocity agreement for teachers with at least 33 states as participants. There are a few exclusively online schools with accredited special education programs; the first to achieve NCATE recognition is Western Governors University, which also offers several K-12 teaching degrees that meet licensure standards. I get it. Coping with a learning disability is a constant struggle – a struggle for the student, a struggle for the parents, and a struggle for the teachers.

I may not have a learning disability myself, but I can still relate. My chronic arthritis limits me daily in what I can and cannot do physically. While it is not the same as dealing with a learning disability, it does help me with the empathy factor. I am a pre-service teacher. I have a year and a half left of college before I am working full-time (hopefully) in the schools. But in my time at doing field work for my university classes, I have learned quite a bit about students with learning disabilities. I have worked with the teachers behind-the-scenes who have fought for years to help their struggling students.

I have worked directly with students who continue to amaze me at how they try day after day to keep learning. And I have even worked with a few of the parents who face the challenges with their children every single day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While at the end of the school day we teachers get to go home and take a break, the parents of students with disabilities do not. They face new and old challenges each day without a break – making them people to respect, and to learn from.

That’s why I spoke with a few parents of special needs children to get their unique perspective – one that many of us cannot relate to – on what they think teachers should know about dealing with parents of special needs students. 1) The first request – just talk to us! Parents of students with disabilities say the most important thing you can do is open up the lines of communication. And that makes sense, when you think about it. How can we expect parents to help us with issues during the school day when we have not strategized with them? So teachers, talk to your parents about what methods of communication are easiest for them – some prefer email, others like phone calls, and some appreciate notes sent home in a notebook. Make sure this communication method works for you, too.

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