Every year is a tough year for parents of children with special needs, but some parents in the Santa Barbara School District say this year is especially difficult.
In each of the past two Santa Barbara school board meetings, a handful of parents of students with special needs have come before the board to complain about what they say is a shortage of legally mandated special-education aides.
One is Cory Bream, a local optometrist who two weeks ago told the board about an incident last month at Washington Elementary, in which her 8-year-old son with autism had a seizure in the classroom.
Despite a legally binding agreement between Bream and the school district mandating that her son would be accompanied by a special-education aide at all times, there was no aide that day, she said.
“How is the teacher supposed to handle 31 other students and help the one seizing?” she said to the board. “During other days when my son didn’t have one-to-one aide support, as promised by the district, he has been beaten up, harassed and otherwise bullied, relentlessly.”
The absence of the aide, she said, has been a common reality this year — much, she said, to the detriment of his educational progress. Bream, who has retained an attorney for the matter, said her son has regressed this year, resuming his formerly conquered habits of bed-wetting and “self-mutilating,” such as banging his head against hard objects.
District officials say this year’s troubles are largely because of how, for some reason, turnover among the aides — which is high under normal circumstances — was even higher than usual after last school year.
“It’s not a really highly paid job, and it’s a tough job,” said Robin Sawaske, the district’s associate superintendent of education.
The hourly wage for special-education aides in Santa Barbara ranges from $14.05 to $17.28 an hour, according to the district’s personnel office. Aides work six-hour days for nine months out of the year, so the average annual salary for an aide is about $16,500.
Bream said her research indicates that Santa Barbara’s special-education aides are the lowest paid in the area, a contention Sawaske said she doesn’t doubt.
Sawaske said the district has been scrambling this year to hire all of the necessary aides and is getting close to filling all the positions. She said she is at a loss as to why the problem seems especially pronounced this year, chalking it up to a “perfect storm.”
One thing that has changed this year is the person in charge of the department. Special-education director Anissa McNeil is the department’s fifth leader in about as many years. But Sawaske said McNeil’s newness has nothing to do with the nature of the current problem, and credited McNeil for initiating some of the first special-education training sessions in years.
“She identified (training) immediately as something our assistants and teachers needed,” Sawaske said.
The meeting during which Bream spoke was on Oct. 14. That night, four other parents shared similar stories with the board.
After that meeting, Sawaske ordered her staff to redouble its efforts to make all of the necessary hires ASAP. Apparently that didn’t happen in every case.
Two weeks later — on Tuesday — four more parents of children with special needs came to the board meeting, mostly from the K-8 Open Alternative School.
One of them was Nadia Holsten, whose daughter has a developmental disability that severely comprises her vision, and requires her to walk on crutches.
Holsten said she has long been satisfied with the district’s special-education program, but not this year. “The rug has been pulled out from under my daughter,” she said.
On two occasions this year, she said, her daughter’s classroom aide has been yanked without warning.
“She does not have a full-time aide at this point, which means she misses math classes, and she sits during phys ed — which we had a whole program worked out for her — and she watches children play basketball,” she said. “So there’s a problem.”
Jeanne White, another parent from Open Alternative, said her autistic son, too, has experienced much of the year with no aide.
“What I thought was sort of a family drama unfolding in my house with my special-needs son who’s in fourth grade is part of a trend, a disturbing trend,” she said.
Mike Conroy, also a parent at Open Alternative, said his son’s aide was inexplicably pulled on Sept. 9, and hadn’t been replaced.
“I’m trying to find out if there’s anyone responsible here,” he said. “Who can I speak to to ensure the district carries out its job?”
Superintendent Brian Sarvis informed Conroy that Sawaske would call him the next day. She did, and told him that a substitute teacher would be found to fill in until a permanent aide is hired.
Noozhawk staff writer Rob Kuznia can be reached at rkuznia@noozhawk.com.
