Garfield Heights special education director outlines programs and staffing shortfalls

Jonah Forte, the district's director of special education, presented the department's annual report to the Garfield Heights City Schools board on Sept. 15, detailing student counts, staffing levels, and active programs. Forte said the district currently serves 511 students identified for special education services and has 38 students placed outside district schools, down from 52 a year earlier. He said 64 students use the John Peterson and autism scholarship options and that placements take students to roughly 18 external locations. Forte described current staffing: 36 intervention specialists distributed across buildings, six speech-language pathologists, seven combined occupational/physical therapists, 28 paraprofessionals focused on special education classrooms, six nurses (with a seventh to be added), and four board-certified behavior analysts and registered behavior technicians. He said 32 of those positions are provided by contracting agencies rather than Garfield Heights employees. "Short answer is no. We're not fully staffed," Forte said when asked whether the district has enough intervention specialists. He listed openings the district would like to fill: three intervention specialists at the high school, one at the middle school, one at Maple Leaf, one cross-categorical teacher at William Foster and two pre-K special education teachers. Forte reviewed programs he said the district is using to raise outcomes: Each Child on Track (a state cohort program focused on academics, attendance and behavior), trauma-informed student support services (TISS) in partnership with Cleveland Clinic to speed mental-health access, Beyond Words music therapy extended into pre-K, Fieldstone Farm experiential placements, and pre-apprenticeship pathways with local partners including a hospitality cohort and paid training opportunities connected to nearby universities. He also described a drone and IT training partnership with Walsh University that includes FAA testing for students. The director presented trend data showing gradual improvement in the district's special-education graduation metrics compared with the state target. He said the most recent state-assigned special education report-card data available to the district covered 2022-23 and that newer data was expected in December. Board members and the superintendent raised funding and state-level concerns during the discussion. Treasurer Phil O'Kove (spelled several ways in the transcript) and other speakers warned about state and federal funding pressure; elsewhere in the meeting a district official said the state reduced its base funding by 2 percent for the upcoming biennium (4 percent cumulative) and that proposed federal changes could affect IDEA-B grant funding. Forte said the department uses standing meetings, quarterly visits for students placed out of district and quarterly state meetings to track progress. He emphasized contracting with outside providers when Garfield Heights cannot recruit employees directly: "Of all these staff, 32 are contracted. That means 32 of these staff members are not direct Garfield Heights employees." No board action was taken at the meeting on staffing or program changes. Any follow-up actions or data Forte said would be available later in the year include December report-card releases and continued quarterly meetings with the Ohio ESE cohort to track the Each Child on Track work.