By: Rilyn Eischens
4/15/2020
By the seventh day of distance learning, Simone Lott could have used a day of rest.
When Minnesota schools closed in mid-March, Lott found herself teaching her four children, including 7-year-old son Samael, who has cerebral palsy. That was on top of her usual responsibilities running a household as a single parent and her full-time job as a social worker.
She already felt behind at work after she was bedridden for a frightening two weeks in March with what her doctor said was likely COVID-19, though she was never tested.
Nothing was easy that first week in her new role as mom playing teacher, and Lott doesn’t expect that to change.
“I think what people forget is that taking care of special needs kids is not just like taking care of any regular kid. I’m trying to manage that and the environment with all the stress going on every single day,” she said. “I’m a mom. I’m not a teacher.”
With Minnesota schools closed for nearly a month in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19, educators and families of children with disabilities are scrambling to navigate uncharted territory: providing remote special education instruction and services to students with complex needs.
Like Lott, many are struggling to adjust to a new reality, one where they must juggle their roles as parents with the duties of teachers, therapists and full-time caretakers. Parents say they feel educators are doing their best to support families’ efforts, but managing specialized services and school work at home is a stressful, tiring undertaking. They worry that without in-person instruction and services, their children will lose hard-earned progress.
Special education instructors also face a monumental change in creating and administering individual distance learning plans, sometimes for as many as 25 students. These plans have to respect each child’s abilities, needs, resources at home and legal right to an appropriate education — a delicate balance teachers can only achieve by working closely with families and constantly reevaluating each plan, experts say.
“[Distance learning] is not a good fit for every student, which I think everyone across the state is finding for students with disabilities,” said Kelly Dietrich, director of special education for Indigo Education, a team of special education administrators who work in 60 Minnesota charter schools. “You really can’t anticipate how a student is going to function in distance learning until they get in there and try it, and I think that’s particularly true for our students with disabilities.”
Under federal and state law, school districts have to provide an education for students with disabilities, tailored to their needs. More than 148,000 Minnesota public school students — about 16% of the total student population — receive special education services.
Students who qualify for special education have a wide range of abilities and use a variety of services — like the support of an all-day one-on-one aide, extra time on exams or physical, occupational or speech therapies. The approach is all laid out in carefully crafted plans called Individual Education Programs, or IEPs.
Abrupt school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the absence of guidance from the federal government upended special education in some parts of the United States. Some districts initially canceled some special education services or online learning altogether over fears that virtual lessons wouldn’t be accessible for students with disabilities.
National policymakers have raised concerns that delivering special education services remotely will cause financial strain for school districts. Minnesota Reps. Angie Craig and Pete Stauber, and California Rep. Jared Huffman sent a letter to House leadership in late March, asking them to include more money for kids with disabilities in a federal aid package.