SACRAMENTO, Calif — Sacramento City Unified School District held a hiring fair this week in an effort to recruit special education teachers and classroom aides. The district is seeking to hire 270 new employees in the department by the beginning of the academic year.

Administrators are seeking to fill 70 teacher vacancies and 200 aide positions across all district school sites. Director of Talent Management Tiffany Smith-Simmons said it is their goal to be fully staffed by the first day of school, which is earlier than usual this year.

The hiring fair comes on the heels of several public grievances with the district’s special education program — including a lawsuit that was settled with the Black Parallel School Board, a letter from the state’s Department of Education and a grand jury report on the program’s deficiencies.

Smith-Simmons said that the fair was designed to ensure as many applicants as possible are ready by Aug. 19. Interview panels spoke with candidates on the spot and nurses conducted tuberculosis screenings and fingerprinting to accelerate the onboarding process.

By the end of the day, the district hired 40 new aides and four new teachers who are ready to start on day one. The district is still seeking applicants for the remaining positions.

Recently hired instructional aide Alejandra Rodriguez is brand new to the classroom but feels connected to the special needs community because her older brother is has autism. She and her family saw the effect that an educator could have on the lives and families of children with autism. Her family still stays in touch with her brother’s kindergarten teacher and Rodriguez said this is in part what inspired her to pursue a career in special education.

“She was an influential person to me getting into this position,” Rodriguez said.

The fair also appealed to more experienced educators, like Maria Quillici, who has 16 years of experience as a teacher. Her first few years of teaching were fraught with difficulty due to the 2008 recession — she was laid off from several schools due to budgetary issues. She later received her early childhood special education credential in hopes of finding more secure employment.

After 10 years with Natomas Unified and one with Twin Rivers Unified School District, Quillici again found that the search for work was disheartening. She has been applying for positions since May, joking that she must have applied to “like five million other places.” Several opportunities at other schools fell through toward the end of the process, which Quillici speculates was due to the budget troubles afflicting many California schools.

After becoming “demoralized” by the monthslong search for work, Quillici attended Sacramento City Unified’s hiring fair not expecting anything to come of it. After a successful interview process, she was elated to walk out of the building with a job as a kindergarten special education teacher at Washington Elementary School. She said that the fact that they are willing to hire someone with a lot of experience (who are more expensive to hire) bodes well for the district.

“They seemed very excited to see someone with my experience applying and that’s just a really good feeling,” she said. “And I think if you feel valued as a teacher and feel like your experience is valued, then that feeling is transferred to the students. And we’re better able to take care of the students if we feel like we’re taken care of.”

Sacramento City Unified School District’s special ed program challenges

Experts theorize that higher demand for special education services has made the lack of educators more pronounced. Around 15% of Sacramento City Unified students are enrolled in special education programs for at least part of the day. Black students in the district are overrepresented in the program, which inspired a lawsuit by the Black Parallel School Board that was settled in May 2023.

The heat that Sacramento City Unified has received for its special education programming has only turned up in recent months as local and state agencies have publicly condemned the district. A scathing Sacramento grand jury report released in May said that the district “continues to utterly fail its most vulnerable students.” This report followed an April letter from the state Department of Education that not only reprimanded the district for not being in compliance with federal and state disability education laws, but for being unresponsive to 40 emails and 22 phone calls requesting district officials turn in state required documentation regarding its special education program.

Key recommendations made in the grand jury report included developing and adopting a comprehensive special education plan by February, improving its early intervention assessments, taking corrective action to reduce the number of students of color in special education programs and mandating professional development for teachers. District special education administrators Krystal Thomas and Geovanni Linares previously zeroed in on bolstered teacher training as a means to improve the program overall.

District spokesperson Al Goldberg said that they will implement staff training based on the action plan created following the Black Parallel School Board settlement and that further staff training is still being developed. The settlement also called for a newly appointed independent monitor who will be responsible for creating an action plan to implement special education policy and procedure.

Special ed teacher shortage is a national issue

The shortage of special education teachers has posed a challenge to schools nationwide. The number of students in special education has doubled nationally in the last several decades, but those willing to enter the workforce have dropped in recent years, likely due to poor pay and difficult conditions.

For teachers at Sacramento City Unified, the salary scale begins at $65,115 and caps at $140,436 annually, according to EdJoin.org. The wages for special education instructional aides start at $18.19 and cap at $20.95 per hour, a few dollars above California’s minimum wage of $16. The district offers fully covered health insurance for workers and their families, and classroom experience that could translate into a career as a teacher later on.

“Hopefully I have a good experience working as an instructional aide so that I would want to go maybe get a bachelor’s or master’s to try to be a teacher,” Rodriguez said.

© 2024 The Sacramento Bee
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Read more stories like this one. Sign up for Disability Scoop's free email newsletter to get the latest developmental disability news sent straight to your inbox.